American Abstract Art in the Arena of Criticism
by Robert S. Lubar
The structure falls today upon the ambitious abstractionist that he cannot longer provoke or scandalize by being non-objective. His amorphous and geometric forms cannot sing the tunes of home-soil nationalism or of proletarian discontent—much less combine them as present American "social realists" seem to. Therefore, perhaps in a new sense, our elimination of the subject offers a survival value.1
—Balcomb Greene
It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial.2
—Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko
In the June 1948 issue of Partisan Review, George L. K. Morris engaged Clement Greenberg in a debate that, in retrospect, sheds considerable light on the historical eclipse of both the American Abstract Artists group (AAA) and the Park Avenue Cubists.3 Morris, as Debra Bricker Balken observes in this volume, had in 1942 ceded to Greenberg his position as chief art critic for the independent Marxist literary journal. In the intervening six years, Greenberg had emerged as one of the most powerful and influential voices in American art criticism, championing the cause of the painters and sculptors who would come to define the aesthetic and social identity of the New York School: Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de kooning, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and David Smith, among others. Although Morris continued to paint and write, his position at the vanguard of New York cultural and intellectual life had waned.
The catalyst for Morris's attack on Greenberg was the author's now classic essay "The Decline of Cubism," which appeared in the March 1948 issue of Partisan Review.4 Deriding Greenberg's text as a "typical example of... irresponsible criticism,"5 Morris took Greenberg to task for insisting that late Cubism had somehow exhausted itself. Although Greenberg asserted that Cubism was still the only style "capable of supporting a tradition which will survive into the future and form new artists,"6 he felt that in recent years it had degenerated into a series of "repetitious or retrograde tendencies"7 in the hands of its greatest practitioners: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger.
Such a position was not likely to win acolytes among American abstract painters, who, like Morris, had always located their practice within the Cubist tradition. Indeed, with Cubism in decline Greenberg went so far as to announce the death of abstract art itself—at least in its 1930s' variants— as an additional sign that the center of advanced Western art had migrated from Europe to the United States, "along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power,"8 following the outbreak of World War II. For Greenberg, 1939 marked an historical watershed for advanced art as America took the lead in the new world order.9
If, however, Greenberg enacted a kind of historical foreclosure on the European Cubist tradition, he saw in the work of Gorky, Pollock, and David Smith the promise of a new and original approach to figuration. It was not that abstraction itself was dead, but, rather, that the form and content of abstract art of the 1930s had been radically transformed by a new generation of painters and sculptors. However much Morris argued that Cubism and abstract art in fact "differ in a quite fundamental respect1 his response to Greenberg glossed over the more salient issue: that abstract painting and sculpture in the 1940s—indeed, the question of an abstract figuration itself—would have to be reconsidered in relation to entirely distinct social and aesthetic criteria. A new historical era had been inaugurated with the decade of the 1940s, and the work of the AAA and the Park Avenue Cubists now seemed little more than a quaint reminder of tentative and failed initiatives in the struggle to transplant the lessons of European modernism to American soil.
