abstract expressionism

The art movement known as abstract expressionism was characterized by gestural and/or non-objective paintings and direct-welded metal sculptures. Also known as "action painting" or the "New York School," the movement was centred in New York City and had its most active phase between approximately 1940 and 1955.

Jackson Pollock gave a pithy summary of abstract expressionist aesthetics years before he would produce his characteristic non-objective canvases of dripped oil enamel. Pressed by German-born modernist Hans Hofmann in 1942 to paint from nature, Pollock famously retorted, "I am Nature." His phrase reflects the complex admixture of discourses in which abstract expressionism participated: Jungian psychoanalysis, primitivism, existentialism, nationalism, and the romantic sublime.

Alfred Barr Jr. coined the term "abstract expressionism" in 1929 to describe the early improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky; it was applied to the artists with whom it is now associated by the art critic Robert Coates, writing about a Hofmann show in the New Yorker magazine in 1946. Like most art movements, it was not named by its artists (who actively resisted "membership") and had no hard historical or stylistic boundaries. Its existence was discernible only after World War II, when U.S. leadership of the global economy propelled a small group of impoverished middle-aged artists into prominence on the international stage. Most were immigrants (Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Hedda Sterne, Mark Rothko), many were born in New York (Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Helen Frankenthaler), but others (Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still) came from the American West and strongly affected the public view that it was a "native" movement rather than continuous with the European avant-garde.

At the time, the visibility of these New York artists was taken as proof of the formal and psychological superiority of their art; recent revisionist histories have instead touted the economic and geopolitical achievements of a victorious United States as the motive force behind the movement's ascendency. In either account, there is consensus that prior to abstract expressionism the United States had no international standing for its modern art (but see New York Dada and the group around Alfred Stieglitz in the early twentieth century).

The politics of abstract expressionism were determined by artistic polarities crystallized by World War II, in which social realists were on the left, identified with Mexican muralists and Communism, and regionalists were on the right, associated with the nationalists of "America First" isolationism. (Expatriate surrealists had little political influence, despite their strong formal and intellectual impact during the war, for which see below.) "Modern" artists were more likely to be leftist, and many had been active communists, but the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940 and the rise of Stalin in general caused a splintering in these ranks, along with a turn from figurative depictions of social themes.

Thus the dominance of abstract expressionism after the war was achieved in part by artists charting a noncommittal course free from the increasingly rigid demands of communism on the left and nascent McCarthyists on the right; the pictorial analogue of this position was a renewed commitment to post-cubist abstraction. (Adolph Gottlieb would describe New York artists' position as "black sheep," neither "white enough nor red enough" to escape attack from both sides.)

These artists eliminated recognizable ("objective") subject matter from their work in favour of individual symbolic systems and abstract ("non-objective") form. Broadly speaking, a first group moved from surrealist figures to gestural abstraction (Pollock, de Kooning, Still), and a slightly later cluster emphasized atmospheric "fields" of colour or modulated near-monochromes (Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Newman). In every case, artists held that their individual formal systems were universally accessible. Communication could be achieved through the mediation of a "collective unconsciousness" (the concept of a universal and innate system of symbolic forms promulgated by Swiss analyst Carl Gustav Jung), through the achievement of a form vocabulary that was sufficiently "primitive" to be intuitively comprehensible to all, or through the indexing of emotion on the canvas through sheer colour or painterly gesture. (Sculpture was another matter, for which see below.)

Each of these modes had precedents in earlier modern art, but their confluence in abstract expressionism resulted in a style of painting that seemed so unprecedented that few were able to tease out its connections to previous artistic movements. A certain anxiety of influence may also have been in play as the movement's New York supporters downplayed linkages with German expressionism (with its search for the "primitive" roots of expression), on the one hand, and, on the other, the utopian geometric abstraction of Russian supremacists and de Stijl painters (both groups had pertinent theories about the intrinsic expressivity of colour and form). The New York group also had much in common with the "informel" (unformed) painting emerging from Paris; influences were active in many directions as even Asia and Latin America actively participated in the burgeoning of post-war abstraction (notably the Gutai and concretist movements, respectively).

Certainly, the dislocations and disasters of the first half of the century played a major role in both the appearance of abstract expressionism and its cluster of aesthetic philosophies. Crucial to the formation of the tenuous collective identity of the New York artists was the interwar U.S. government Federal Art Project. Established as part of the Depression-alleviating Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, its first administrators openly espoused the ideas of John Dewey, whose Art as Experience had been published the year before. The project acknowledged that "artist" was a profession worth supporting (a development unprecedented in American culture), and it gave employment to both immigrants and natives; artists such as Gorky, de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Pollock, and Guston received crucial support and would contribute directly to abstract expressionism's genesis (it could be argued that this governmental investment paid off a decade later in America's post-war success in the international art scene).

