As we saw in the previous chapter, art and the processes of art making became central to mid-twentieth-century philosophical discussions about the nature of human existence and action in the modern world. Artists themselves sometimes situated their work in broad philosophical terms, but more often they served as examples of dedication to the processes of creative labor. This chapter examines mid-twentieth-century artists whose working processes became emblematic of extreme dedication to process and the critical discourse that promoted them. This discourse builds on earlier discussions of prominent modern artists, most notably Cézanne, as well the tradition of difficulty previously traced in relation to modern artistic production. In addition to extending earlier discursive themes, the mid-century emphasis on artistic process transformed the ways artists perceived their own work. A striking example of this is Picasso’s statement published in 1960: “Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research. That is why I number them. It is an experiment in time. I number them and date them. Maybe one day someone will be grateful.”1 This is a complete reversal from the artist’s famous 1923 statement, in which he said, “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.”2 For many artists at mid-century, total engagement in their working process defined them, and the final resolution that the completed artwork had once signified began to diminish in importance. This shift in values not only affected the work of prominent artists, it also had notable effects on both the general public’s engagement with art and the ways artists were educated.
Alberto Giacometti is the mid-twentieth-century artist most often invoked as the heir to Cézanne. Like Cézanne, Giacometti led a highly restricted existence devoted to the pursuit of representing what he saw, and also like his predecessor his sense of that pursuit was of an almost impossible task in which he made very slow progress over the course of decades.3 Jean-Paul Sartre described his dedication: “Giacometti is not interested in statues at all, but only in sketches, insofar as they help him to his goal. He breaks everything, and begins all over again. From time to time, friends are able to save a head, a young woman, a youth, from the massacre. He doesn’t care, and goes back to his task. He has not had a single exhibition in fifteen years. . . . The marvelous unity of this life lies in its insistent search for the absolute.”4 For Sartre, Giacometti is the quintessential existential man who takes nothing as given and devotes himself to discovering and confronting the unmediated object of his gaze. The severe restrictions of his existence are proof of the sincerity of his labors. The artist’s task is the ultimate effort, one that encapsulates the existential task of all human beings, the need to confront existence directly without preconceptions or prefabricated meanings. Not only did Sartre describe the existentialist’s stance as a rigorous moral test, he also considered it an ongoing labor without final resolution. There is never a moment of ultimate revelation, a moment of rest and absolution. Thus human life, like Giacometti’s relentless labor, is a continual test of endurance and dedication to a goal that is always just out of reach.
More significant than the attainment of a goal is the attitude maintained in its pursuit; at each moment the individual must maintain good faith and act with authenticity. These are key concepts for existentialism that had wide influence on mid-twentieth-century thought, particularly in the realm of art and culture. They inflected preexisting notions of artistic expression and individual style with a strong moral tone.5 Dedication to the creative process became increasingly a means to demonstrate absolute moral commitment to truth and authenticity. The artist’s activity was no longer the production of artworks; rather, it became one of the most, even the most, concrete example of authentic action. As Sartre’s description of Giacometti shows, the artist is not concerned at all with the products that result from that action; what matters is the effort, the act, the process.
Writers who knew Giacometti inevitably emphasized the artist’s total dedication to process rather than to results. Mercedes Matter wrote:
“Each time I work,” said Alberto Giacometti, “I am ready without a moment’s hesitation to undo all that I did the day before because each day I have the impression that I see further.”
This was Giacometti’s life, this irrevocable beginning again, this voluntary life of Sisyphus. It was an effort indefatigably sustained, the all-consuming focus of his energies. . . .
“I’m only happy when I’m trying to do the impossible. . . . It’s an endless quest.”6
According to David Sylvester, “His interest was not in producing the best results he might be capable of: it was in endlessly putting his capabilities to the test. ‘I see something, find it marvellous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary; I advance in any case. Whether I advance by failing or whether I advance by gaining a little, I’ll always have gained for myself, personally. If there’s no picture, that’s too bad. So long as I’ve learned something about why.’”7 Matter also noted that “in later years it became more and more difficult for him to complete anything, until finally he rejected the very idea of finishing a work. By then it was only what he was gaining in the process that mattered, not the particular work that happened to survive or to be destroyed as the case may be.”8
As described in these texts on the artist’s life and work, Giacometti was completely indifferent to everything but his creative efforts. This included the products of that effort. It was his brother Diego who facilitated Alberto’s complete devotion to the labor of creation. Diego took on the role of the traditional craftsman, allowing Alberto to instantiate the creative process. Thus Alberto was able to be completely immersed in the immediacies of creation, the drawing and sculpting from direct observation, without having to stop and make more practical decisions. Diego fabricated the armatures for the sculptures, cast the works in plaster when Alberto stopped working for the night, and oversaw their final casting in the bronze foundry, even to the point of supervising the patination of the final works.
Division of labor in the artist’s studio is traditional; what made Giacometti’s studio unusual was the type of labor the artist performed. Traditionally, the artist supplied the ideas and the assistants provided the more labor-intensive craft production. In Giacometti’s studio the artist engaged in physically and emotionally intensive labor, and it was the assistant’s role to control the situation in ways comparable to how a stage manager and producer create the conditions for a theatrical production. Giacometti’s own labor became a mysterious, even primordial task, one for which there were no precedents, not even in his own previous works: “In each work the artist begins his task by putting himself in the condition of one totally lacking in the technical means for carrying it out. . . . [James] Lord questioned Giacometti about his ‘technique’ for translating his ‘vision into something which is visible to others.’ ‘That’s the whole drama,’ Giacometti replied, ‘I don’t have such a technique.’ He then said that despite his excellent training he had never been able to paint what he saw. ‘So I had to start all over again from scratch . . . and things have been going from bad to worse.’”9 If every work began from nothing and no existing technique was implemented in its creation, then it is evident there would be a serious problem determining when the work was completed. And, indeed, there was: “Painting and sculpting are transformed into a process of knowing and self-knowing; ‘whether an artwork is a failure or a success,’ Giacometti said, ‘is, in the end, of secondary importance.’ The repudiation of aesthetic objectives makes finishing a painting impossible, since reality has no formal goal. The artist is ‘only working for the sake of the experience that I feel when working,’ and he could keep busy forever on a single canvas, producing a rubble of sensations, and perceptions, all passé, like . . . the chaos discovered at the end of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece.”10 Obviously there were products of Alberto Giacometti’s labor, a great many products in fact, but what preoccupied the artist was the creative process, the effort to render what he saw in drawings or sculptures. This is far from unusual. What makes Giacometti an exemplary artist for his time is the extremity of his dedication. His life was his art; he lived and worked in his studio, even when he could afford to live more comfortably. He was obsessed with capturing the image of his sitter, which persistently eluded him. A lifetime of dedication to his task seemed not to advance him appreciably closer to his goal.11
Giacometti was himself aware of the unusual nature of his life and work: “In a way, it is rather abnormal that instead of living one spends one’s time trying to copy a head, immobilizing someone in a chair every afternoon, the same person for five years, trying to copy him without succeeding, and still going on. It’s not an activity one could call exactly normal, do you think? One has to belong to a certain social environment for it to be even tolerated . . . it’s an activity that’s useless to the whole of society. It’s a purely individual satisfaction, extremely egotistical and basically annoying even to the person himself.”12 In stating that his activity was socially useless Giacometti was certainly mistaken. His work—not merely the products of his labor, but its means of production—had significant social value. Giacometti’s dedication to his process, his life devoted to the effort to make concrete a single relatively simple idea, the image of his own perception, provided a public example for others to follow. Complete dedication to an idea, no matter how apparently useless, is the means to create meaning in life. In the existentialist’s world where there is no faith, no certainty of God, no common morality, all that is left is the individual’s choice to act or not. The artist’s act, continually repeated, is an affirmation of human purpose in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity. As Harold Rosenberg wrote in the early 1970s, “As a legend, Giacometti is a match for Duchamp, though of an opposite order: against the celebrated impresario of non-works . . . he represents the absolute worthwhileness of engaging in the processes of creating sculptures and paintings.”13 While Giacometti may be one of the more extreme examples, his dedication and seriousness of purpose are characteristics of many mid-twentieth-century artists. Also notable in the artistic discourse of the period is an overall sense of the exalted, even universal import of the artist’s endeavor. For Robert Motherwell it is a demonstration of human potential in an era that provides little external inspiration: “No one now creates with joy; on the contrary, with anguish; but there are a few selves that are willing to pay; it is this payment, wherever one lives, that one really undertakes in choosing to become an artist. The rest one endures. . . . In so doing, one discovers who one is, or, more exactly, invents oneself. If no one did this, we would scarcely imagine of what a man is capable.”14