Despite Morris's assertions to the contrary, Greenberg did in fact recognize the pioneering role that American abstractionists had played in the 1930s, even if he viewed their work as a foil against which the new generation had to react. In 1957 he reminisced about the decade in which he had come to prominence as an art critic:
Abstract and quasi-abstract Cubism reigned at the annual exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, which were highly important for the exchanging of lessons, and from which some abstract painters learned at least what they did not want to do. Hans Hofmann, in his classes and in a series of public lectures held in 1938-39, reminded us, however, that there was more to high painting than Cubist design.11
Seven years later, Greenberg appeared more generous in his appraisal of the historical impact of 1930s' abstraction:
At the besinning of the 1940s the strongest new impulses of American painting were making themselves felt in the area of abstract art. The quality of work done in the late 1930s and early 1940s by abstract painters like Stuart Davis, llya Bolotowsky, Giorgio Cavallon, Burgoyne Diller, Balcomb Greene, Fritz Glamer, George L. K. Morris, Albert Swinden, I. Rice-Pereira and a few others looks higher now than it did then. The annual exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists group, to which most of these artists belonged, were the most important occasions of those years as far as advanced art in New York was concerned. To these exhibitions the subsequent sophistication of New York painting owed a great deal.12
Still, Greenberg's judgements were tempered by his abiding belief that abstract painting in the 1930s had somehow reached an impasse. When, in 1962, he again pointed out that "good abstract painting was produced in New York during that time," he was quick to add: "Nevertheless, the sense of how confining serious abstract art had become under the canons of closed Cubism betrayed itself in the feeling that Stuart Davis had to be overcome rather than emulated."13
This notion of "overcoming" is at the heart of Greenberg's criticism, not to mention his philosophy of history. His 1962 essay "After Abstract Expressionism," from which the above comments about Davis are taken, speaks volumes about Greenberg's aesthetic theory and the impasse he perceived in an abstract art that remained grounded in the canons of Synthetic Cubism, from which it could not deliver itself in the 1930s. Although much of this pivotal essay is devoted to the achievements of color-field painting in the work of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, it provides considerable insight into a broader issue that colored all aesthetic and critical debates in the 1930s: the "problem" of figuration at a time of social and economic crisis.
This is not the place to rehearse all the intricacies and subtleties of Greenberg's controversial thesis.14 A few preliminary observations, however, are in order. Greenberg argued that artists like Gorky and Pollock effectively loosened up the closed forms of Synthetic Cubism through a painterliness that suggested a return to illusionistic space without recourse to the structure of linear perspective and traditional representational strategies. With the return of figuration in the Women series (1950—52) by de Kooning, Abstract Expressionism realized a "plastic and descriptive painterliness that is applied to abstract ends, but which continues to suggest representational ones."15 This "abstract" or "homeless" representation, as Greenberg called it, reestablished an illusion of space in painting as an optical experience rather than a diagrammatic structure, in line with a direction that Picasso and Braque had initiated in their Analytic Cubist works of 1911. It would be left to Newman, Rothko, and Still, however, to realize the full potential of a purely optical conception of space and structure through shape and color.
However, what is implied, but never explicitly stated, in Greenberg's argument is not only the question of originality in American abstract painting of the postwar years—its break with the Cubist tradition and the last vestiges of Western illusionism—but his emphasis on a dialectical sublation of the very terms of abstraction and representation, a kind of canceling out of the antinomies of form and content, ground and figure, and, with that, the realization of an almost transcendent figuration. Although Greenberg presents his thesis as a development within painting itself, there is no question that his argument betrays the historical conditions of his formation as a critic in the 1930s, during which time the question of abstraction versus representation was filled with social and political urgency. Beginning his essay with a striking generalization—"Twenty-odd years ago all the ambitious young painters I knew in New York saw abstract art as the only way out"—he immediately added the qualification that "representational art confronted their ambition with too many occupied positions." Although Greenberg would argue, according to the logic of his formalist method, that "it was not so much representation per se that cramped them as it was illusion,"16 the "occupied positions" to which he alludes point to a broader crisis of the political and social subject in and of representation in the late 1930s. The epigraphs with which this essay begins immediately suggest what was at stake for abstract and representational painters alike in that momentous decade. Referring to the presence of mythological subjects in their works of the early 1940s, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko asserted in 1943, "If we profess kinship to the art of primitive man, it is because the feelings they expressed have a particular pertinence today. In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of color and form seem irrelevant."17 With the world at war, the lessons of formalist abstraction in the 1930s appeared morally vacuous to Gottlieb and Rothko, who viewed painting as a repository of those humanist values that were being threatened by totalitarian regimes on both the political Left and Right. Reviewing the third annual exhibition of the AAA group at the Riverside Museum in March 1939, Robert Coates lamented the cold and intellectual mood of the show as a declaration of "pure" abstraction—precisely those " niceties of color and form" which Gottlieb and Rothko would later denounce. "It seems to be a move in the wrong direction," Coates opined in the New Yorker. "It is precisely in the development of symbols, and the exploration of their capacity to express emotion, that the true field of abstract painting lies."18 Three years later Robert Motherwell took Piet Mondrian to task for similar reasons, suggesting that the artist had placed aesthetic research above social responsibility. "[I]n seizing the laboratory freedom of the scientist," he wrote, "Mondrian has fallen into the natural trap—loss of contact with historical reality; or more concretely, loss of the sense of the most insistent needs (and thus of the most insistent values) of a given time and place." Betraying a clear penchant for social and economic thinking, Motherwell continued:
[Mondrian] has spent his life in the creation of a clinical art in a time when men were ravenous for the human; he created a rational art when art was the only place where most men could find an irrational, sensual release from the common-sense rationalism and disciplines of their economic lives.19
In Motherwell's view, Mondrian's art, which exerted a powerful influence on abstract painters like Burgoyne Diller, was the maximum expression of the means and ends rationality of industrial capitalism.
