The American artist with any pretensions to total seriousness suffers still from his dependency upon what the School of Paris, Klee, Kandinsky, and Mondrian accumulated before 1935. . . . All excellence seems to flow still from that vivacious, unbelievable near past which lasted from 1905 until 1930 and which not even the First World War, but only Hitler, could definitely terminate.—Clement Greenberg, 1947
Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss.—Robert Motherwell, 1951
We Americans have the technique to bring something to performance so well that the subject is left out. There is nothing we throw away so quickly as our données; for we would make always an independent and evangelical, rather than a contingent, creation. . . . We throw away so much and make so much of the meager remainder. We make a great beauty, which is devastated of everything but form and gait.—R. P. Blackmur, 1958
Is it possible that the significance of the New York School has been misconstrued? Is it possible that the much vaunted “triumph” of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s—when, for the first time in our history, an entire “school” of advanced American painting commanded international attention and acclaim—might not, after all, have been the unqualified artistic success it is nowadays taken to be by all the organs of established cultural opinion? That the emergence of the New York School in the decade that followed upon the end of the Second World War brought an immense change in the fortunes of American art is certainly beyond dispute. That this momentous change was closely linked to a decline in the fortunes of modernist art in Europe—the art from which Abstract Expressionism derived its principal impetus and ideas—remains a far more contentious issue. That the implications of that decline did much to determine the scope of what it was possible for the New York School to achieve is a question that few chroniclers of the Abstract Expressionist movement have been willing to confront. From a critical perspective of this persuasion, however, the emergence of the New York School is best understood as at once an epilogue to and a quintessentialization and apotheosis of the great epoch of early-twentieth-century modernist painting in Europe.
Such a view is, of course, very much at odds with current critical orthodoxies. On the one hand, there is the citadel of institutional opinion that insists on celebrating the New York School as a grand departure from European tradition, quite as if Abstract Expressionist painting was to be seen as some sort of analogue to Whitman’s poetry or jazz. On the other hand, there is a counterorthodoxy prevalent in the academy that holds to a belief that the American avant-garde somehow “stole” its artistic ideas from their legitimate European custodians under the malign auspices of the cold war. The first attempts to aggrandize the New York School by exaggerating its originality and uniqueness, while the second attempts to demonize it for purely political purposes. (To this demonizing political agenda, moreover, the academic left has lately added equally irrelevant charges of racism and sexism.) Yet neither of these critical orthodoxies seems true either to our experience of the art itself or to the historical circumstances in which it was created.
What is essential to understand about the historical origins of the New York School is that it emerged from a world in which the political geography of modernist art had suffered a severe contraction. Even before the Second World War brought the public life of art in Europe to a virtual standstill, modernism had been outlawed in two of its vital centers—first in Russia under the Soviet regime of Stalin, and then in Germany under the Nazi regime of Hitler. This malevolent fate had particularly grievous consequences for the votaries of abstraction, which was everywhere seen—by its champions no less than by its enemies—to represent the most extreme manifestation of the modernist spirit in art, and was thus even more vulnerable to hostile opinion than its figurative counterpart.
What is also important to understand about the fate of modernist art in the decade prior to the Second World War is that even in those countries where it was more or less accepted as a legitimate, though still controversial, component of modern cultural life—which was largely the case in France, Britain, and the United States—abstraction continued to meet with fierce institutional resistance. In France, except for Léger and Delaunay, the masters of the School of Paris were hostile to pure abstraction. In the 1930s, moreover, the dominance of Surrealism on the Paris art scene had the effect of marginalizing even abstract artists of the stature of Mondrian and Kandinsky. (That the abstract art of Kandinsky had exerted a crucial influence on Miró, the greatest painter to receive the imprimatur of André Breton, hardly mattered. Kandinsky remained excluded from the Surrealist canon.) In Britain, too, despite a spirited campaign mounted in the critical writings of Herbert Read on behalf of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo, abstraction was generally regarded by both the cognoscenti and the public as something alien and absurd. Even a modernist critic as enlightened as Roger Fry had harbored serious doubts about its aesthetic efficacy.