Merleau-Ponty saw the artist’s original self-expression through automatic personal gestures as trivial,15 and many other mid-century writers, critics, and artists tended to avoid stressing the artist’s work as mere personal expression in favor of an emphasis on the artist’s struggle to make work. Motherwell described his work’s power and significance as preeminently moral: “I should guess that when it [my painting] moves anyone it is because of its moral struggle. . . . Aesthetic decisions in the process of painting are not primarily aesthetic in origin but moral. . . . One might say today that the morality of a picture is unusually dependent on what the artist refused to accept in it as bearable. Modern pictures—‘abstract’ ones, that is—tend to be the residues of a moral process.” The artist’s self-expression was situated in a larger more significant context than a simple and direct assertion of personal identity. As existentialist thinkers stressed, personal identity had to be created, often with great difficulty. The artist’s process was thus a concrete example of the difficulties faced by the individual attempting to arrive at self-definition: “Art is a form of action, a drama, a process. It is the dramatic gesture itself in modern times, not a religious content, that accounts for art’s hold on the minds of men. One enters the studio as one would an arena. One’s entire character is revealed in the action, one’s style. . . . Of course, everyone undergoes risks just by living. From one point of view, the artist’s function is to give each risk its proper style. In this sense everyone should be an artist.”16
Robert Motherwell, in fact, defined the entire New York school of painters in terms of the existentialist process of authentic self-definition:
The School of New York tries to find out what art is precisely through the process of making art. That is to say, one discovers . . . rather than imposes a picture. What constitutes the discovery is the discovery of one’s own feeling, which none of us would dare to propose before the act of painting itself. . . . We know what we believe by how we paint. . . . The major decisions in the process of painting are made on the grounds of truth, not taste. Conventional painting is a lie—not an imposture, but the product of a man who is living a lie. . . . That painting and sculpture are not skills that can be taught in reference to preestablished criteria, whether academic or modern, but a process, whose content is found, subtle, and deeply felt; that no true artist ends with the style he expected to have when he began, anymore than anyone’s life unrolls in the particular manner one expected when young; that it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one’s own style . . . such is the experience of the School of New York.17
Here is the moral justification not just for the artist’s process, but also for its necessary isolation from external influence. What had been understood by many thoughtful modern artists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries as a delicate and judicious balancing between the perception of external reality, the formal organization of a painting, and the expressive intentions of the artist had become a much more restricted direct engagement between the painter and the painting. External influences such as established painting techniques, other artworks, even perceived reality, became potential disruptors of the honesty of the artist’s encounter with the act of painting. The artistic process became reified, sacrosanct, not only a means of self-definition but human potential made concrete. The rapid dominance of this view of the artist’s labor in the mid-twentieth century coincided with an enormous expansion of artist education programs in colleges, universities, and art schools, which, as we shall see, established not only a widespread approach to artist education but also set in place an enduring belief in the exalted importance of the artistic process.
The writer and critic most closely associated with the existentialist interpretation of New York school painting is Harold Rosenberg, whose article “The American Action Painters” appeared in ARTnews in 1952. In this well-known essay Rosenberg described the American painter as staging an encounter with the canvas, which became “an arena in which to act.” The painted image is the result of this encounter, unlike in previous eras when images originated in the artist’s mind. Echoing earlier writers such as Collingwood and Dewey, Rosenberg stressed the artist’s physical gestures and likened them to dance in their capacity to “enact” the artist’s psychic state. The painter’s primary gesture is the line, which establishes the painter’s movements as aesthetic statements: “Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction—psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked.”18 This description of what is required for accurate critical evaluation of action painting is a particularly interesting theme of Rosenberg’s essay that revitalizes issues of evaluation that had been hotly debated during the interwar period in Paris in the context of Surrealist automatism.19 How precisely were marks to be read as indexes of authentic processes, be they processes of pure automatism, emotional expression, or existential engagement, and who was capable of accurately reading them?
Rosenberg’s essay is famous for its formulations of the action painter’s process; the artist rejects all preexisting guides and goals, “works in a condition of open possibility,” and “accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating.” He claims that the test of a painting’s seriousness is the “degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the artist’s total effort to make over his experience. A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an action and its relation to a transforming process in the artist.” Each brushstroke is both a decisive result of the dramatic dialogue between painter and canvas and the formation of a new question.20 This description suggests that the action painting will somehow index an ongoing dialectical tension, although there is no concrete description of what the physical signs of this dialectic may be.21
Rosenberg does provide the alternative to engaged action painting. It is an easy mystical painting based on luck and chance that creates “unearned masterpieces,” and a gesture that “completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own.”22 The description is strongly reminiscent of early critical assaults on Surrealist automatic painting that stressed its formal weaknesses resulting from a lack of structural rigor and developed skills. Now, however, it is less a matter of formal incapacities than a lax aestheticism that indexes a lack of proper moral engagement with the artistic process. Rosenberg claims that this easy mystical painting makes good commodities and recognizable autographic styles. The latter criticism is comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s dismissive approach to mere self-expression, and the rejection of art that is merely a successful commodity was an avant-garde strategy well established by the Surrealists during the 1920s.
Rosenberg’s distinction between an easy creative process that docilely follows chance where it may lead and an active, tension-filled, dialectical, and engaged process sketches out the beginnings of an evaluative scale. In this scale it would appear that conventional aesthetic or formal appeal is likely to be suspect as inadequately engaged. Similarly, it may be that the artist who finds some sort of satisfaction as an indicator that the work is finished is also not fully dedicated to the process. Robert Motherwell’s statement from 1947 presents an interesting case in this regard:
I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and errors. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view. My pictures have layers of mistakes buried in them—an X-ray would disclose crimes—layers of consciousness, of willing. They are a succession of humiliations resulting from the realization that only in a state of quickened subjectivity—of freedom from conscious notions, and with what I always suppose to be secondary or accidental colors and shapes—do I find the unknown, which nevertheless I recognize when I come upon it, for which I am always searching.23
Motherwell here describes a working process that is a series of efforts to consciously control the work, all of which result in failure, and an ultimate discovery, which apparently arrives only when consciousness is relaxed and feeling takes over. The work then contains the efforts, “layers of mistakes,” that led to its final form. The struggle is framed here in fundamentally Surrealist terms, and tension implicitly arises from alternating efforts to control and to relinquish control. Echoes of formalism (internal relations, unification, colors, and shapes) and of Matisse’s description of his painting process reveal Motherwell’s marriage of a more traditional painter’s method, the craftsman’s concern to create a well-made object, to a Surrealist search for pure automatism. This dual approach does have a goal that is ultimately discovered/revealed in the final stage of the painting.
Motherwell’s 1947 statement is interesting in part because it shows a means for understanding the process of a New York school painter in terms that are clearly indebted to well-established practices of modern artists. Discussions of Willem de Kooning, the painter whose improvisational process Rosenberg credited as the inspiration for “The American Action Painters,” are often more difficult to parse, although aspects of Motherwell’s statement are notably applicable. De Kooning’s paintings are commonly considered to be “arrested processes” that have “layers of mistakes buried in them,” and he might plausibly have said about them that “they are a succession of humiliations.” He is well-known for describing his paintings as “slipping glimpses,” which might be compared to Motherwell’s final moment when what he was seeking “flashes into view.” The differences seem to lie in motivation. Whereas Motherwell was apparently seeking something, an image, some sort of formal resolution, by quasi-automatic means, de Kooning seems to have been fully engaged by the process itself. It is this, of course, that made him such an inspiration for Rosenberg, and it is this aspect of the artist’s achievement that has recently been of particular interest to scholars.
According to Rosenberg, de Kooning was strongly affected by Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece as well as Cézanne’s life and work.24 Like Giacometti, whom de Kooning also admired, de Kooning belongs to a tradition of failure, artists so absorbed by their working process that they not only cannot achieve a final product, they cannot even see what they are making with anything approaching ordinary detachment.25 There is, however, a notable difference: whereas the other prominent artists of this lineage approach the tragic in their attitudes, de Kooning seems not only to have considered his situation absurd but to have found it amusing.