In retrospect, these judgements appear harsh and dogmatic, but in the late 1930s and early 1940s they hit their mark with a degree of social specificity. Indeed, when in 1962 Greenberg suggested that abstraction in America had reached a dead end, his reference to Stuart Davis as an artist who had to be "overcome rather than emulated"20 again pointed to the critical context in which debates on the ethical purpose of contemporary abstract art had been waged. While Morris and the Park Avenue Cubists generally remained above the fray of internecine discussions concerning the social position and moral responsibility of artists in the struggle against fascism, Davis, as president of the Artists' Union and national secretary (later, national chairman) of the American Artists' Congress, was a staunch defender of artists' economic rights, and led the Popular Front initiative among artists in the struggle against war and fascism.21 Unlike the John Reed clubs, which until 1934 had maintained a hard-line Communist position, the American Artists' Congress maintained an antisectarian policy of political and aesthetic openness in accordance with Popular Front directives.22 Although the majority of artists who joined the Congress remained committed to the broad theoretical goals of Marxism, Davis defended modernist art as the maximum expression of the democratic ideal of free choice, rejecting prescriptive measures for a "politically correct" art in accordance with the doctrine of Socialist Realism. He wrote:
The arguments used to promote "social content" in art entirely fail to specify that social content expression is to be made specifically in terms of art. They stress the subject matter and state that the art form will follow from such subject matter. Such a view is misleadins in that it leaves out the essential element in the process of art. In this argument, the individual does not exist, it is regimentation. It is Fascism.23
It was perhaps Davis's openness in aesthetic and political matters to which Greenberg objected in 1962, for the relation of form to content, in Greenberg's conception, could never have been resolved in Davis's terms. However much Greenberg insisted that Davis remained a "provincial" artist, and that there was an "unspoken feeling in the air that provincialism was what had most to be overcome,"24 one senses that for Greenberg the broader issue concerned the contamination of painting by "outside" subject matter.25 Had Davis been a staunch practitioner of abstract art in the way that Morris and Balcomb Greene were, his work may have been perceived as "derivative" in relation to extant European models, but his reformulation of American scene painting in a modernist guise, and the balance he sought between representational content and abstract form, was a far greater liability in Greenberg's view.