The situation in America was somewhat different, however. While mainstream critical opinion in the United States was similarly hostile or indifferent to the achievements of abstract art in the 1930s, there was nonetheless some significant institutional support for its European masters. The Museum of Non-Objective Art—later to be better known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—was founded in New York in 1937 as a kind of shrine to Kandinsky and his followers. (Jackson Pollock worked there, doing odd jobs, in 1943.) Even earlier, in 1927, A. E. Gallatin had opened his Gallery of Modern Art, a collection that favored abstraction, at New York University, and earlier than that, in 1920, Katherine Dreier had founded the Société Anonyme, which was also sympathetic to abstraction. Most important of all was the founding in 1929 of the Museum of Modern Art, where in 1936 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., organized a major exhibition of Cubism and Abstract Art, which gave the public of its day its first comprehensive account of the history of abstract art in Europe.
Yet not a single American painting was included in the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, though Alexander Calder was represented by his mobile sculpture. This implicit downgrading of American abstraction deeply embittered our embattled native modernists, who in the 1930s were fighting a lonely struggle for recognition against the popularity of reactionary Regionalist and Social Realist painting. This led to a public protest in 1939 when a group called the American Abstract Artists, which had been organized in 1936 to advance the cause of abstract art in the United States, issued a broadside that asked the question, “How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art?” It was signed by fifty-two artists and caused the museum a good deal of embarrassment. It did not, however, prompt any immediate change in policy.
The reason, though never publicly avowed, was nonetheless clear. American abstract art in the 1930s was not deemed sufficiently powerful or original to merit more vigorous support. As one of the museum’s curators, James Thrall Soby, confided on another occasion: “You cannot possibly present twentieth-century American painting as we have presented School of Paris painting. The revolutionary impact is not there.” This is a judgment that posterity has somewhat modified—for there was more going on in American art in the 1930s than the museum quite appreciated—but not essentially altered. Even the most advanced American art of the time was still largely tethered to European initiatives.
This was a situation that the eruption of the Second World War radically changed. The fall of Paris to the Nazi army in June 1940 marked the end of an era in European modernism. If the modernist movement in art was to have any immediate future, it would be left to artists in the United States—both native modernists and European émigrés—to create that future. Almost overnight, then, New York became the sole remaining outpost of the modernist movement, and thus the de facto capital of the international avant-garde. This was as much of a shock to the Americans as it was to the Europeans, for modernist art was essentially a European creation and American artists were used to regarding themselves as the underdogs of the movement. That its future might now be in American hands was a daunting prospect for which few American talents had prepared themselves. Yet it was in this atmosphere of shock, dislocation, and worldwide crisis—a crisis in the very civilization that had produced the modernist movement—that the New York School emerged in the early years of the war.
Like so many of the other American painters who constituted that first generation of New York School painters, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was abysmally ill-prepared, by training or temperament or intellect, to respond to this daunting challenge. That he succeeded to the extent that he did—which was for a very brief period between 1947 and 1950—was itself a remarkable feat, a triumph of ambition and short-lived inspiration over a severely handicapped and unruly personality. The figure he most resembles in American cultural history isn’t Walt Whitman but Hart Crane, whose horrific career traced a similar course of self-destructive combat with extreme circumstance to wrest from the conventions of European modernism an authentic statement of American experience.
In September 1939, when the war in Europe commenced, Pollock was a twenty-seven-year-old painter whose accomplishment was negligible and whose personality was already showing signs of fracture and disarray. For two years he had been under psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and would remain under treatment—mostly of a Jungian persuasion—for some years to come. As an artist he was still very much under the influence of his teacher and mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, one of the leaders of the Regionalist school. He had also taken a keen interest in the Mexican muralists, especially José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who in the 1930s were very much in vogue in the United States. (They indeed enjoyed more favor at the Museum of Modern Art than most American modernists.) It was from Siqueiros in the 1930s that Pollock acquired an interest in the use of enamel paint and some of the techniques for dripping and pouring it, though it would be another decade before he put them to significant use in his own painting. It was not until 1940 that, as his brother Sande wrote at the time, Pollock had “finally dropped the Benton nonsense.”