Rosenberg described the situation of the modern artist as focused solely on making art. To him, painting is detached from social, metaphysical, and aesthetic objectives: “The function of art is no longer to satisfy wants, including intellectual wants, but to serve as a stimulus to further creation.” De Kooning stated that he considered painting a way of living. This way of living, as Rosenberg described it, was utterly unfettered by any predeterminations. In his art the artist is fully open to the multiplicity of experience and as a result has no style. Rosenberg explicitly rejected the notion that de Kooning worked automatically; thus de Kooning’s paintings cannot be seen in terms of Motherwell’s description of a series of failed attempts to achieve automatism. For Rosenberg what was most significant was the tension of de Kooning’s process, which he described as a “mismating of immediacy and will,” an ongoing attempt to reconcile the unpremeditated mark with the artist’s conscious aesthetic will. He wrote that the artist’s labor is comparable to that of a boxer or mountain climber, a developed and instinctual responsiveness to a constantly changing situation, what Rosenberg called a “trained sense of immediate rightness”: “In the situation that keeps arising on the canvas, the artist-actor must be governed not by rule, nor even by esthetic principle, but by tact.”26 Rosenberg also explicitly stated that de Kooning had a craftsman’s competitive approach to his painting, matching his own skills against the great painters of the past.27 It is his consciousness of history and his constant deployment of the nuances of the painter’s craft that keep de Kooning from being a merely self-expressive painter in Rosenberg’s account. But it is also, and more significantly for the painter’s reputation, the intensity of his struggle that came to define de Kooning’s painting.
The notion that de Kooning’s painting resulted from an extreme struggle with his medium became prominent in the early 1950s when Thomas Hess published an article on the making of Woman I for ARTnews. Accompanied by many photographs of the painting at various moments in its making by Rudolph Burckhardt, the article documents the painting’s two-year genesis, in which it seemed less to advance from an incomplete to a completed state than to be begun, destroyed, and begun again. In Hess’s account the making of de Kooning’s painting was not a development or progress but a romantic voyage comparable to those undertaken by nineteenth-century poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The photographs document arbitrary stops on the voyage, not significant stages of the work, and are no “more or less ‘finished’ than the terminus.” The voyage itself is what matters in Hess’s account, the “exploration for a constantly elusive vision, solution to a problem that was continually being set in new ways.” Like Rosenberg, Hess stresses the artist’s rejection of automatism in favor of the long process of thoughtful labor: “The artist . . . refuses to capitalize on the process of correction and the happy accidents it so often produces. Changes made after prolonged study . . . [are] preceded by scraping back to the canvas.”28 Hess describes de Kooning’s painting method as “fast” and his tempo as “hectic”; this rapid pace is broken up by periods of consideration and scraping out previous layers to begin again.
Hess’s long championship of de Kooning, which began with “De Kooning Paints a Picture” and lasted for many years of critical and personal support, built on the painter’s previously established reputation. His peers had long respected De Kooning as an artist of notable skills developed in a European art academy as well as by training as a traditional European decorator. Such skills, unusual among artists in the United States, not only impressed the artists he knew, they also made it possible for him to find occasional work as an illustrator and decorative artist. In the mid-century New York art world de Kooning was respected for renouncing his training to devote himself to the creation of modern art, and in that effort working relentlessly to evade his technical facility. The fact that he rarely exhibited prior to the early 1950s, seemed unable to complete a painting despite constant labor, and lived in extreme poverty added to the legend of the uncompromising artist dedicated to an impossible project at great personal cost. Not only did he refuse to become a commercial artist, he destroyed most of his paintings. Such unremunerated dedication was highly esteemed by his peers and seen as an example of extreme artistic integrity.
De Kooning’s legendary labor to create modern paintings needs to be considered in terms of its context and precedents. First, there is the American context where prior to the 1950s it was virtually impossible to become a successful modern artist, particularly without first establishing a reputation in Europe. According to de Kooning’s biographers, in the 1930s when no one could sell art New York artists often discussed the process of painting itself as an intrinsic good.29 Dedication to modern painting in the United States was established as a fruitless endeavor; even the few American museums devoted to modern art had no interest in American artists. The second important issue is that of precedent. Cézanne’s labors were, of course, well-known, but there were the even more immediate and apposite precedents of Matisse and, most importantly, Picasso. Ambitious young artists considered Picasso their greatest predecessor, the artist whose achievement they had to master and surmount in order to establish their own reputations. And Picasso was a formidable artist whose reputation and achievements, in addition to being legendary, were virtually cognates for modern art itself. Picasso, the inexhaustible, relentless creator, became the measure of the modern artist, and it is hardly remarkable that in the face of such unflagging creative production the next generations of artists would find themselves caught up in examinations of the creative process.
De Kooning, like many ambitious artists of the time, sought to challenge Picasso. He cited the huge 1939 Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art as a major influence on his development, and there are important ways that de Kooning’s process and reputation followed that of the modern master.30 Like Picasso, de Kooning worked ceaselessly to subvert the technical skills and facility he had acquired in his early academic training, yet these very skills remained key to the success and appreciation of both artists’ work. This was a significant aspect of de Kooning’s reputation that appears in the earliest published criticism of his work. For example, in 1948 Reneé Arb wrote, “Here is virtuosity disguised as voluptuousness—the process of painting becomes the end. Technique is lavish and versatile; draftsmanship elegant and precise.”31 Likewise, Clement Greenberg wrote, “The indeterminateness or ambiguity that characterizes some of de Kooning’s pictures is caused, I believe, by his effort to suppress his facility. There is a deliberate renunciation of will in so far as it makes itself felt as skill, and there is a refusal to work with ideas that are too clear. . . . These very contradictions are the source of the largeness and seriousness we recognize in this magnificent first show.”32 Also, like Picasso, de Kooning devoted his life with single-minded intensity to his work. Both artists drew constantly and were remarkably prolific, although unlike Picasso, de Kooning destroyed most of his early work. This in itself can be seen as an important indicator of the situation of the young modern artist at mid-century. Whereas the old master was constantly displaying his fecundity, the next generation was overwhelmed with anxiety, unable to fix the value and significance of any product.
Picasso’s confident and seemingly infinite proliferation of works, which were widely published and exhibited, provided younger mid-century artists with contradictory messages. One was that the successful modern artist was fully engaged in making, in the creative process, and produced works naturally as a tree bears fruit, each one no more or less valuable than the last. In apparent contradiction, however, was the immensity of Picasso’s youthful achievements and the travails that accompanied them. Two of his most important paintings, the portrait of Gertrude Stein and the Demoiselles d’Avignon, were notorious struggles to make, and the second, arguably the greatest single painting of the twentieth century, was not considered finished by the artist. Furthermore, by the mid-1930s Picasso was on record as the confident artist finding success in his failures, satisfied by his own hard-won dissatisfactions:
In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture—then I destroy it. . . . A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. . . . When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing.33
The success of de Kooning’s women paintings of the early 1950s seems in this light almost overdetermined.
The combination of the subject, the overwhelming figure of a “monstrous” woman, bearing the obvious indexical signs of the artist’s long creative struggle to produce her, was the perfect manifestation of the difficulties facing the modern figure painter at mid-century. Not only was the work a contemporary revision of Matisse’s and Picasso’s earlier “masterpieces,” it also portrayed in vivid form the existential anxieties associated with figuration and interpersonal communication. In place of the refined decorative resolution of Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude, the sculptural solidity of Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, or the confrontational graphic simplifications of his Demoiselles, de Kooning presented women who oscillate irresolutely in form and character. Their presences are demanding; they have imposing scale and color, as well as, in many instances, dominant anatomical parts that draw attention. Nevertheless, their forms are largely unfixed, body parts appear in varying undecidable positions and locations, and their emotional aspect is likewise ambiguous. They are most often described as monstrous and menacing, interpretations well in keeping with Sartrean existentialism’s view of the dangerous power of another person’s gaze.34 In these paintings de Kooning’s well-established existential anxieties as an artist found an appropriate subject.35 Irresolvable process directed itself to an unfixable representation: the mysteries of woman as perceived by a man.
The traditional figurative subject was also a source of great difficulty and anxiety for an ambitious modern artist at mid-century. Arguably the most influential critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, promoted the conviction that modern art had evolved to pure nonrepresentational abstraction and that figuration was a step backward. It was a view shared by many supporters of modern art, as de Kooning well knew, and his own first one-man show in 1948 had been an exhibition of nonrepresentational painting much admired by Greenberg. The women paintings with their overt display of both figurative subject and the artist’s unresolved painting process thus represented another approach to understanding the significance of the modern artist’s work. In de Kooning’s women paintings the artist’s labor does not result in the exalted impersonality of medium-specific purity and optical sensation (what Rosenberg mocked as “apocalyptic wallpaper”) promoted by Greenberg and his followers. Instead, de Kooning’s paintings manifest an altogether different vision of the modern artist’s achievement: the persistence of the artist’s physical and emotional labor in the face of indifference and even denigration. Of course, de Kooning’s dedicated craftsmanship, his full engagement with his creative process, ultimately was not just well received but became an inspiration for many artists. Here was an artist whose work was the result of a single-minded devotion to the process of making art, who worked without theories or abstract limitations, and who discovered in his labor its raison d’être. In an age of ever-increasing mechanization, a life devoted to the craft of painting and a seemingly endless exploration of its nuances began to take on a kind of value and meaning in itself.