Morris, too, had his differences with Davis and the American Artists' Congress, and his argument adds yet another dimension to the form/content divide in American art criticism at this time. Reviewing the Third Annual Exhibitions of both the Congress and the AAA in spring 1939, Morris lamented the notable presence of social subject matter in the former show at the expense of formal values. Morris wrote:
Works of every senre were in evidence, but the Congress exhibitions derive their special character from a preponderance of paintings that might be loosely classified as "social satires." Here, at any rate, they tended to eclipse all other types of work; at the same time they serve to demonstrate the unavoidable effect of violent subject-matter upon artists who have never become grounded on an authentic tradition of their own.26
In contrast, he applauded the AAA exhibition as an example of constructive social idealism expressed through the medium of painting itself. "The slogan of the Congress is For Peace, For Democracy, For Cultural Progress, and obvious comments upon these phrases echo resoundingly from every wall," Morris observed. But he quickly added:
The Abstract Artists share these convictions, but they also believe that the esthetic impulse cannot become a tool for concrete political or philosophical dissemination, at this stase of our cultural metamorphosis at least.... The present decade may have publicized at last the cracks in the old social order. The Congress illustrates the crevices. The abstract artists, on the other hand, attempt to reorder their plastic instincts; they attack the established conceptions of art itself.27
To be sure, Morris emphasized on more than one occasion that pure form could in fact be the bearer of advanced social values, although he resolutely refused to define those values in direct political terms. In an interview with the French-born abstractionist Jean Hélion, who served as A. E. Gallatin's artistic advisor, Morris posed the following two questions: "Is there any connection ... between political trends and their expression through art-forms? In other words can the abstract painter today find an adequate creative impulse if he remains continually out of touch with society?" Hélion's response, which echoed Morris's own sentiments, left no room for ambiguity. "With the exception of satirical drawings, posters, and such specialized means adapted to the average comprehension and taste of the public," he wrote, "I doubt that any plastic work can be used efficiently in a political fight. If an image is strongly developed from a plastic point of view, it absorbs the meaning of the subject."28 Balcomb Greene, a founding member of the AAA, expressed a similar position in the pages of Morris's journal Plastique at precisely this moment. He asserted:
The American abstractionist seems usually to understand that capitalist society hampers the development of his art. But he resents the professional revolutionist's demand for an art immediately comprehensible to the masses which will bolster up sales for a society which in turn is allowed a generation of dictators for its realization. It is in this world of shaded pragmatisms that the artist as idealist must seek his values.29
And, as if to second-guess the response that his comments might elicit from hostile critics, Greene concluded his remarks by asking a question that struck at the core of abstract art's embattled position:
The central difficulty for the advanced artist may now be clear. Granted he has the tenacity to turn out his number of canvases, what besides his remote ideal has he to keep his work from becoming a mere brush service to his independence, automatic therefore, often imitative and always decorative? What stimulation?30
Greene, in fact, presents an interesting case. As a committed Leftist he straddled two worlds: the politically informed partisanship of Art Front, mouthpiece of the Artists' Union, and Morris's more socially disengaged Plastique. Indeed, if Morris championed Léger as the quintessential modern artist who responded to the neatness and precision of the industrialized world, Greene viewed Léger's "New Realism" as a revolt against tradition that announced a new, humanist conception of mass society, yet without succumbing to the demands of political propaganda.31 The distinctions are instructive. Morris viewed abstract painting as a universal language within a venerable art-historical tradition that could be traced back to ancient times. His deep-rooted historicism and his belief in the existence of an aristocratic culture of pure form precluded the kind of accommodation to contemporary social movements that Greene, with notable provisos, espoused. In an essay entitled "On America and a Living Art," published in the 1936 catalogue of A. E. Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, Morris provided the fullest exposition of his philosophy of history in relation to the development of abstract art. He argued:
For a complete renaissance, for an artistic evolution that will give adequate expression to the emotional voice of the Twentieth Century, the artists of the world must continue the long road backward—back to a simplicity untrammeled by the thousand complexities of illustration that enchain the issue. And there is no direction more tantalizing and more beset with impediments than this journey backward in search of significant form. For it must go all the way if the artist is to reach firm ground on which to plant his feet.32
If Gottlieb and Rothko viewed the art of primitive man through the historical lens of modern conflict, tracing a temporal arc they hoped would express the terms of survival for contemporary civilization, Morris associated abstract art with universality across time. The "long road backward" was a trajectory without a concrete starting point or a terminus.