What seems to have changed everything for Pollock was seeing Picasso’s Guernica at the Valentine Gallery in New York in the spring of 1939, and then, later that year, the mammoth exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art at the Museum of Modern Art. It was his intense encounter with Picasso that marked Pollock’s entry into the arena of modernist painting, which Benton had famously repudiated—an arena in which Picasso would presently be submerged, in Pollock’s case, by the impact of Kandinsky, Miró, Masson, and Matta. It was to a large extent the therapeutic ethos of Jungian psychoanalysis, however—an ethos that conferred immense metaphysical authority on so-called archetypes, which were believed to lie buried in the recesses of unconscious memory but were waiting to be magically summoned for conscious purpose—that determined the way Pollock performed in that arena.
What ignited this heady amalgam of modernist pictorial aesthetics and Jungian psychology in Pollock’s painting was the Surrealist doctrine of automatism, which was itself derived from the Freudian concept of the unconscious. This isn’t the place to explore the central role played by psychoanalytic theory and practice in the art and culture of the 1940s in this country. Suffice it to say that it was enormous. It effectively supplanted the role played by Marxist thought in the 1930s, and exerted an even greater influence on the conduct of life. Neither the art of the New York School nor the poetry of the same period—the poetry of the generation of Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell—can be fully understood or seriously assessed in isolation from the culture of psychoanalysis. Nor, for that matter, can any other area of American cultural life in the years between the Second World War in the 1940s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, a subject that still awaits a social historian to do it justice.
Be all this as it may, it was the doctrine of automatism that emancipated Pollock from the morass of modernist eclecticism and pastiche in which his painting remained mired during the war years when his art was just beginning to attract serious attention. His conversion to automatism also liberated him from the bogus mythification of those tacky Jungian “archetypes” that identify paintings like The Moon Woman, Male and Female, Guardians of the Secret, and The She-Wolf (all from 1942–1943) as the work of an artist whose raw command of the painterly medium, while still pretty crude, was more impressive than his muddled attempts to deal with symbols ostensibly dredged up from the unconscious—but actually acquired from the intellectual hearsay of the period—as his principal subjects. It wasn’t until Pollock got rid of his subjects—or what R. P. Blackmur called “données” in the passage I have quoted above—that he was able to achieve an art that, as Blackmur wrote, “is devastated of everything but form and gait.” It was his total embrace of automatism in the “drip” paintings of 1947–1950 that made the breakthrough possible.
It is one of the many problematic aspects of the retrospective Jackson Pollock, which Kirk Varnedoe has organized at the Museum of Modern Art this winter, that it treats the artist’s oeuvre as if it were a consistently sublime achievement rather than what it is: a highly uneven body of work which, even in its rare moments of original accomplishment, is scarcely comparable to the greatest painting of the modernist era. This approach to the Pollock problem seems to have been dictated by a mistaken belief that Pollock’s life constitutes one of the master myths of twentieth-century American life. This belief is baldly stated in the opening pages of Mr. Varnedoe’s essay for the catalogue of the exhibition, an essay whose very title—“Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work”—puts us on notice that we are invited on this occasion not merely to examine an artist’s work but to participate in an historical romance. “The span from Elvis Presley’s first record in 1954 through Jasper Johns’s first show in 1958 formed a key divide in American life,” Mr. Varnedoe writes, “and Pollock’s car crash (like the actor James Dean’s the year before) was one of its benchmarks. In retrospect, that accident says ‘end’ as surely as Sputnik (launched the next year) says ‘beginning.’”And further:
Pollock now looms as a central hinge between the century’s two halves, a key to how we got from one to the other in modern art. As the pivot on which prologue and coda balance, he has become in history, still more than he was in life, a legitimator: validation accrues to the lineage fertile enough to have spawned him, or to followers clever enough to have properly read his message; and competing claims abound. Even more broadly, any theory of cultural modernity has to claim the summit he occupies before it can assert dominion on the territory; and in this way accounts of Pollock also become litmus tests for broader philosophical and political positions about the meanings of his epoch. Trying to write his history inevitably broaches larger queries about our own.