One of the major themes in discussions of de Kooning’s art is its physicality and the physicality of the artist’s working process. Richard Shiff has explored de Kooning’s manual techniques in drawing and painting, as well as the artist’s conceptualization of physicality as the basis for his work. He contends, for example, that the women de Kooning painted are less the result of the artist’s perceptions of women than they are representations of his own kinesthetic sensations and sense of physical embodiment.36 Attention to the physical processes of drawing, the formation of gesture and its subversion when it becomes too easy or habitual, is at the center of de Kooning’s work. It is what allowed him to find tension and continued interest in a creative process that could easily have become mere rote activity. In a combination of constant invention of new strategies for spontaneous production and careful attention to the products of his actions de Kooning kept his process active and engaged throughout his career.37 There was, according to the artist’s supporters, no resting on an achieved style for de Kooning: “Standard[s] will always be flexible, as the experience is always new. . . . A system cannot be willed. It grows . . . like a crystal. Irrelevancies of Style, including the artist’s own style, must be excluded, for the experience depends, in part, on freshness for its validity.”38
The requirement for infinite engagement and novelty places the artist in a precarious position. There is no place to rest for the artist fully engaged with his process, and Hess emphasized the extent to which de Kooning worked to keep his work off balance, in process:
Hazard enters in every change of angle and brushstroke. It is not unusual for a painting to be turned upside down or 90 degrees at the last minute. The artist feels he must keep off-balance in front of his work. The picture is a bet kept riding on rolls of the dice. It can be lost at any throw. When it can no longer be lost, the picture is finished. The artist is outside. And to keep his bet on the table, the most dangerous methods must be used. Peril becomes as much a part of the medium as turpentine. The means cannot be separated from the ends in the finished work . . . because the only separable means are those pounds of paint that have been scraped to the floor.39
Hazard, peril, lost bets, the artist’s work is difficult, even dangerous, balanced on the knife-edge between the failures of complacency and loss of control. Here the artist’s process becomes a metaphor for the difficult, even impossible, negotiation of personal identity in the modern world. Either one becomes the impersonal automaton, the bureaucratic “organization man,” or founders in a schizophrenic abyss, a puppet driven by external forces beyond one’s control.
The mid-twentieth-century critical discourse that situated process as central to the significance of modern art reflected widespread contemporary values and projected a specifically male image of the modern artist who engages in conventionally masculine attitudes. He embraces danger, destruction, and risk in the battle against conformity and forces of moral disorder. There seems to be no obvious position for the female artist in this discourse, which marginalized active self-defining women just as the contemporary art world and society did.40 Women do not appear as artists in the most well-known and influential accounts of mid-twentieth-century modern artistic process, and they were notably marginalized in published discussions of individual artist’s processes.41 They are, however, disturbingly present as the depicted subject with which the male artist struggles in his desperate efforts to make his creative mark. Balzac’s character Frenhofer, whose failed painting of a female nude in which only a foot remained recognizable after years of labor, initiated what became a persistently repeated exercise, renewed, practiced, and represented through the decades of modernism in the work of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and de Kooning. The modern artist does not just do battle with his medium and abstract forces as the core of his creative process; he also does battle with women whose representation constantly eludes him.
It is not surprising that the discourse of modern artistic process was a site for articulating and promoting what has long been recognized as the profound gender bias of modernism.42 Indeed, it would be remarkable to find that such a prominent cultural discourse had escaped prevailing social values, conceptions, and prejudices. The discourse of artistic process did offer women at mid-century something important, however: a means to conceive their largely unrecognized creative labors as potentially meaningful and even heroic. In stressing the high value of unceasing, dedicated labor as a personal act of self-definition in the face of public indifference, the discourse of modern artistic process provided unacknowledged artists of all genders, classes, and racial identities with a powerful and potentially sustaining ideology. Certainly ideology is not as practically sustaining as the financial remuneration that often accompanies an artist’s public recognition, but it did allow a space for conceiving highly significant creative activity within the constraints of social, cultural, and economic oppression and prejudice. That these constraints greatly affected women is inarguable, evident not only in the relative neglect of female professional artists at mid-century but also in the relegation of many dedicated women to the category of amateur artists, which will be discussed below. As we shall see, though, the discourse of process was not only used to promote the gender biases of modernism; it was employed to undermine many of the value claims made for modern art and would prove to be an invaluable tool in expanding its parameters to include a far wider range of practices and practitioners than were recognized in the first half of the twentieth century.
Thomas Hess’s 1953 ARTnews article on the creation of Woman I with its accompanying photo documentation was part of a mid-century phenomenon: the public presentation of artists at work. As discussed in chapter 4, ARTnews followed the French magazine Cahiers d’Art in showing the stages of artworks by famous modern artists like Picasso and Matisse in the 1940s. At the end of that decade the magazine began its regular series of illustrated articles documenting artists at work. Since the first of these, “Ben Shahn Paints a Picture,” appeared in May 1949, the series was well established by the time de Kooning was featured in 1953. In ARTnews these features on artists at work were often oriented toward the artist as a personality and usually included images of the artists in their studios literally at work rather than a series of images of a work in progress. The reader was thereby given a feeling of immediacy and intimacy with the artist’s working process.
Magazine photo essays on artists’ working processes were not limited to art magazines; they also appeared in mainstream news magazines such as Life and were paralleled by films of artists at work. Picasso was filmed while he painted, most famously in 1956 in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso. In this film, which the director introduces by saying it will supply us with a public display of genius, Picasso states that in showing his working process he wants to “get to the bottom of the story,” and that in order to do so “everything must be risked.” To the painter who said that he felt like a matador when he was painting, the idea of the artist’s work as risking all may not have seemed hyperbolic. It is also a statement very much in tune with contemporary existentialist attitudes and Harold Rosenberg’s conception of the American action painters, whom he saw as participants in a risky adventure. Whether the filming of the artist at work truly gives viewers a sense of risk is impossible to know, but Clouzot attempted to create an atmosphere of suspense in filming the progress of the many works Picasso creates for the movie.
More significant than any emotional charge generated by the filming is the vivid presentation of the sequential nature of the artist’s work. It seems possible that this method even affected Picasso’s own perception of his process, making the sense of temporal development more self-conscious than it had been in his earlier career. As quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Picasso told the filmmaker Alexander Liberman late in his career that all his paintings were researches and experiments in time, thereby renouncing his famous 1923 statement that his artistic labor was “finding” rather than researching. Even in 1935, just two years before his creation of Guernica was documented and published in Cahiers d’Art, Picasso told Christian Zervos, “I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done.”43 Without making an evaluation of what such a dramatic shift in attitude meant for Picasso himself, it is possible to see it as a reflection of changes in the cultural valuation of the modern artist’s process and product. The artist’s process—and not just that of Picasso the recognized genius, but that of all artists—had become a source of great curiosity by mid-century, and the extent to which the artwork as product revealed that process was a means to justify its significance and even acclamation.
Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the artist’s work were enhanced by the slow-motion sequences of Matisse drawing in a 1946 documentary film. Just as the philosopher (and the artist himself in this case) can discover new aspects of the creative process on film, so, too, may the public begin to consider viewing the artist’s labor as a means of access for understanding and valuing modern art. Scenes of the artist working in the studio helped to develop public recognition that modern artists did in fact work hard, even if the products of their labor seemed childish or lacking in skill when first compared to the representational masterpieces of previous centuries.44 Documentation of artists at work also helped to define them as individuals who often resembled menial laborers rather than the figure of the clean, intellectual, even aristocratic fine artist promoted since the Renaissance. In the United States the image of the artist as a workingman, someone who engaged in dirty physical labor, was a means not just of holding up the artist as a liberated alternative to the middle-class office worker but also of proving that art was a masculine activity in a society that had long viewed art as a suspiciously feminine pursuit for a man.45
The most masculine image of the modern artist was that of Jackson Pollock, whose much-remarked-on roughneck appearance, unorthodox drip painting process, and seemingly incomprehensible, enormous, nonrepresentational paintings became a popular public icon of the outrageous modern artist. In Pollock’s case, perhaps even more than de Kooning’s, the artist’s creative process was integral to the significance of the works. This was so evidently true that it was almost neglected in the critical discourse of the late 1940s and 1950s. Rosenberg implicitly deflated the claims Pollock had to be an “action painter” in his famous essay by his reference to “apocalyptic wallpaper,” although it seems inevitable that Pollock influenced Rosenberg’s conception of action painting.46 Clement Greenberg, Pollock’s primary critical supporter, thought that the value and interest of Pollock’s work resided in the paintings themselves and the ways he saw them as advancing the formal development of modern art. How they were made was not an issue he concerned himself with in his evaluations, although he acknowledged Pollock’s skillful manipulation of his drip technique.47 Other critics often described the way the drip paintings were created but did not connect the process to the evaluation of the final works; it remained mere information about the artist’s quasi-automatic technique rather than a topic to analyze or explore. Pollock himself concluded an interview in 1950 by stating, “Naturally, the result is the thing—and—it doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.”48 Pollock certainly believed that what he was doing was making paintings (and he hoped successful ones), not merely engaging in a process that was its own reward and raison d’être.