Although most of the WPA funding went to mural art featuring heroic workers, churning assembly lines, and rolling farmland, the program also funded easel painters and artists interested in adopting the "foreign" abstract modes then current in Paris (the undisputed capital of modern art until the Vichy regime). By the time of their WPA funding, de Kooning, Krasner, and Gorky all exhibited a sophisticated grasp of European modernism, particularly the cubists' achievement of a shallow, minimally illusionist space and the surrealists' innovative biomorphic abstract forms. The living presence of many surrealists in New York (driven from European capitals by the rise of fascism) provided another impetus for the New York painters' developing interests in non-objective painting and the broader cultural uptake of psychoanalysis as a compelling source of artistic invention and interpretation.

Among the many concepts supported by the surrealists were the importance of the unconscious to creativity and the use of a new technique called "automatism," which proved to be the most essential components of early abstract expressionist practice. The French painter André Masson (who was working in New York in the early 1940s) had been making automatist drawings as early as 1924. In this technique (also employed in surrealist poetry and often involving psychotropic drugs), the drawing (or writing) hand is dissociated from the mind's conscious control, supposedly thereby tapping forms and motives directly from the unconscious. The surrealists had used automatism as a form of suggestion to initiate the more conscious process of making poetry or drawings. The abstract expressionists, however, valued automatism as an end in itself, a primary means of revealing the artist's unmediated emotional state. As Gottlieb commented, "I prefer the no-content of purism to the shoddy content of social realism.... I love all paintings that look the way I feel" (Tuchman, 1977, p. 71).

This is one sense of Pollock's assertion that he was Nature-mindful of the unstructured id and its instincts, human beings and human nature were but part of a vast continuum of organic life and its expressions. Claims to work from the unconscious were predicated on such a continuum, and Pollock's first poured paintings (which began in 1947) proclaimed both their natural and automatist origins with titles such as Galaxy, Phosphorescence, and Vortex. Not even the horizon line of the surrealists' eerie dreamscapes survived Pollock's radically automatist process, which upended gravity and conventional orientation cues. In the photographs by Hans Namuth that made Pollock's working method famous, the canvas is off the easel and flat on the ground; Pollock is shown moving his whole body around this horizontal surface, flinging paint in loops, "lariats," and trails, pursuing improvisationally generated order in a rhythmic, repetitive, trancelike dance.

Despite the ambiguity of "automatism" as a signifier in a post-war epoch characterized by automation and other cognates (Jones, 2005), the abstract expressionist subject was constructed by films and art critics as a visionary, solitary, and possessed individual opposing a world of mass formations. The much-vaunted alienation and anguish of the artist were held to resist everything from fascist totalitarianism to an emerging consumer culture. The isolated gestural painter was figured as male, white, and, above all, free-a subject position that proved problematic for non-males such as Krasner or Sterne, and non-whites such as Norman Lewis.Predicated on spontaneity, the "action" painter's volcanic productions were taken as both proof and guarantor of democratic liberalism and free speech. As scholars of abstract expressionism have determined, this heightened individualism meshed with free market ideologies of global capital, serving the very mass formations it imagined it was inoculating itself against (Leja, 1993; Guilbaut, 1983). Increasingly throughout the immediate post-war period, exhibitions of the "New American Painting" were sent overseas as vivid emissaries of democracy in the cultural cold war.

The artists working in cultivated bohemian alienation during the war anticipated none of this, however. The interior world revealed by automatism was deeply private, and the artists resisted collective identity through their statements and through the very disjunctions of their jealously protected "signature styles."Cutting against this were the remnant social collectivisms of the left and the lingering optimism from the WPA's vision of an art linked to its public (the Dewey legacy), which called for shared signification. In addition to Jungian concepts of collective archetypes and the parallel discourse in transcendental communicability of abstraction (Focillon's Vie des Formes, Hilla Rebay and anthroposophy at the Guggenheim Museum) was the prevailing faith in "primitivist" themes and images (emerging from the popular anthropologies of scholars such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Sir James Frazer). While the romantic sublime would be key to these connections, primitivism came first.