In the presence of such claims to world-historical importance, then, Mr. Varnedoe embraces the notion that “normal critical criteria” are still beside the point in discussing Pollock’s art, for how can mere art criticism hope to account for a phenomenon like “a central hinge” of an epoch that goes back a hundred years? Even in the vast literature devoted to Picasso, I cannot recall anything to equal this bizarre exercise in museological hyperbole. It makes even William Rubin’s misguided attempt to place the paintings of Frank Stella in the company of Shakespeare and Dante seem almost modest by comparison. In the end it is a testimony not to Pollock’s artistic achievement but to something far more mundane—a curator’s anxiety that a claim to anything less than the colossal and world-shaking will fail to bring in the crowds needed to justify an exhibition mounted on a blockbuster scale.
Alas, it is in the interest of museum marketing and mythmaking that war has been declared on so-called normal critical criteria in the organization of this retrospective and its accompanying catalogue, and not because such criteria are no longer relevant to what the artist accomplished or failed to accomplish in the course of a very troubled life.
What “normal critical criteria” amount to on this occasion turn out, for the most part, to consist of the critical observations made by the late Clement Greenberg in the course of his close involvement with Pollock’s painting. While paying a kind of pro forma lip service to Greenberg’s accomplishments as a critic, Mr. Varnedoe mounts a major assault on just about every aspect of his critical thought. Not only are we treated to the now familiar reference to Greenberg “as a tyrant of taste in the early 1960s” but to a summary attack on Greenberg’s pessimistic views of American society in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the sense of “alienation” with which he identified both the New York School and the vicissitudes of high cultural aspiration in that period.
Taking what can only be called a Saturday Evening Post cover view of this postwar period, Mr. Varnedoe evokes a jolly time “when a world war against totalitarian powers had just been won, when prosperity had returned after the bitter years of the Depression, and when an enormous boom in new births apparently signaled a groundswell of confidence and relief.” Apparently he is unacquainted with W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety (1947), or the ballet later based on it, or with the pervasive influence in these years of such unjolly writers as Kafka and Kierkegaard and Sartre and Camus and Maritain—but why go on? About the spiritual temper of that postwar period Mr. Varnedoe remains as innocent—or ignorant—as one of those newborn babes he cites as evidence of a “groundswell of confidence.” Can he really have no idea of the spiritual disarray and psychological breakdown that the war and the Holocaust and the atomic bomb brought in their wake?
There is certainly plenty to take issue with in Clement Greenberg’s criticism, and with Greenberg himself, but on this subject—the moral and cultural temper of the period in which the New York School emerged—his pessimism was both accurate and prophetic. He wrote as follows in 1947:
The morale of that section of New York’s Bohemia which is inhabited by striving young artists has declined in the last twenty years, but the level of its intelligence has risen, and it is still downtown, below 34th Street, that the fate of American art is being decided—by young people, few of them over forty, who live in cold-water flats and exist from hand to mouth. Now they all paint in the abstract vein, show rarely on 57th Street, and have no reputations that extend beyond a small circle of fanatics, art-fixated misfits who are as isolated in the United States as if they were living in Paleolithic Europe.
Although Pollock’s principal critical champion, Greenberg didn’t write as a cheerleader—and it is for that reason, I suppose, that a curatorial cheerleader like Kirk Varnedoe is concerned to discredit him. While Greenberg did not hesitate to describe Pollock in 1947 as “the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one,” he also said of Pollock’s painting that “its paranoia and resentment narrow it; large though it may be in ambition—large enough to contain inconsistencies, ugliness, blind spots, and monotonous passages—it nevertheless lacks breadth.” It is for judgments like this that Greenberg has had to be demonized once again on the occasion of this retrospective.
