London
Visiting Venice in 1950, Kenneth Clark saw a notice for an exhibition of an American artist whose name he did not recognize. “I went in,” Clark wrote in his unpublished memoir Aesthete’s Progress, “and for two minutes was bewildered, then suddenly I became aware of an energy and a vitality that had almost faded out of European art. France, to which all earnest lovers of modern art had for so long turned their eyes, was exhausted; a new school had arisen where we had not expected to find it, the USA.”
The unknown American was Jackson Pollock, the new school Abstract Expressionism. In America, Pollock was already more known than understood, following a 1949 Life profile that had asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The Venice exhibition, organized by Peggy Guggenheim and held at the Museo Correr, was Pollock’s first European solo show. Over the following decade, a series of traveling exhibitions introduced Europeans to “Ab Ex” figures such as Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still. The last of these shows, “The New American Painting,” toured Europe in 1958-59. Meanwhile, in New York, Leo Castelli was showing Jasper Johns’s Targets sequence, a harbinger of Pop’s eclipse of Abstract Expressionism.
“Abstract Expressionism” at the Royal Academy is the school’s first British show since 1959. It is a European equivalent of the 2011 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—and hence, the first comprehensive European show, because painters like Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell were producing excellent work well into the 1970s. It also offers a European perspective on the sources and course of postwar American art.
Abstract Expressionism is the Baked Alaska of modern painting. Abstraction and Expressionism are opposing principles. Abstraction aspires towards the cold rationality of form, but Expressionism trusts in the heat of individuality and subjective content. Both styles had originated in a Europe that had reached, in the title of Arshile Gorky’s 1947 painting, The Limit. In this sense, Clement Greenberg’s publicity was true: Abstract Expressionism was part of postwar America’s bravura extension of European inheritances. As the Congress for Cultural Freedom realized, it was an aesthetic Marshall Plan, promising revival to an exhausted Old World. Still, as curators David Anfam and Edith Devaney emphasize, the roots of Abstract Expressionism lie before 1939, and not just in the shadow of Picasso, the challenges of Cubism and Surrealism, or local Abstractionists like Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. Europe’s modern masters knew the Old Masters, and the Abstract Expressionists studied both.
The first room at the Royal Academy shows the 1930s apprenticeships of Rothko and Pollock, and their early attempts to follow Picasso beyond figuration. In Self-Portrait (1936), Rothko reprises Rembrandt’s pose of 1659. In Interior (1936), Rothko frames modern despair in the architecture of one of Michelangelo’s Medici tombs at San Lorenzo, Florence. Gorky’s ink Portrait of Willem de Kooning (1937) evokes Picasso’s drawings of the 1920s and, further back, the neoclassicist Ingres. “The idea of an isolated American painting,” Pollock said in 1944, “seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics of physics would seem absurd.”
The second room shows that the singular, tragic Gorky was ahead of them. In The Artist and His Mother (1926-36), Gorky, a refugee from the Armenian genocide, reconstructs a photograph of himself and his mother, who had starved to death in 1919. The depthless Cubist planes of the background, the blankness of his mother’s eyes, and the dissolution of her hands into rough brushwork in the foreground have the flatness of nightmare. Memory decays into blurred patches, and personality dissolves into indeterminate outlines.
Deprived of the continuous line of autobiography, Gorky’s line digressed into biomorphic forms, organic curves, and obscure orifices—a cryptic autobiography, mixing sensual impulses and perceived forms. Abstraction was caught between the extremities of Kandinsky’s flamboyantly digressive colors and Mondrian’s grid of lines. In the rich, overflowing brushwork of Water of the Flowery Mill (1944) and the bleached shadows of Diary of a Seducer (1945), Gorky broke the impasse, expressing the inner extremities of ecstasy and despair.
Gorky was also ahead in his historical experience, in that his world had already ended. In 1945, America caught up, imaginatively speaking: At Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the imagery of apocalypse leapt from medieval to modern. “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer said after the first atomic bomb test. Abstract Expressionism cohered amid despair—for humanity in general and humanism in particular—and the disorientated reconstruction that became the new polarities of the Cold War. “I am nature,” Pollock told Hans Hofmann.