It was the notorious 1949 article in Life that first placed textual emphasis on the artist’s process. The piece began with a summing up of critical evaluations from Greenberg to Pollock’s Long Island grocer, a deliberate strategy that played off highbrow and lowbrow, New York City and the country, the United States and Europe. No direct evaluation was made of Pollock’s painting beyond noting the enormous disparity in previous critical evaluations of the artist, which ranged from major modern artist to degenerate. However, an implicit evaluation seems evident in the statement that Pollock studied under the “Realist Thomas Benton but soon gave this up in utter frustration and turned to his present style.” Undoubtedly many readers would read this as indicating that Pollock was unable to paint realistically. What followed were some brief quotations about his technique and a description of his process that stressed its workingman’s physicality and improvisatory messiness; the inadvertent inclusion of cigarette butts and dead bees in the painting topped off the list of “foreign matter” that went into a Pollock painting. It is hard not to read the article as intending to sympathize with readers suspicious of the value of modern art, but it is interesting that it is in this context that Pollock’s process becomes the primary issue. Perhaps the unacknowledged author, staff writer Dorothy Seiberling, decided that while the readership of Life might not feel themselves qualified to form a meaningful opinion of the paintings, they would have an opinion on the artist’s process. Whatever her motivation, it seems evident that she decided Pollock’s painting process was particularly interesting and worthy of attention simply for what it was. Unlike contemporary art critics she made no effort to link the artist’s working process to the paintings.
Robert Goodnough’s article “Jackson Pollock Paints a Picture” appeared in the May 1951 issue of ARTnews. Accompanied by the now-famous photographs of Pollock at work on Autumn Rhythm by Hans Namuth, the piece represents the first fully detailed description of the artist’s working methods and their relevance to his paintings. As Goodnough presented it, Pollock’s painting process consisted of bouts of “feverish intensity” interspersed with long periods of contemplation. He stressed the physicality of Pollock’s drip method, explicitly comparing its beginnings to a ritual dance, but he also insisted on the artist’s thoughtful development of the work. This was no mere automatism, but the careful creation of a “record” of a “released experience”; the final stages of the work were “slow and deliberate,” directed to bringing the “exceedingly complex” design to “a state of complete organization.” In what appear to be paraphrases of Pollock, Goodnough encapsulates the contradictory difficulties the painter faced in making works with such a striking and relatively novel technique: “Pollock feels that criticism of a work such as this should be directed at least in terms of what he is doing, rather than by standards of what painting ought to be. He is aware that a new way of expression in art is often difficult to see, but he resents presentation of his work merely on the level of technical interest.”49 On the one hand Pollock believes his painting needs to be evaluated on its own terms, not in terms of the standards of previous paintings, but he does not want its uniqueness to turn it into a merely singular demonstration of an unusual technique. Given that the method so easily could become a performance with slightly freakish overtones, like the notorious donkey painting with its tail in 1910,50 it is not surprising that Pollock was apparently satisfied with Greenberg’s formalist evaluation of his paintings and their place in the development of modern art.
Goodnough’s article is an important precursor to both Rosenberg’s “The American Action Painters” and Hess’s “De Kooning Paints a Picture.” As in those later articles, the author stresses the painter’s intense and immediate engagement with his painting process as key to the significance of the work:
These [modern abstract] artists are not concerned with representing a preconceived idea, but rather with being involved in an experience of paint and canvas, directly [emphasis added], without interference from the suggested forms and colors of existing objects. The nature of the experience is important [emphasis added]. It is not something that has lost contact with reality, but might be called a synthesis of countless contacts which have become refined in the area of the emotions during the act of painting. Is this merely an act of automatism? Pollock says it is not. He feels that his methods may be automatic at the start, but that they quickly step beyond that. . . . Decisions about the painting are made during its development and it is considered completed when he no longer feels any affinity with it.51
Goodnough’s overall interest is to outline how the artist’s creative process is able to create an emotionally expressive and formally integrated work that can stand apart from the artist as a successful aesthetic object. This is certainly a different emphasis from Rosenberg’s, whose interests were more with the artist as actor rather than as creator, but Goodnough, a painter and member of the New York school himself, gives an indication of how the painters of the period conceptualized the significance of their working processes. They did not reject the importance of the final product as the next generation would. It is that next generation who will view Rosenberg’s action painting as proposing an art of pure creative process, with Jackson Pollock serving as the prime exemplar of that attitude.
The centrality of Pollock’s process for the understanding and reception of his painting took on a slightly different guise in Leo Steinberg’s 1955 review of a retrospective of his work. Steinberg, unlike previous reviewers, saw great effort in Pollock’s painting process rather than the graceful automatism others had noted. Indeed, Steinberg’s Pollock seems to have somehow become confused with de Kooning, an artist struggling against his own skills to realize an impossible task. He describes the paintings as “manifestations of Herculean effort, this evidence of mortal struggle between the man and his art. For the man mortifies his skill in dogged quest for something other than accomplishment. From first to last the artist tramples on his own facility and spurns the elegance that creeps into a style which he has practiced to the point of knowing how.” According to Steinberg, Pollock’s paintings look easy to make, and this is an intentional effect in keeping with contemporary values that place functionality over craftsmanship. The artist “has no love for conspicuous diligence” and instead embraces “mindless ferocity and chance.” These are cultural values Steinberg finds inhuman, but he locates their source in the much-cited example of modern art: Frenhofer’s illegible painting in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the tale that, Steinberg notes, made Cézanne cry. What is perhaps most intriguing about Steinberg’s review is its conclusion, in which he discusses the painting he likes most in the show, the 1951 Echo: “A huge ninety-two-inch world of whirling threads of black on white, each tendril seeming to drag with a film of ground that bends inward and out and shapes itself mysteriously into a molded space. There is a real process here; something is actually happening. . . . With all my thought-sicklied misgivings about Pollock, this satisfies the surest test I know for a great work of art.”52 Steinberg’s language seems somehow corrective, even chiding, as he takes the process-oriented language of Rosenberg’s action painting and applies it to the formal achievements of Pollock’s Echo. Implicit in the article is a conviction that the critic cannot evaluate the artist’s process except as it is manifested in the work. Here is the middle ground between a criticism that assumes aesthetic achievement rests in formal resolution of the artwork and criticism that seeks to value art based on the artist’s engagement in the process of making a work without precedent or preconception.
The great importance of the artist’s process in the critical and philosophical understanding of mid-twentieth-century art raised problems for the future. If as Rosenberg and others claimed it was the artist’s active and engaged creative process that was significant, how was that to be evaluated? What guaranteed that a properly engaged process would be visible in the final artwork? Once the signs of an engaged process were recognizable they would become a style and easily subject to inauthentic deployment, no longer a balancing act on the knife-edge between success and failure. This was an issue for the second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters who adopted a style of gestural abstraction indebted to de Kooning and whose achievements are commonly considered aesthetic rather than existential. Also problematic is the purpose of an art wholly engaged with its process of production. Elevating the importance of artistic process above the creation of an aesthetically successful artwork seems to lead to a solipsistic art, one that would have little or no interest to anyone other than the person making it. Art would no longer be aesthetic or a form of communication; it would simply be an activity, something more akin to a sport than traditional artistic production. This, as we shall see, is in fact one of the outcomes of the emphasis placed on artistic process in the mid-twentieth century.
The rise of the New York school coincided with another mid-century artistic phenomenon, the development of a strong amateur art movement in the United States.53 Sparked by the American publication of Winston Churchill’s book Painting as a Pastime in 1950, amateur painting became a national fad supported by the popular press as well as many businesses, which sponsored painting classes, clubs, and exhibitions. The discourse promoting painting as a hobby reveals public attitudes toward the values and benefits of making art as well as raising significant challenges to the modern artist’s identity and process. These challenges are particularly notable in the pages of ARTnews, which in addition to being the main promoter of the New York school painters also strongly championed the amateur art movement.
As we have seen, critical supporters of modern art in the 1950s exalted the artist’s total engagement in the experiential processes of making, sometimes even at the expense of producing finished artworks. In these terms amateurs were positioned to be ideal modern artists; they were commonly portrayed as devoted to the process of art making as an activity good in itself. Unconstrained by the need to make saleable commodities, they were freer than were professional artists to fulfill their individual needs for self-expression and self-discovery.54 Furthermore they were, at least theoretically, unhampered by education and training in conventional modes of picture making; they were uncorrupted originals, another key desideratum for modern artists. All of these advantages were repeatedly raised in articles devoted to amateur art.