For the entire premise on which this retrospective has been organized is the belief that Pollock ushered in a new golden age in American art—a golden age represented by the likes of Cy Twombly, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Lynda Benglis, Richard Serra, and Brice Marden, among many others. One can only say that golden ages aren’t what they used to be. On this matter, too, what Greenberg wrote about the Museum of Modern Art in 1947 remains amazingly relevant, for some things haven’t changed in the last fifty years. “Pusillanimity makes the museum follow the lead of the powerful art dealers. . . . But it cannot be blamed too much, since it reflects rather accurately the prevailing taste in American art circles.” If there really was “a tyrant of taste in the early 1960s” on the New York art scene, it was Leo Castelli, not Clement Greenberg—but to acknowledge that would capsize the premise on which this Pollock retrospective has been organized.
A more reliable key to our understanding of Pollock’s painting is, in any case, to be found in Greenberg’s observation that it “lacks breadth.” But to reflect on that realm of aesthetic actuality is to remove Jackson Pollock from the romance of history and return our attention to what the artist accomplished and failed to accomplish in the only important pictures he ever created.
Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe.—D. H. Lawrence, 1923
Until well into the 1940s, Jackson Pollock’s painting remained locked in a struggle to master and overcome the influences of the European modernist painters he took as his models—primarily Picasso, Kandinsky, and Miró. That he was not himself an artist in their class was more or less taken for granted even by his most ardent admirers at the time. It is doubtful that Pollock himself believed he was an artist in their class. Yet what he brought to his encounter with these European masters was a fierce determination to produce an art that would somehow carry him beyond the styles and conventions he was wrestling with. Among much else, this meant that traditional easel painting had to be abandoned in favor of something the European masters of modernism had not yet attempted to place at the center of their art—a mode of mural-scale wall painting of a radically subjective character.
Pollock seems to have understood that as an easel painter he would never be able to trump his European masters. Not only did they bring to the tradition of the easel picture a richer and more complex command of experience than any that was within his own reach, but they had effectively transformed the content of the easel picture to conform to the imperatives of that experience. Mural-scale wall painting of a certain persuasion—painting that would be tethered not to the service of some social cause but to the only subject that governed the artist’s will: his own troubled psyche—offered a way to circumvent the tradition to which Pollock could not finally make a significant contribution.
It was in the interest of circumventing that tradition that the influence of the Mexican muralists, the public art of Thomas Hart Benton, and Pollock’s own response to Picasso’s Guernica all played a crucial role in determining his leap into mural-scale wall painting in the late 1940s. It was in the scale and ambition of such painting, not in its ethos or imagery, that Pollock saw the possibility of a radical artistic opportunity. For the social content of 1930s mural painting Pollock felt no affinity whatever. Indifferent to politics and fundamentally anti-social in his personal behavior, Pollock had only one subject that commanded his loyalty: his own appetites, ambitions, and compulsions, which years of Jungian psychoanalysis had elevated in his own mind to the status of a cosmological imperative. (Hence his megalomaniac assertion that “I am nature!”) It wasn’t until he was able to bring those appetites and ambitions into alignment with a pictorial technique allowing them unfettered expression—unfettered, that is, by the traditional tools and constraints of easel painting—that Pollock was able to achieve an art uniquely his own.
It is for this reason that the “drip” abstractions of the late 1940s and early 1950s are inevitably the central focus in any comprehensive account of Pollock’s oeuvre. It is one of the distinctions of the Jackson Pollock retrospective which Kirk Varnedoe has organized at the Museum of Modern Art that it assembles a larger number of these abstract paintings than has ever before been seen in a single exhibition. This, in my view, is also one of the principal liabilities of the exhibition, for what has come to be regarded as “classic” Pollock is not, after all, an art of infinite variety. It is maddeningly repetitious in its formal rhythms. It is paltry in its command of color, for classic Pollock is largely based on light-dark contrasts rather than chromatic structure. Classic Pollock also lacks breadth, as even Clement Greenberg acknowledged, in its range of feeling and invention.