One might respond here that in the context of both American scene painting and official Nazi art of the 1930s, the appeal by Morris and members of the AAA to notions of quality and universal formal values33 represented a discrete challenge to racial, national, and ethnic typologies, as Meyer Schapiro conceived the issue in a little-known essay for Art Front, although he did not address the question of American abstraction directly.34 However, at a time when artists were being called upon to declare their political position unequivocally, few critics were willing to give the Park Avenue Cubists and the AAA the benefit of the doubt. Insisting on the "question of art as a humanized activity," O. Frank, writing for the radical Marxist journal New Masses, derided the AAA for being a fundamentally bourgeois organization. He declared:
The most extreme form of the bourgeois revival in art was the appearance of a new abstract movement drawing together some fifty people, most of them very young, into the American Abstract Artists. The dominant tendency in this group has been toward total abstraction, or "non-objectivity." Its headstrong purists decry all traffic with the immediate world. They are ail for the rarefied sphere of "pure creation," "esthetic emotion," "plastic experience." Small wonder if this group has failed to produce a single artist of outstanding importance or even of promise.35
Although Frank had clearly overstated his case by using political engagement as an exclusive measure of the "importance" of contemporary art, his was not a minority position among socially committed artists.
Far more subtle, and for this very reason more instructive, is a paper Meyer Schapiro delivered at the First American Artists' Congress in 1936. Entitled "The Social Bases of Art," Schapiro's text examined the broader economic forces that gave rise to the development of abstract painting and sculpture as a unique social phenomenon in twentieth-century art. In a memorable passage that might easily serve as a description of the Park Avenue Cubists' class position, Schapiro eloquently argued:
The conception of art as purely aesthetic and individual can exist only where culture has been detached from practical and collective interests and is supported by individuals alone. But the mode of life of these individuals, their place in society, determine in many ways this individual art. In its most advanced form, this conception of art is typical of the rentier leisure class in modern capitalist society, and is most intensely developed in centers, like Paris, which have a large rentier group and considerable luxury industries. Here the individual is no longer engaged in a struggle to attain wealth; he has no direct relation to work, machinery, competition; he is simply a consumer, not a producer. He belongs to a class which recognizes no higher group or authority. The older stable forms of family life and sexual morality have been destroyed; there is no royal court or church to impose a regulating pattern on his activity. For this individual the world is a spectacle, a source of novel pleasant sensations, or a field in which he may realize his "individuality," through art, through sexual intrigue and the most varied, but nonproductive, mobility.36
In Schapiro's view, abstract art represented the maximum expression of the social mobility of the rentier class, to the extent that "colors and shapes are disengaged from objects and can no longer serve as a means in knowing them";37 that is to say, the abstract artist abdicates his direct connection to social life and devotes himself to "a painting committed to the aesthetic moments of life, to spectacles designed for passive, detached individuals, or to an art of the studio."38 In short, Schapiro argued that the much-discussed condition of "flatness" in modern abstract painting is not a universal phenomenon, as Morris would have it, but, rather, approximates the flatness of the commodity itself in industrial society. To drive his point home, he resorted to a gendered metaphor in order to define the relation of modern art to merchandise:
A woman of this [rentier] class is essentially an artist, like the painters whom she might patronize. Her daily life is filled with aesthetic choices; she buys clothes, ornaments, furniture, house decorations; she is constantly re-arransins herself as an aesthetic object. Her judgements are aesthetically pure and "abstract," for she matches colors with colors, lines with lines. But she is also attentive to the effect of these choices upon her unique personality.39