ARTnews’s support of amateur artists coincided precisely with the establishment of “X Paints a Picture” as a regular feature. In the May 1949 issue of the magazine Thomas Hess published “Ben Shahn Paints a Picture.” The same issue announced the ARTnews national amateur painters competition and opened with an article by Winston Churchill on the pleasures of amateur painting. The next issue initiated another regular monthly feature, “Amateur Standing,” which ran until 1961. Throughout the 1950s illustrated articles about professional artists at work were published in the same magazine that provided support and advice directly to amateur artists, thereby foregrounding the processes of making. This is a marked shift in approach for the magazine, which had focused on historical artworks and work by prominent European modern artists, not “hands-on” articles about contemporary American artists or amateur painters. ARTnews hoped to capitalize on the burgeoning amateur art fad by opening its pages to the concerns of amateur artists. This strategy was clearly stated in the announcement of the national amateur competition: “The Editors of Art News believe: that the actual practice of art by non-professionals offers rich rewards of pleasure and relaxation; and that amateur painters become the most understanding and enthusiastic audience for the art of professionals, contemporaries as well as masters of the past.”55 However, the strategy was not ultimately a success.
From the beginning of its support of amateur art ARTnews upheld the distinction between amateurs and professional artists, although the magazine admitted it could sometimes be difficult to maintain.56 Winston Churchill provided the basic model for the amateur artist. In his article he expanded on the ARTnews editors’ claim that painting “offered rich rewards of pleasure and relaxation.” He recommended it as an “absorbing new amusement” with which to occupy leisure time. For Churchill painting is an “inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus” that supplies “new mental food and exercise” and “an unceasing voyage of pleasure and discovery.” He abjures notable artistic success. In Churchill’s view the amateur painter who begins late in life, as he did, must have audacity, because he (or she)57 will never acquire the instinctive skills of the trained artist: “We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paintbox.”58 The article was illustrated by four photographs of Churchill painting plein-air landscapes in Cannes, Miami, and Marrakesh, and one of him working in his well-equipped home studio in England.
Churchill’s article was buttressed by the magazine’s call for entrants to its amateur painting competition in which the editor, Albert Frankfurter, enlarged on the (masculine) virtues of amateur painting: “Amateur painting is far more than a recreation sport for the tired business man . . . it actually is the basis for a sure, sound inner knowledge of the creative process. The more amateur painters then, and the higher their standards and more intense their efforts, the greater and better the artistic feeling of a nation. We can think of no better way to build and constantly increase a national audience deeply involved with the art of America than by fostering one to which the actual practice of art is a part of its daily life.”59 The magazine’s strategy of getting that tired modern businessman out of his comfortable armchair where he was contemplating the soothing products of Matisse’s labors and in front of an easel painting his own pictures was well in tune with American values. Instead of the distanced appreciation of the traditional connoisseur, the new American audience for modern art would be fellow makers, men with knowledge derived from hands-on experience.60
In the next issue of ARTnews Alison Mason Kingsbury described the enormous number of enthusiastic amateur artists in Ithaca, New York, whose active art association had been featured in Life magazine the previous April. She agreed with Churchill on the pleasures and benefits of amateur art making and stated, “In a mechanized and regulated life such as most people necessarily lead, the useless, the game, the thing-in-itself is the greatest possible release. It is therapy and happiness.” She also made an equivalence between the amateur and the modern artist who both embrace freedom of expression and reject the demands of the marketplace: “The very direction taken by the present practicing artist was established over a century ago with the Romantic Movement, which liberated art from authority and gave the right to paint to the individual. The subsequent innovators were amateurs in the truest sense. They preferred to discover and to paint what they believed, rather than to sell. Their doctrine of free expression permeates all our aesthetic thought as surely as the doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau permeate our social and political thought.”61 Modern painting is honest self-expression, liberated from all external constraints and concerns. It is a self-sufficient activity that fulfills needs unmet by the requirements of modern life. This conception combines the Arts and Crafts movement’s belief in the virtues of art making with a modernist belief in art for art’s sake.
Kingsbury’s view of art as therapeutic self-expression was typical of the explanations given for the popularity of amateur art making. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which sponsored art classes and annual exhibitions for employees, published a brochure titled Money Isn’t Everything in which the rationale for these activities was described in terms derived directly from the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris: “In an industrial society which grows more complex daily, jobs become more demanding, more routine and further removed from the end product. One of the challenges to modern management is how to afford people the greatest possible degree of satisfaction in the work they do, no matter how routine it is. . . . If the art class is contributing to the ‘wholeness’ of individuals in their daily jobs, it is serving an important function.”62 Art making was an established means to ameliorate the drudgery of modern labor, and its support in the workplace indicates a desire to increase productivity by fulfilling the psychological and emotional needs of workers. Making art was also repeatedly portrayed as a means to combat the dehumanizing effects of modern life in general: “To the painter today, whether professional or amateur, it is immensely important that he avow the unique vitality of his own creative resources, and prove . . . that he . . . [is] not a standard product of mass civilization. People today need to . . . create an identity for themselves in a mechanical age of routine, with art as an outlet for individualism. Thus modern art, claimed by some to be radical, is actually the most democratic expression of individual character.”63 Amateur painting’s therapeutic effects included supplying not just pleasure and individual expression but also purpose and meaning. As one optometrist wrote, he “turned to art to satisfy an obscure hunger” and to escape the loneliness and boredom of his job. After working all day, he paints every evening for the “joy of release,” in addition to sketching in his lunch hours and painting intensely on his vacations.64
According to ARTnews some amateur artists aspired to the degree of dedication they attributed to professional artists: “The life of the artist, devoted to an ideal that elevates it above the stresses and strains and the humdrum necessities of commonplace lives, appears to the amateur almost in that sublime light which other ages have reserved for the lives of the saints.”65 This description implies that the writers for ARTnews had a more realistic conception of the artist’s labor than did idealistic amateur artists, but when pressed to distinguish between amateurs and professionals many art critics and writers resorted to similar notions. According to the New York Times critic Aline Louchheim, for the amateur artist making is a pleasure, while the professional suffers unremitting agony to reach elevated goals: “The amateur’s greatest satisfaction . . . is in the doing rather than the result, the absorption in the work, the sense of personal challenge, the joy of . . . making with his own hands . . . and perhaps above all, the escape from his everyday world . . . for the professional . . . the result is what counts. The doing is a hard process, circumscribed by stringent self-discipline, by constant checking against a high goal, by harsh requirements.”66 Although Louchheim suggests there is a qualitative distinction between the products of the amateur and those of the professional artist, for whom “the result is what counts,” she focuses her comparison on the differing experiences of the process of making. This is unsurprising given that it was rare for a critic to devote serious attention to amateur artists’ works. Amateur art was generally discussed in a manner similar to that used for children’s art. What was significant was that amateurs were engaged in making art; the quality of the results was of no real interest to professional critics.67
At the beginning of the amateur art fad the critic Emily Genauer quoted Winston Churchill’s statement that painting “is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites no exhausting pursuits,” and she continued, “This, I dare say, will be something of a surprise to those thousands of professional painters to whom the practice of their art is . . . the most agonizing, soul-searching effort. Mr. Churchill’s remark, however, provides a useful and needed definition of an amateur painter. If you paint for fun . . . you’re an amateur.”68 Genauer’s distinction between amateur and professional on the basis of the artist’s emotional experience reflects the contemporary shift to evaluating art based on the experience of its production rather than on the final product. It was becoming commonplace to claim that the true artist’s labor was defined by its difficulty. In Art and Experience Dewey had described the artist’s working process as “one of the most exacting modes of thought,”69 and Collingwood similarly emphasized the difficulties of the creative process in his Principles of Art. As we have seen, this notion was prevalent in discussions of contemporary artists such as Giacometti and de Kooning, and it was also taken up by critics to determine the differences between amateurs and professionals.
In 1953 ARTnews’s early enthusiastic support of amateur art began to dissipate. This seems to have been at least partially the result of the commercial success of some amateur artists.70 The magazine published an editorial by Albert Frankfurter that began by comparing amateurs who sold their work in galleries to prostitutes and went on to dissuade them from taking bread out of the mouths of hardworking professional artists.71 He asked amateurs to renounce public ambition, and the grounds of his request were experiential: Frankfurter claimed to be worried about how materialism would destroy amateur artists’ disinterested pleasure in art for art’s sake and lead to bitterness and disappointment, “which can sour art, even for the born artist who has spent all his life at it.” Amateurs can find “endless rewards in self-expression and in the greater enjoyment of some of the highest, nearest to divine, works of the human race,” but selling art should be the sole province of “those who have dedicated themselves to the agony of giving an entire lifetime to one outrageously demanding muse.” Frankfurter thus separated the amateur and the professional on the basis of both nature (the “born artist”) and dedication. Amateurs may have a limited experience of “art for art’s sake” as long as their efforts remain pure (noncommercial); the professional artist’s effort is on an altogether different plane of dedication and self-sacrifice. It is not a pleasure; it is a vocation fraught with pain and difficulty.