Given these limitations, such paintings are best seen in isolation from each other. They actually gain something from being viewed in the company of abstract paintings unlike themselves in method and imagery—which is generally how we do see these Pollocks in museum collections—for the contrasts to be observed in such contexts have the effect of underscoring the element of furious, headlong energy in Pollock. When a large number of Pollock’s abstract paintings are seen in close succession, however—as they are in the MOMA retrospective—their much-vaunted energy tends to deflate and flatten into decorative tedium. The more we look, the less we find. What may strike us initially as random and reckless in the labyrinthine traceries of dripped and poured pigment soon reveals itself to be involuntarily governed by an ineluctable and compulsive monotony. Pollock’s unconscious, to the extent that it was called upon by his automatist methods to supply him with images, forms, and ideas, turned out to be a very limited resource. But then, so too was the element of conscious control in Pollock. Which may be why classic Pollock turned out to have a lifespan of less than five years.
Even so, the paintings produced in the early stages of this short-lived period are more interesting than those that came at the end. If we take Cathedral (1947) as marking its beginning, then it was pretty much over by 1950, the year in which Pollock produced Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm, and a number of similar paintings in which he seems to have been able to effect a more workable equation between uncertainty and control than either before or after. That there remained a large element of uncertainty in Pollock’s own view of what he was doing in the drip abstractions even in his best years is evident in his introduction of Miróesque cut-out figures in 1948–1949. In the eight-foot-wide Out of the Web (1949), for example, the figures actually dominate the weblike traceries of pigment. By the time we get to Blue Poles (1952), uncertainty has been supplanted by predictability. Blue Poles is the Abstract Expressionist version of Salon painting. Classic Pollock had become its own cliché. And in the few years that remained, Pollock is seen to be attempting something like a return to easel painting.
No one has given us a better account of the artistic implications of the shift from easel painting to wall painting in Pollock than the late William C. Seitz in his early study of Abstract Expressionist Painting in America.1 Until 1946 [wrote Seitz] Pollock’s paint surfaces were passionately molded with brush and knife in what Thomas Hess characterized as a “heavy, dark Expressionist idiom.” The irreducible unit of his style, despite rectilinear structure, was the individual stroke, though its identity was apt to be lost in the total textural maelstrom and the optical pulsation effected by variegated color. Out of this “total textural maelstrom,” according to Seitz, came “Pollock’s identification of passion with nonobjective brush tracks,” and this in turn led him to a pictorial method in which “tools seldom touched the painting surface”—the method Seitz described as “the flow or drip of enamel from brush, stick, or can.”
Seitz then addressed the crucial question of “the degree and nature of the control that the artist intentionally or unconsciously exerts over his medium.” While reminding us that “The idea of accident is deeply entrenched in modern tradition,” Seitz went on to observe that Pollock had
demonstrated that direction can be given to even so fluid and willful a medium as poured enamel. Control here applies not to the exact track and shape of each brushstroke [sic] to be sure, but to the types of relationship inherent in the process. Individual passages . . . at no point evidence the direct touch of the painter. Rather, it is his entire bodily activity that from a distance influences, but by no means determines, his configuration. Accident, gravity, and the fluid response of the paint combine with human gesture to form a structure that is the result of their interaction.
About the pictorial structure that results from this interaction, Seitz also offered some cogent observations.
It is easy to see three-dimensional structure in Pollock’s pictures; and as one’s consciousness moves, in exploring his endless space of cellular division, time is involved as well. Finally, following the perceptual jolt by which one’s impression of a visual field shifts, hollow space becomes flat surface. What was open structure is seen as a network of lines that weave above and below each other across the canvas, and the spectator is excluded. The picture, still vital, becomes a wall decoration.