Throughout the 1940s, abstract expressionists emphasized their works' continuities with both archaic Greek myth and Native American belief systems (continuities clearly charted by Freud's metaphors of the Oedipal narrative or Totem and Taboo). There is a long tradition of modern artists appropriating African or "Oriental" art (e.g., Pablo Picasso's 1907 Demoiselles d'Avignon and Paul Gauguin's interest in Tahiti) as antidotes to supposedly hyper-civilised bourgeois European life. But New York painters felt themselves to be dwelling in a barbarous age and experienced their thinking as continuous with the supposedly "primitive" mind. Theirs was a positive identification, but it found reinforcement in anthropological theories (most of them deeply racist) that articulated a supposedly subconscious process of assimilation of others' ethnic traits (as in Jung's 1930 essay "Your Negroid and Indian Behavior:

The Primitive Elements in the American Mind" [see Leja, 1993, p. 104]). The abstract expressionists thus simultaneously claimed a link with the source of Western European culture (Greek myth) and asserted their unique access to Native American art as a national legacy. In doing so, they made a virtue of the kind of aspersions cast routinely on American culture by Europeans (e.g., Jung). Although inheritors of the same magisterial colonial gazethat animated Gauguin, Picasso, and countless other Western artists before them, the abstract expressionists' tropism toward the "primitive" was experienced as a deep identification with locally available myths rather than appropriations of an Other (Barnett Newman would celebrate the Native American burial mounds in Ohio as the founding of his own new aesthetic: "Here is the self-evident nature of the artistic act, its utter simplicity").

Sharing the avant-garde's long-standing ambivalence toward Enlightenment ideals of the progress of civilization, the abstract expressionists were also part of a different geo-historical moment that gave such critiques a more desperate relevance. Given World War II, the binary between what French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had called the "pre-logical" mind of les sociétés inférieures and the supposedly more evolutionarily advanced western mental apparatus seemed untenable to the abstract expressionists. As Rothko and Gottlieb stated in a 1943 radio broadcast: "Those who think the world of today is more gentle and graceful than the primeval and predatory passions from which these myths spring, are either not aware of reality or do not wish to see it in art. The myth holds us...because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves" (Leja, 1993, p. 68). Barnett Newman, defending forms of Northwest Coast tribes such as the Kwakiutl with similar passion in 1947, wrote: "To [the Kwakiutl artist] a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. [Now] a new force in American painting...is the modern counterpart of the primitive art impulse." Insisting that their non=objective paintings offered the accessible equivalent of these highly complex ideographic signifiers, Newman continued, "For here is a group of artists who are not abstract painters, although working in what is known as the abstract style" (1992, pp. 107-108).

The two broad modes of abstract expressionism were clear by 1950. Pollock and de Kooning most centrally, but also James Brooks, Guston, Franz Kline, Krasner, Motherwell, and Bradley Walker Tomlin were all identified with a gestural, calligraphic brush stroke or line; these were the "action" or "gesture" painters. Newman, Rothko, and Reinhardt produced "field" pictures, in which large areas of pigment were soaked, scrubbed, or brushed into canvas in such a way that the individual mark merged into broad areas of saturated hue.

These domains were permeable - Pollock's skeins were described as "fields" by Clement Greenberg; Clyfford Still painted enormous expanses of colour that were nonetheless gestural in the way paint was applied. Artists in both camps were at great pains to distinguish their work from what they described as the "meaningless" geometric abstraction of northern European modernists such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, and dismissive of their contemporaries in Europe pursuing non-objective geometric art. They insisted that their works had subject matter beyond pure form and colour (indeed, one school that Still and Motherwell founded called itself "Subjects of the Artist").

Both modes of what Newman had called "non-abstract painting in the abstract style" were thus believed to have a broad yet specific cultural meaning. Depending on the moment and the interpreter, such meanings shifted over the course of the movement. In the "mythmaking" discourse of abstract expressionism's primitivizing first phase, a painting's meaning was taken to lie in its totemic value as a graphic, nonverbal signifier for terror and the destructive, primeval forces of human nature. Congruent with this early emphasis on what has been called the "Modern Man" discourse of the primitive during the immediate post-war period, the artists developed an interest in the more sophisticated tenets of continental philosophy. The ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger were discussed in artist-run periodicals along with essays by and about existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and less well known phenomenologists such as Emmanuel Lévinas.