The commercial success of amateur artists underlined the difficult rhetorical terrain of modern art. Little seemed to differentiate the amateur from modern artists, who were increasingly portrayed as rejecting traditional developed skills to embrace freedom of expression, truth, and authenticity. Were the only significant differences a capacity for dedicated suffering and the need to earn a living from selling artwork? Frankfurter’s attempt to police the boundary between amateur and professional painting must be considered in terms of what went unsaid in the pages of ARTnews—what, exactly, determined quality in contemporary painting? Like many modern art critics before and after him, Frankfurter took a stand for his magazine as an arbiter of quality without offering any substantive explanation for its judgments. By his own account, not only were amateur painters getting one-person exhibitions in the most prestigious locations in the American art world, their art was selling; both of these occurrences suggested that amateur art might equal the quality of art by professional artists. However, the success of some amateur artworks could be attributed to other causes, such as the ignorance of a public unable to perceive the higher quality of professional work, or the fame of the amateur artist in another context (as was case for Churchill).
Rather than attempting to explain the qualitative differences between amateur and professional work, Frankfurter simply requested amateurs to leave the field on “ethical” grounds. He was in an impossible position, attempting to placate rival interests. The amateurs whose ambitions ARTnews had fostered under Frankfurter’s aegis had quickly come to challenge the professionals he had expected them to support in 1949. If anyone could become a successful artist, then the elite cachet that underpinned the art world would disappear, and quality would become a mere matter of personal taste. The amateur artist had become a monster that threatened the art world’s control of quality and value.
Outside the pages of ARTnews, critics did not hesitate to suggest that amateur artists were often better than their professional counterparts. The more conservative American Artist was explicit about the threat amateur art posed to avant-garde artists: “If amateurs more frequently get hung today may it not be because of the very nature of modern art in which the gap between disciplined talent and superficial cleverness has been narrowed immeasurably?”72 In his 1950 review of the first ARTnews amateur painters competition for Art Digest Ralph Pearson wrote, “There are practically none of the crude blunderings which represent our professional School of Confusion. The amateurs, it seems, have much to teach a considerable group of professionals. Comparison between this cross-section of pastime-paintings and that of the professionals at the Whitney Museum Annual is inevitable. . . . The average technical skill of the amateurs, for instance, is markedly superior to a surprising number of the professionals. . . . There are no amateur examples as incredibly crude as a half-dozen ultra-confusionist fumblings honored by inclusion at the Whitney.”73 Thomas Hess took a notably different position in his review of the Whitney Annual in ARTnews. He claimed it was the best of the recent Annuals, and that works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, and Greene rose above the large number of inept abstract paintings.74 Since Pearson did not name the artists whose work he deplored as crude “ultra-confusionist fumblings” we cannot know to whom he was referring. Nevertheless, his insistence on the evidence of technical skills and the relatively conservative tendencies of his criticism in general suggests he was not likely to be receptive to the works Hess admired.
The trend of New York school painting supported in the pages of ARTnews during the 1950s led away from traditional evaluative standards altogether to promote the notion of art making as experience and action freed from preexisting determinations and learned technique. An unintended result was the implicit leveling of qualitative distinctions between professional and amateur painting. The difference outlined by Frankfurter hovered between the crassly material, the artist who had to earn a living from his art, and the spiritually dedicated artist as the natural born servant of an “outrageously demanding muse.” Neither identity was predicated on the quality or interest of the professional artist’s work.
ARTnews changed its approach to amateur art in 1953, replacing its earlier enthusiastic promotion with informational and didactic articles that explicitly positioned amateurs as technically inferior to professional artists. The painter, and director of the 92nd Street Y, Aaron Berkman, took over the “Amateur Standing” column in 1955 and focused it on instructional topics such as perspective and historical techniques.75 Berkman urged intelligent engagement and not just enthusiastic participation, and insisted that amateur artists recognize their technical limitations: “Amateurs don’t have the time to devote to developing professional techniques; they are mainly interested in the ‘momentary deed,’ the act of accomplishment.”76 While this was a common view, and one stated by Churchill at the beginning of the amateur art fad, in the context of the contemporary art promoted in ARTnews it was deeply ironic.
Very little differentiated amateur artists’ interest in the “momentary deed” from the professional artists being profiled in ARTnews who disdained facility, proficiency, and control. In fact, the shift to an instructional approach in the “Amateur Standing” column occurred at the moment when the magazine began to profile painters such as Larry Rivers, Lee Mullican, John Ferren, and Balcomb Greene in its “X Paints a Picture” series. All of these artists claimed to have little to no control over their painting process and stated that they considered facility and virtuosity meaningless.77 They claimed to seek spontaneity and freshness, the very qualities that had been held up as primary attributes of amateur painting during the past several years. Nevertheless, Berkman ignored contemporary trends and increasingly devoted “Amateur Standing” to advice on developing traditional skills of pictorial design.
It is tempting to assume that the writers for ARTnews believed that successful liberated artistic self-expression required a firm grounding in traditional skills in the manner of Matisse and Picasso. That was not, in fact, the case, as the magazine profiled artists who claimed to have had no formal training. In the pages of ARTnews the professional artist could be self-taught and trying to create a painting in two minutes of spontaneous brushwork that abjured all skill and facility. He could claim not to know whether the work he had just made was successful or what its significance was, but the magazine deemed him a professional, apparently by fiat. The amateur, in contrast, was by definition lacking the technical skills, understanding of pictorial practice, and dedication that characterized the professional artist. Amateur painters must be encouraged in order to expand the audience and market for art (and art instruction), but they must never be allowed to believe that their own liberated self-expression could equal that of the professional artist. The incoherence of the ARTnews position on amateur art revealed the fundamental difficulty of defining professional modern art as authentic self-expression by means of an unrestricted creative process.
The dividing line between amateur and professional began to seem increasingly arbitrary, especially as the numbers of highly dedicated “amateur” painters grew and could claim to devote as much or more time and energy to their art than did many “professional” artists. This was most often true of women who did not work and were able to spend more time on their art than were professionals who had to teach or work other jobs to support themselves. In reality, despite the persistent address to the male amateur in articles and advertisements, it was widely known that the great majority of amateur artists were women who did not work outside the home. As early as 1949 ARTnews reported the predominance of women among amateur artists: “The amateur painting epidemic is rapidly reaching across the United States. . . . Generally the strongest contingent consists of housewives (mothers, grandmothers and widows). Following closely on their heels are business men, physicians, teachers, students and professional artists (mostly commercial).”78 This recognition did not affect the discursive construction of the amateur artist who was explicitly figured as male in most articles on the subject. A notable exception to this was Frankfurter’s comparison of amateur artists to prostitutes,79 and his claim that they were taking bread out of the mouth of professionals takes on a more pointed tone and precise meaning when understood as directed explicitly toward women. Women could afford to be amateur artists, while men were professionals who needed to work to support themselves and their families. Seen in this light, the professional artist’s high-minded dedication and suffering, his freedom of expression and unhampered self-discovery, seem more and more like a protectionist rhetorical stance intended to convey value on the production of commodities that in the end anyone might produce themselves.80
The “Amateur Standing” column disappeared from ARTnews without notice or explanation after the March 1961 issue.81 In his last column Berkman completely reversed his views on amateur artists’ weaknesses and needs. Suddenly, amateurs were no longer naturally self-expressive originals deficient in knowledge and skills; they were now overly academic. After years of urging amateur artists to develop technical knowledge and discipline, Berkman chided them for being rule-bound and submissive. He claimed that “most amateurs restrict themselves to a mechanical rote imposed by their teachers. . . . As students such amateurs often were teacher’s pets, and they find it difficult to understand why others do not equally appreciate their efforts.” The answer to this problem? “Improvisation,” “let the picture happen,” and let the “intuitive self take over.” In time the student will find in painting “a process of self-revelation and self-communication” and “his art [will] become a personalized creative act instead of a mechanical process.”82 Almost parenthetically, Berkman noted that such tapping of intuition was “made popular by Abstract-Expressionism,” but his real interest was to connect the technique to Zen ink painting as described by D. T. Suzuki and he devoted half the column to this subject.