Now the possibility that it might be the fate of mural-scale abstract painting to be experienced as wall decoration—“wallpaper,” as Harold Rosenberg derisively characterized it in “The American Action Painters”—was an issue that was deeply troubling to virtually all of the painters of the New York School. That is why there was so much heated discussion lavished on the importance of the “subject” from the earliest days of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940s. It was believed—some of the time, anyway, by some of the artists—that a compelling subject would forestall abstraction’s descent into wall decoration. There were New York School painters—Mark Rothko prominently among them—who insisted that the only legitimate subject for abstract painting was some mythic or mystical vision of human tragedy, yet few observers of his art could find any hint or suggestion of such a subject in the paintings he actually created. Willem de Kooning, on the other hand, downgraded the very notion that “content” might play an important role in painting—“It’s very tiny—very tiny, content,” he said—but his own argument was undermined by the series of Women paintings that placed him in a direct line of descent from Picasso, for whom a subject had always been crucial. There was never any consensus on the subject of a “subject” in the New York School, nor could there be—for it was in the very nature of Abstract Expressionist painting for each of its practitioners to conduct a radically subjective dialogue with the art of the European modernists they aspired to supplant.
In this respect, certainly, Robert Motherwell was far more candid than most of his colleagues in the New York School when he observed that “Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss.” Yet the idea that “the whole culture of modern painting” might in fact be the unacknowledged subject of Abstract Expressionist painting—which I firmly believe to be the case—was deeply distasteful to many painters in the movement, who regarded it as an affront to their high-risk, existential ambitions as members of an embattled avant-garde. It was an idea that for many people in the art world conjured up discredited notions of art-for-art’s-sake and “significant form”—theories that were believed to give priority to art over life, and thus inevitably put in question the ambition of the New York School painting to produce an art so radical that it would at some level challenge the life of the time.
It was for this reason that Harold Rosenberg’s theory of “action painting” scored such an immense success when it was first promulgated in 1952. In a single bold stroke, Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters” appeared to remove the entire Abstract Expressionist movement from both the history of modern painting and the pettifogging distinctions of aesthetic discourse by situating it instead in some exalted realm of existential “action,” where, as the author claimed, “what matters always is the revelation contained in the act,” and such mundane matters as “Form, color, composition, drawing . . . can be dispensed with.” This was the key passage in what amounted to a declaration of independence from what D. H. Lawrence had called “the old parenthood of Europe”:
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
It was further claimed by Rosenberg that “The new American painting is not ‘pure’ art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic.” On the contrary, Rosenberg wrote, “The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.” From this perspective, then, “The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form—as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas—is bound to seem a stranger.”
If “every distinction between art and life” had been eliminated in this painting, what it called for wasn’t art criticism or aesthetic judgment but some existentialist version of psychoanalysis. 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.
The notion that “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” was the sheerest nonsense, of course. But it proved to be very seductive nonsense. For its effect was to provide the Abstract Expressionist movement with an exciting new dramaturgy in which the artist now emerged as an existential hero and his painting was to be seen not as an aesthetic endeavor but as the cynosure of a heroic private action that was not to be judged by aesthetic standards. It was, alas, a very “European” theory, which derived from ideas to be found in Breton’s surrealism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Sartre’s existentialism, yet it proved to be so appealing that it was somehow exempted from any negative association with “the old parenthood of Europe.”
There was, however, a dirty little secret involved in the promulgation of Rosenberg’s theory. For it was well known at the time that Jackson Pollock was the artist upon whose recent work—the mural-scale “drip” abstractions of the late 1940s and early 1950s—Rosenberg had based his theory of “action painting.” And it was also well known in New York art circles that Rosenberg actually despised Pollock’s paintings and had a very low opinion of the man himself. Yet because Pollock was the only painter then at work whose pictorial practice—especially as it was recorded in the photographs by Hans Namuth—seemed to lend itself to Rosenberg’s existential “action” scenario, he shamelessly exploited Pollock’s notoriety without according him appropriate recognition or even mentioning his name. There was thus at the very core of this famous essay on “The American Action Painters” an act—one might even call it an existential act—of unconscionable bad faith. Yet because Rosenberg was so enamored of his own theory and saw that its publication would bring him a celebrity he had never before enjoyed—which, of course, it promptly did—he turned his private mockery of Pollock’s painting into a bogus manifesto for the entire Abstract Expressionist movement.