Individualism, spectacle, decoration: these, for Schapiro, were the social and economic terms that defined abstract painting under late capitalism. Indeed, the accusation that abstract painting was little more than a form of advanced decoration was a leitmotif of late 1930's art criticism. Reviewing Alfred Barr's historical survey of Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, which Morris deplored for its exclusion of recent work by American painters and sculptors, Emily Genauer dismissed Mondrian's and László Moholy-Nagy's compositions as "so many simple commonplace patterns for bathroom tiles."40 Reviewing the same exhibition, Edward Alden Jewell, art critic for the New York Times, criticized abstract artists for their insensitivity to the demands of the art-going public. "With few exceptions," he lamented, "everything in this exhibition ... may be classified as decorative."41 Jewell, in fact, was unrelenting in his attacks on abstract art. On the occasion of the first annual exhibition of the AAA, he denounced the "rarefied" atmosphere of the show and sarcastically described the work as "very effective architectural embellishment."42 To these biting accusations both Genauer and Jewell in turn added that the work of the Park Avenue Cubists and the AAA was fundamentally derivative of European models, and had thereby degenerated into a new form of academism.43
If in retrospect, it is difficult to separate the discrete social and aesthetic discourses that have relegated American abstract art of the 1930s to the back pages of art history. Yet it is clear that competing claims to representing the voice of a nation and a world shattered by economic depression, social unrest, and ideological crisis weighed heavily on the minds of artists and writers across the political spectrum. For a nation awakening, like a sleeping giant, to a new position on the world stage, the question of formal and social values in painting was secondary. Nothing less than the survival and preservation of culture in the wake of fascism, totalitarianism, and advanced capitalism was at stake as the world prepared for war. Representational art, in Greenberg's words, may have contained too many "occupied positions," but so, too, did abstract painting and sculpture in America. As Leon Trotsky asserted in the pages of Partisan Review:
To find a solution to this impasse through art itself Is impossible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itseif. It will rot away inevitably ... unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character.44
1. Balcomb Greene, "American Perspective," Plastique no. 3 (Spring 1938), 12.
2. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (in collaboration with Barnett Newman), "letter to the Editor," New York Times, June 13, 1943, sec. 2, p. 9.
3. George L. K. Morris, "On Critics and Greenberg: A Communication," Partisan Review 15, no. 6 (June 1948), 681—84. Greenberg's response immediately followed in the same issue, and is reprinted in John O'Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2:242—45.
4. Clement Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism," Partisan Review (March 1948); in O'Brian, 2: 211—15.
5. Morris, "On Critics and Greenberg: A Communication," 682.
6. Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism," in O'Brian, 2:213.
7. Ibid., 2:212.
8. Ibid., 2:215.
9. Using this metaphor of aesthetic competition, Greenberg later elaborated on the concept of American ascendancy in the visual arts in "America Takes the Lead, 1945-1965," Art in America (August-September 1965); in O'Brian, 4:212-17.
10. Morris, "On Critics and Greenberg: A Communication," 283.
11. Clement Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York," in Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 230—35. The text, dated 1960, is the revised version of the essay "New York Painting Only Yesterday," which Greenberg published in the Summer 1957 issue of Art News.
12. Greenberg, "America Takes the Lead," in O'Brian, 4:212.
13; Clement Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism," Art International (October 25, 1962); in O'Brian, 4:121—34.
14. Greenberg was immediately taken to task by Max Kozloff, "A Letter to the Editor," Art International 7 (June 1963), 89—92; and by Harold Rosenberg, "After Next, What?," Art in America 52 (April 1964), 64—73.
15. Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism," in O'Brian, 4:124.
16. Ibid., 121.
17. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, "The Portrait of the Modern Artist," mimeographed script of the broadcast Art in New York, H. Stix, director, WNYC, New York, October 13, 1943, 4; cited by Irving Sandler in The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Praeger, 1970), 64.
18. Robert Coates, "The Art Galleries: Abstractionists and What About Them?," New Yorker (March 1939), 57; cited in Susan C. Larsen, "The Quest for an American Abstract Tradition, 1927—1944," in John R. Lane and Susan C. Larsen, eds., Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927—1944, exh. cat. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 44, n. 48.
19. Robert Motherwell, "Notes on Mondrian and Chirico." VVV no. 1 (June 1942), 59-61. The text is cited in part in Debra Bricker Balken, "Interactions in the Lives and Work of Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L. K. Morris," in Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L. K. Morris, American Abstract Artists: Aspects of Their Work and Collection, exh. cat. (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1992), 21.
20. Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism," in O'Brian, 4:122.
21. For a discussion of Davis's activities in the Artists' Union and the American Artists' Congress, see Cécile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 65—97.
22. As Whiting observes, "The membership brochure entitled 'Who Can Join?' read: 'Membership in the Congress is open to any artist of the first rank living in the U.S., without regard to the way he paints or the subject matter he chooses to deal with in his work. He can be academician or modernist, abstractionist, realist, or surrealist. The only standard for membership is whether he has achieved a position of distinction in his profession; the only requirement, that he support the program of the Congress against war and fascism.' " In ibid., 40.
23. Stuart Davis Papers, June 26, 1936; cited in ibid., 70—71.
24. Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism," in O'Brian, 4:122.
25. In a notorious footnote to his groundbreaking essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" of 1939, in which Greenberg first outlined his theory of modernist painting as the progressive realization of the intrinsic nature of the medium, the critic derided Surrealism as "a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore 'outside' subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium." Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Art and Culture, 7, n. 3.
26. George L. K. Morris, "Art Chronicle: American Artists' Congress," Partisan Review 6, no. 3 (Spring 1939), 62-63.
27. George L. K. Morris, "Art Chronicle: American Abstract Artists," Partisan Review 6, no. 3 (Spring 1939), 63-64.
28. George L. K. Morris, "Art Chronicle: Interview with Jean Hélion," Partisan Review 4, no. 5 (April 1938), 33-40.
29. Balcomb Greene, "American Perspective," 12, 14.
30. Ibid.
31. See, for example, George L. K. Morris, "Fernand Léger Versus Cubism," Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 3 (October 1935), 2—7; and Balcomb Greene, "The Function of Léger," Art Front (January 1936), 8—9.
32. George L. K. Morris, "On America and a Living Art," Museum of Living Art, A E. Gallatin Collection (New York: George Grady, 1936), n.p.
33. In "The Quest for an Abstract Tradition," an essay Morris contributed to the Abstract American Artists' Annual in 1938, he argued for an art of quality in which "the bare expressiveness of shape ... the weight of color ... the direction of line and angle can be restudied until the roots of primary tactile reaction shall be perceived again." In "The American Abstract Artists," published in the 1939 American Abstract Artists' Annual, Morris declared that in the absence of external patronage, abstract artists in America would prevail by "setting a standard in which they believed," and that it is on the basis of quality that "an abstract work must stand."
34. Meyer Schapiro, "Race, Nationality, and Art," Art Front (March 1936), 10—12.
35. O. Frank, "New Forces in American Art," New Masses 28 (July 12, 1938), 23-24.
36. Meyer Schapiro, "The Social Bases of Art" (1936), in David Shapiro, ed., Social Realism: Art as a Weapon (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973), 118—27.
37. Ibid., 125.
38. Ibid., 126.
39. Ibid., 123-24.
40. Emily Genauer, "Cubism Exhibit at Modern Museum," New York World-Telegram, March 7, 1936, 12B; as cited in Larsen, "The Quest for an American Abstract Tradition, 1927—1944," 25.
41. Edward Alden Jewell, "The Realm of Art: Abstract Pennants Flying," New York Times, March 8,1936, sec. 9, p. 9; as cited in Larsen, "The Quest for an American Abstract Tradition, 1927—1944," 25.
42. Edward Alden Jewell, "American Abstractions," New York Times, April 11, 1937, sec. 10, p. 10; as cited in Larsen, "The Quest for an American Abstract Tradition, 1927—1944," 37.
43. See, for example, Emily Genauer, "Forty Art Shows Open," New York World-Telegram, April 10,1937, and Edward Alden Jewel, "American Abstractions."
44. Leon Trotsky, "Art and Politics: A Letter to the Editors of Partisan Review," Partisan Review 5, no. 3 (August -September 1938), 3-10.