The about-face in Berkman’s final “Amateur Standing” column suggests that after a delay of several years the ideas promoted in ARTnews articles on the New York school painters had become mainstream. Nevertheless, the disjunction is startling. The magazine that most strongly promoted the Abstract Expressionists suggested techniques for painting intuitively and spontaneously to amateur painters only well after the heyday of the style. And when Berkman finally did so he virtually ignored the Abstract Expressionists in favor of Zen ink painting. Also striking is the change in attitude toward amateur painters. At the beginning of the 1950s the magazine was enthusiastically supportive of amateurs’ right to and pleasure in self-expression through painting, no matter what their style or technique. Ten years later those same amateurs were insufficiently self-expressive, insufficiently original; they were merely engaged in a “mechanical process” that must be changed into a “personalized creative act.” Just making a painting was no longer enough to escape from the “mechanized and regulated life” Kingsbury had seen as the lot of most Americans in 1949; by 1961 creative self-expression required instruction in proper attitudes and techniques for self-liberation.
The ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism and the increase in art making as an amateur activity coincided with an enormous expansion of artist education in the United States during the 1950s. The large number of predominantly male students enrolling in college under the GI Bill is generally credited to the postwar boom in colleges and universities in the United States, which included the establishment of many art departments. Previously, colleges and universities focused on art history; the making of art, when part of the curriculum at all, was generally limited to education programs and art teacher training, which were geared toward women.83 By mid-century, however, there were more classes in studio art as colleges began to expand their notion of art appreciation to include understanding gained through direct participation in the creative process, a belief that also affected mid-century concepts of the value of amateurism, as we have seen.84 As Howard Singerman discusses in Art Subjects, this mirrored the expanding influence of John Dewey and his followers in education, who saw art as a rigorous mode of thought and thereby a valuable aspect of general education (115–16). The big shift, though, was the establishment of BFA and MFA programs that were neither traditional academic programs nor professional programs for training designers and commercial artists. It is in the context of these programs that new attitudes about the significance of the artistic process developed in ways that have had an enormous effect on both the understanding and the creation of art since the mid-twentieth century.
Among the key attitudes for the acceptance of visual arts programs in the university setting was the rejection of craft training as the necessary focus of an artist’s education.85 As discussed above, there is a long history going back to the Renaissance of promoting the intellectual aspects of artistic creation over manual craftsmanship. The traditional intellectualism of the fine arts was manifested in university visual arts programs as a scientific orientation in which concepts and projects, often drawn from the Bauhaus foundations class, were pursued as a species of laboratory work (71). The making of art came to be defined by exploration and experimentation, discovery and invention. Equipped with basic design principles, established as fundamental truths of vision and perception rather than mere traditional forms (88–89), the developing artist pursued various “problems,” which might result in products along the way. Here is a reframing of the modern artist’s project as exemplified by Cézanne, Giacometti, Mondrian, and even Picasso. Like these artists, the university-trained artist would not be unduly concerned with the creation of saleable commodities, but would be engaged in a creative process presumed to be of value in and of itself. Indeed, the establishment of artist-training programs on this model was a way to guarantee the self-sufficient value of the creative process. An MFA program taught would-be artists how to be artists, far more than it taught them how to create art that would allow them to pursue financially successful art careers. That was the province of commercial art and design.
Artist education was established in the university setting on terms that were often self-contradictory. It borrowed many ideas and strategies from the Bauhaus foundations program, but it rejected the pragmatic and social orientation of the Bauhaus as a whole. Visual arts programs rested on the largely unexamined and unstated assumption of the value of art and artists in human life and society. This value was not located in the artist’s successful creation of products, because that would turn artists into mere producers of commodities. Thus art programs did not foster the acquisition of mere production skills, the traditional purview of artist training. Instead, university art programs become self-generating, self-sufficient systems, producing artists trained primarily to become financially self-supporting only within the confines of academia. In this institutional context they could devote themselves to exploring the nuances and potential significance of the creative process isolated from the pressure to create successful, or even self-sufficiently meaningful, products—and that, it might well be argued, has great potential value as sociological, psychological, and even philosophical experimentation.
The success of the Abstract Expressionist generation was a key impetus for the institutionalization of art programs that abandoned a skills-based approach to artist education in favor of a broad-based experimental approach intended to develop artists in a more holistic sense. As the first generation of American artists to enjoy international acclaim the Abstract Expressionists served as role models, and it was evident that, with occasional exceptions, these were artists whose success did not rely on traditional artistic skills. Indeed, in the late 1940s a group of the New York school artists opened their own art school, Subjects of Artists, in which there was no hands-on teaching of art. Rather, the students were treated as if they were artists and participated in discussions with their teachers. Singerman sees the open conversations about student artworks held at Subjects of Artists as the origin of the critique method that remains central to artist education programs to this day (142).
Teaching projects designed by artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation are indicative of a process-oriented rather than product-oriented approach. Robert Motherwell devoted five lectures to the stages of Guernica in his class at Hunter College; and he gave a similar amount of attention to the 180 drawings of the artist and his model in Picasso’s The Human Comedy. When hired to teach a summer class at Black Mountain College in 1948 de Kooning set up a still life and told his students that they would spend the entire summer looking at it: “On one piece of paper or one canvas we are going to look at it until we get it exactly the way it is. Then we’re going to keep working on it until we kill it. And then we’re going to keep working on it until it comes back on its own.”86 In the 1950s Ad Reinhardt also gave his students projects designed to keep them involved in the creative process at the expense of creating a work of art. He made them work on the same sheet of paper all term. They were to draw self-portraits and then erase them and begin again. His projects were designed to promote “unmastery” and open students up to possibilities (145). Singerman describes the art teaching of the Abstract Expressionists as psychologically oriented, intended to provoke students to find themselves and their own individuality as artists. As such the teaching of technique was extraneous to the main goal, which was the fashioning of individuals into artists (146–49).
The most renowned teacher among the Abstract Expressionists, Hans Hofmann, was both older and far more traditional in his respect for craftsmanship and belief in the necessity of mastering the medium and formal values. He encouraged his students to explore varieties of paint handling, but he did not promote any specific technique as a desirable end in itself. Technique was, for Hofmann, a means to the end of creating a formally successful work of art. His overall position was a vague amalgamation of common early twentieth-century views on the nature of modern art as a combination of personal expression, a loosely spiritual response to nature, and formal mastery of the medium. The very successful careers of many Hofmann students as second-generation Abstract Expressionists suggest that a grounding in some type of formal training in painting was a practical prerequisite for the successful “unmastering” of Abstract Expressionism. Rothko, Newman, and Still were supposedly proud of their inability to draw (139), but such statements must be taken with certain reservations. First, although they probably did not draw particularly well in a traditional academic sense since none of them had undergone the full rigors of academic training, they all studied art for years and had extremely long careers teaching art, so they undoubtedly had at least adequate drawing skills. Second, and more important, however, is that being able to draw well was considered a completely outdated skill by mid-century. After Picasso’s famous claim that he labored to draw like a four-year-old, ambitious modern artists could (and often did) happily announce that they did not labor under the handicap of too much skill.
The tension between the traditional values of technical mastery and the liberated dedication to the process of painting would soon disappear in the expanded embrace of pure experience that replaced aesthetic evaluation in the 1960s. Harold Rosenberg turned from emphasizing the importance of art as action and event to upholding his belief that only certain types of consciously developed experiences were artistically/aesthetically meaningful. He described Hofmann’s teaching not in terms of technical instruction in painting but in terms of developing the creative attitudes of his students. In Rosenberg’s view, Hofmann tried to get his students into the canvas to awaken pictorial life, and to “give rise to the ‘meetings,’ ‘bridges,’ ‘communions’ of a continuous creative process that embraced all of its components, including the artist himself, in a singleness.”87 For Rosenberg, Hofmann’s approach to art making stood in marked contrast to the uncreative free-for-all of the early 1960s: “What may not be rejected is his [Hofmann’s] conviction that art is essentially creation. Anything can be a work of art, but its mode of production decides its meaning and its value. . . . He saw art as that kind of activity by which the actor himself is transformed.”88 This is in essence what many artists have meant when they claim what is most significant is the artistic process. As we shall see, however, that is only one aspect of the meaning of process in recent art.
Mid-twentieth-century art and criticism represents a moment of precarious equilibrium when the artist’s process began to rival the final work in significance. For most prominent critics the ultimate value was still the aesthetic quality and interest of the works of art produced, but artists’ working processes were an increasingly important factor in critics’ interpretations and evaluations. In the decades to come process would triumph over the final artwork as artists and the art world in general began to question the meaning and role of art, particularly its status as a valuable aesthetic commodity. The art of a painter like Jackson Pollock thus stands at a crossroads where the artist’s process and the artwork it produces are equal in importance and inseparable. In the following decades, as the modern artwork increasingly loses its identity as a personally expressive aesthetic object, the processes of its production acquire altogether different purposes and meanings.