Rothko, a Russian Jew who had immigrated as a child, began to “pulverize” the “familiar identity of things” in search of fragments of redemption. Having toyed with Max Ernst-style Surrealist birds in Gethsemane (1944), he became a kind of religious technician, bathing the eye in Kandinsky’s palette and mystical ambitions. In large, numinous, and inarticulate canvases like 1949’s Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red), the onrush of tone emulates the encounter with the divine, while the retinal afterimage, like the refusal to title the painting, compensates for its absence. At the Royal Academy, Rothko’s substitute religion fills the central, circular atrium.
Pollock’s development still astounds. His early 1940s paintings are belligerent yet unresolved, repeating motifs from Gorky and Picasso with rising disgust. In Male and Female (1943), he tries to rid himself of Picasso by Jungian analysis. In Mural (1943), commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, he tries to dissolve his problem by diluting it in scale. In Night Mist (1945), he tries to crush it by condensation. Finally, in 1947, he throws away symbolic language and technical precedent and becomes Jack the Dripper.
In Phosphorescence and Enchanted Forest (both 1947) Pollock crosses what Thoreau called “the invisible boundary” where outside and inside, form and feeling, become one. Only an American artist could have produced such metaphysical optimism in 1947. The Europeans were still digesting the war; Orwell was writing 1984 and Sartre Roads to Freedom. Only an American artist could, like Pollock in Phosphorence, have used aluminum paint. Natural, nocturnal phenomena—the dying light of a shooting star, the luminous rhythms of the phosphorescent ocean—become the perverse beauty of violence in plain sight: the gleam of a Superfortress’s metal skin, the hot flash of phosphorus incendiaries. To become death is to be nature: the American Sublime.
And only an American artist could have done this and still ended up on the cover of Life. Perhaps, as Auden, mourning Yeats, said, poetry changes nothing; but the business of art changes along with the wider economy. The celebrity that overtook Pollock, like the market for Ab Ex’s trademark big canvases, was the result of postwar prosperity. Disposable wealth, more than the flight of European artists, was what allowed New York to supplant Paris as the world’s art gallery.
The Abstract Expressionists endured their early poverty like the 19th-century bohemians, with Romantic angst, too much drinking, and more machismo than a bullfighter’s birthday party. They endured their success no less conscientiously, and suffered accordingly. It would be droll now, had it not been such a waste. The tragedy of Willem de Kooning was the struggle for traditional authenticity amid the peculiarity of affluence. Gorky’s pupil, de Kooning became the Richard Burton of modern painters. The story has it that Burton insisted on performing his party trick, the recitation of entire Shakespeare plays, even when he was so drunk that he forgot large sections or jumped haphazardly from play to play. De Kooning’s early eviscerations of the female form, like Woman as Landscape (1955), are wildly surgical. In Villa Borghese (1960) and Untitled (1961), the colors are still strong but the hand is unsteady. By the mid-1970s . . . Whose Name Was Writ in Water (1975) has the self-disgust of the drinker who keeps failing to drink himself to death. The candor is appalling, the loss of control embarrassing; in existentialist terms, the wrong kind of authenticity.
In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan wrote that culture had its hot and cool moods. Perhaps, because we have had so many cool moods in art since Pop, the cooler Abstractionists have aged less well than the hot Expressionists. Through no fault of their own, the slick finishes of Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still have been outdone by the digital image. Newman still talks a good painting, but Adam (1951-52), Eve (1950), and Ulysses (1952) no longer live up to their sales pitch. Now that the giant video screen has changed the circumstance around the pomp of Clyfford Still, PH-150 (1958) resembles expensive wallpaper.
The hot gestures of Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, Philip Guston, and Joan Mitchell still convince. The spattered brush strokes of Mitchell’s Mandres (1961-62), the considered chaos of Hofmann’s In Sober Ecstasy (1965), and the desperate structural power of Kline’s Andrus (1961) have the testimonial quality of a thumbprint or voice. After the struggles for scale and expression, the lemon yellows and deciduous greens of Mitchell’s four-panel Salut Tom (1979) have a pastoral sublimity.
“In the long run,” Thoreau wrote, “men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they should aim at something high.” In a time when public life is debased, most art is cynically trivial, and the liberal and humanist traditions of the West are treated as reactionary irrelevance, it is impossible not to see “Abstract Expressionism” without nostalgia and regret. Not so much for a golden age as for one of chrome and aluminum, when American artists aimed, with Whitman-like daring, for (as a 1945 Gorky title had it) The Unattainable.
Dominic Green, the author of Three Empires on the Nile, teaches politics at Boston College.