Critic and editor Harold Rosenberg was an important vector for this activity. The existentialist struggle to act after being "thrown into being" was further popularized by film noir and the hardboiled detective novel, where meaningful subjectivity is carved out of modern barbarism by sheer force of will. Where mythmaking still assumed a terrified collectivity (vaguely congruent with pre-war political activism), the emerging emphasis on existentialism (in its American interpretations after the war) signalled a shift toward alienated individualism. In this second phase of abstract expressionism, the individual existential act of painting found a route to shared meaning through Sartre's emphasis on the "situation" in which man finds himself. In this potentially common "situation," the individual act or choice became (if only symbolically) a choice for all men (gender bias not coincidental). The echo of the Nietzschean superman was emphasized in abstract expressionist periodicals such as Possibilities and Tiger's Eye. One interpreter wrote in the latter: "It is because individualism is grounded in self-confidence that the individual who has extreme self-confidence and great will power can rise above others and become a hero" (Ashton, 1973, p. 188). Newman, in particular, emphasized Nietzsche, choosing the Dionysian mode from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy to describe the small abstract expressionist community: "The artist in America is...like a barbarian.... This is, then, our opportunity, free of the ancient paraphernalia, to come closer to the sources of the tragic emotion. Shall we not, as artists, search out the new objects for its image?" (1992, p. 170).

Newman, who had been responsible for the scornful witticism that aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is "for the birds," nonetheless emerged (with Motherwell) as one of the most powerful philosophical thinkers in the abstract expressionist circle. In the artist-run periodical Tiger's Eye, he provided the most sustained analysis of a theme that would come to dominate the painting and interpretation of abstract expressionism: the sublime. The little magazine was reflecting a discourse already in progress when it solicited "Six Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art" in 1948; in addition to Newman, the artist contributors included Motherwell and Clyfford Still. Newman worked explicitly with Edmund Burke's concepts of sublimity, seeing those quintessentially eighteenth-century meditations as "a surrealist manual" that had helped him develop a crucial contrast between the specious (European) search for beauty and the noble (American) quest for the sublime. Having lost ready access to God, as Newman saw it, modern abstract expressionists were still seeking to create a sublime art. The answer lay specifically within the artist as an individual (as existentialism had already confirmed). Acting only from internal emotions, the artist would create objects that produced in the viewer (as in the artist) the sublime trajectory of terror and ego dissolution, followed by those forms of aesthetic representation that would produce the coherent ego once again.

Obviously, this sublime trajectory was predicated on the same processes of mythologisation, individuation, and personal expression that had animated earlier phases of the movement. As Newman summarized it: "Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making it [sic] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings" (1992, p. 173). The constant reference to "man" in abstract expressionist statements was not merely a false generic (although it clearly participated in the blithe masculinism of the time). Manhood was a gendered requirement for the achievement of sublimity, following Kant's declaration, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), that "the fair sex has...a beautiful understanding, whereas ours should be a deep understanding, an expression that signifies identity with the sublime." Just as he had been careful to separate his Kwakiutl artist from "the women basket weavers" who merely decorated objects with "the pleasant play of non-objective pattern," Newman (who quoted Kant on the subject) saw the sublime as an exclusively masculine (or masculinizing) pursuit defined in opposition to the "feminine" search for beauty or "mere" decoration. Newman's thinking culminated in the first of his large-scale works, the eight-by-eighteen-foot "field" painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis from 1950.

A taut horizontal canvas with a smoothly brushed surface of saturated red, Vir is punctuated by thin verticals of brushier pinks and browns and one narrow strip of unpainted canvas. Newman called these verticals "zips," and scholars have connected them with Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti's spindly and cadaverous figures of the post-war period, lone men standing isolated in the existential void. Like so many other abstract expressionists (whether biologically male or female), Newman painted as "sublime heroic man," seeking to enact-rather than depict-(his) contemporary existence. "The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting and sculpture" (1992, p. 187). The sublime terribilità came from the ongoing encounter between the self and the void.

Abstract expressionist canvases did not invoke the discourse of sublimity merely through their titles or their symbolic evocation of figures devoured by space (for example). This discourse was produced for the most part by the artists' intense involvement with the material and processes by which their paintings were produced and received. In this as in so many other areas, Pollock "broke the ice" (as de Kooning had remarked), establishing through his infrequent statements and even less frequent interviews that "on the floor... I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can...literally be in the painting" or "when I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing" (Jones, 1996, p. 47). Being lost in the act of painting was analogous to being lost in the act of viewing the painting. Pollock's dense skeins of enamel, intermittently soaking into the canvas or standing slightly off the surface in taut whipcords of paint, produced shimmering absorptive fields for vision.