The unhappy history of this episode in critical legerdemain is now worth recalling not only because it became so inextricably involved in public perceptions of the art of the New York School for so many years but also because something akin to Harold Rosenberg’s bad faith in promoting his “action” theory seems to have governed the very conception of the Jackson Pollock retrospective at MOMA. Unlike Rosenberg, Mr. Varnedoe cannot be accused of despising Pollock’s painting, yet implicit in the atrocious way he has presented the artist’s drip abstractions to the public—and without the drip paintings there would be no Pollock retrospective—is an assumption that these are not works of art that can be expected to sustain our attention without recourse to the mythology surrounding their creation.
Hence the unforgivable decision to install a life-size replica of the interior of the Long Island barn that served as Pollock’s studio in the exhibition itself. That studio interior is, of course, the mise en scène of the media-generated legend of “Jack the Dripper” and all the other nonsense written about Pollock’s antics as an artist. Owing to the photographs of Hans Namuth that documented Pollock’s “performance” in that studio, it has become a space almost as famous as the paintings that were created in it. At MOMA, moreover, the replica of this studio space is adorned with a copious selection of the Namuth photographs of Pollock at work, and on a video monitor at the entrance there is a film version of the same subject. This replica of the Pollock studio turns out to provide the climactic moment in what is a large and at times a very wearying exhibition, and its function in the retrospective is clearly to give the public something other than Pollock’s paintings to look at. To an understanding of Pollock’s painting this replica of his studio space contributes nothing. Its purpose is purely dramaturgical. By evoking the legend of the painter performing in the studio, it succeeds in shifting attention from the paintings to the artist himself as he has passed into the mythology of modern cultural life. It certainly succeeds as show biz but is finally very damaging to the public’s understanding of the art.
What the conception of the Pollock retrospective owes to Rosenberg’s “action” theory, and what both owe to the folklore generated by Namuth’s studio photographs and films, is made explicit by Pepe Karmel, Mr. Varnedoe’s collaborator on this exhibition, in his essay for the catalogue accompanying the retrospective. This essay on “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” which runs to some 45 large pages plus 102 footnotes—roughly two-thirds as long as Mr. Varnedoe’s own essay on the life and work of the artist—is something of a museological phenomenon in itself. I, at least, cannot recall another museum text of this length in which the most mind-numbing pedantry is so seamlessly combined with such shameless legend-mongering to produce such a negligible critical result. For what momentous discovery does Mr. Karmel come up with after his protracted study of Namuth’s negatives and the outtakes from the Pollock film project? “Pollock’s achievement, in his pictures of 1947–50,” writes Mr. Karmel in conclusion, “was to transform graphic flatness into optical flatness—to show that by piling layer upon layer, sign upon sign, you could generate a pictorial sensation equivalent to that of the primordial vision field.” He acknowledges that “The impact of this discovery is evident in Pollock’s painting,” and then adds: “But only through the films and photographs of Hans Namuth can we understand the technique that made it possible.”
Yet in this pedantic endeavor Mr. Karmel is guilty of engaging in the very same critical strategy he takes Harold Rosenberg’s “action” theory to task for. “Rosenberg’s rhetoric encouraged artists and critics to focus on Pollock’s actions rather than on the images resulting from them,” Karmel correctly observes, and then at much greater length than Rosenberg attempted does exactly the same thing. But since the whole conception of this retrospective is to exploit the Pollock myth rather than to give the public a disinterested account of the artist’s accomplishment—which really doesn’t require an exhibition on this scale—it was essential for MOMA, too, to concentrate on “Pollock’s actions” rather than his art. So the paint-splattered floor of the artist’s studio is given a full-color reproduction in the catalogue, and the studio itself has been replicated as a shrine where not the paintings of Jackson Pollock but the photographs of Hans Namuth documenting their production may be pondered as the sacred relics of the artist’s legend. All of which has less to do with the life of art than with the current business practices of the art-museum industry.
[1999]
Footnote
1. Originally written as a doctoral dissertation at Princeton University in 1955, Seitz’s Abstract Expressionist Painting in America was not published as a book until 1983, when Harvard University Press brought it out with a forward by Robert Motherwell and an introduction by Dore Ashton.