De Kooning's more aggressive slashes and licks of pigment achieved their effects of sublimation through more visceral means, taking the viewer through the tangled and exhilarating jungle of his active strokes (turning from complete abstraction, around 1951, and resuming his lifelong engagement with the figurative and erotic theme of Woman). The field painters chose a still different route to sublimity. Rothko explained that he painted large canvases so that "you are in it. It isn't something you command" (Jones, 1996, p. 50). He requested that his canvases be grouped together in separate galleries, where they would surround the viewer with their characteristic sombre, soft-edged rectangles of hovering colour. Newman also enforced postures of viewing that would maximize the desired state of absorption; visitors to his 1951 exhibition were asked to stand so close to his enormous canvases that their entire field of vision would be saturated by intense chroma. Viewers would thus be visually dissolved in an oceanic experience of sublimity, their identity reconstituted only later in a process of reflection on that overwhelming aesthetic encounter.

Sculpture fared badly within the evolving discourse of abstract expressionism, as artists such as Theodore Roszak and Seymour Lipton attempted to find "direct metal" equivalents to action painting. Their sculp-metal and cast works seemed frozen in the mythologizing phase of the movement and never achieved the magisterial sublimity of the canvases of their painter colleagues in the post-war period. Only the direct-welded assemblages of David Smith rose to the level of painting in the movement, and even he described himself as a "pictorial thinker" and was praised by critics in similar terms.

From the welter of critical approaches to abstract expressionism during its peak, two divergent interpretations came to dominate; both emerged from the Marxist culture of New York in the 1930s, but with markedly different slants. The first was codified by Harold Rosenberg, who coined the rubric "action painting" to describe the risky, spontaneous, volcanic process seemingly recorded in Namuth's photographs of Pollock painting. Describing the canvas as "an arena in which to act" in 1952, Rosenberg concluded: "What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event" (Rosenberg, 1959, p. 25).

Lost in the scorn subsequently heaped on this existential position was its deep effect on younger artists. Allan Kaprow, for example, under the influence of both Pollock and the aleatory composer John Cage, was introducing an action-oriented art form that would begin as "Happenings" in 1958 and continue into "performance art," still vital after the millennium. An unanticipated offspring of existentialist action painting, Kaprow's new genre emphasized what he articulated as "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," in a distinctly Cagean reading: "Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odours, touch" (1958, p. 56).

It was precisely against this promiscuous mingling of varieties of sensuous experience (and specifically against the intermingling of different art forms) that Clement Greenberg had earlier articulated the grounds for what would be the second formulation of abstract expressionism's meaning. As early as 1940, Greenberg revisited Gotthold Lessing's 1766 essay, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, and its reinterpretation by Irving Babbitt (in his 1910 New Laokoon). These were considered polemics against the confusion of the arts supposedly epitomized by the Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön; Greenberg's "Towards a Newer Laocoön" was the first of many influential essays in which he argued that modernism, constituted as it was by a progressive, even teleological, purification of the arts, participated in this long narrative of genre refinement. Before ever seeing a Pollock drip painting, Greenberg pursued a Marxist theory of the artist's alienation from his bourgeois patrons to argue that each of the avant-garde arts sought to define itself "solely in the terms of the sense or faculty which perceived its effect" (1986, p. 31). In Greenberg's formalist view, painting was both historically and philosophically constituted by its uniquely visual nature.

When he did come to claim Pollock, Greenberg described the drip paintings not as "events," but as shallow optical fields available to cognition through eyesight alone.

For Greenberg, Pollock's importance lay solely within the history of modernist painting, where his skeins were seen as working to push cubism's achievements further toward "flatness," which emerged as the teleological goal for modernism in Greenberg's account.

American postmodernism revisited these debates over abstract expressionism and its interpreters in the 1980s; Greenberg, in particular, emerged as the postmodernists' bête noire. Abstract expressionism, no longer available as a method inhabited from within, became a manner or style for postmodern pastiche, while its heroic stance was subjected to withering critique. The effort to guarantee readings of deep humanistic meaning in canvases employing largely non-objective visual forms appeared naive in a poststructuralist, postmodern frame. At the same time, even for postmodernists, abstract expressionism remained a strong example of an aesthetic that believed in itself as offering a self-evident philosophical system, whether prompting reflections on modernism or the nature of man.

Although clearly naive from the perspective of revisionist historians, poststructuralists, and postmodern artists, such a condition of philosophical conviction is one to which contemporary artists and theorists still aspire.