PAINTING SINCE WORLD WAR II

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PAINTING SINCE WORLD WAR II

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: ACTION PAINTING

The term Abstract Expressionism is often applied to the style of painting that prevailed for about a dozen years following the end of World War II. It was initiated by artists living in New York City in reaction to the anxiety brought on by the nuclear age and subsequent Cold War. Under the influence of existentialist philosophy, Action Painters, the first of the Abstract Expressionists, developed from Surrealism a new approach to art. Painting became a counterpart to life itself, an ongoing process in which the artist faces comparable risks and overcomes the dilemmas confronting him through a series of conscious and unconscious decisions in response to both inner and external demands. The Colour Field Painters coalesced the frenetic gestures and violent hues of the Action Painters into broad forms of poetic colour that partly reflect the spirituality of Oriental mysticism. In a sense, Colour Field Painting resolved the conflicts expressed by Action Painting. They are, however, two sides of the same coin, separated by the thinnest differences of approach.

GORKY. Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), an Armenian who came to America at sixteen, was the pioneer of the movement and the single most important influence on its other mem­bers. It took him twenty years-painting first in the vein of Cezanne, then in that of Picasso-to arrive at his mature style as we see it in The Liver Is the Cock's Comb. The enigmatic title suggests Gorky's close contact with the poet Andre Breton and other Surrealists who found refuge in New York during the war, as well as the personal mythology that underlies his work. The treatment, moreover, re­flects his own experience in camouflage, gained from a class he conducted earlier. Everything here is in the process of turning into something else. The biomorphic shapes clearly owe much to Mir6, while their spontaneous handling and the glowing colour reflect Gorky's enthusiasm for Kandinsky. Yet the dynamic interlocking of the forms, their aggressive power of attraction and repulsion are uniquely his own.

POLLOCK. The most important of the Action Painters proved to be Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who in 1950 did the huge and original picture entitled Autumnal Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 mainly by pouring and spatter­ing his colours, instead of applying them with the brush. The result, especially when viewed at close range, suggests both Kandinsky and Max Ernst.

Kandinsky's non-representational Expressionism and the Surrealists' exploitation of chance effects are indeed the main sources of Pollock's work, but they do not sufficiently account for his revolutionary technique and the emotional appeal of his art. Why did Pollock "fling a pot of paint in the public's face" (as Ruskin had accused Whistler of doing)? Not, surely, to be more abstract than his predecessors, for the strict control implied by abstraction is exactly what Pol­lock relinquished when he began to dribble and spatter. A more plausible explanation is that he came to regard paint itself not as a passive substance to be manipulated at will but as a storehouse of pent-up forces for him to release.

The actual shapes visible in our illustration are largely de­termined by the internal dynamics of his material and his process: the viscosity of the paint, the speed and direction of its impact upon the canvas, its interaction with other layers of pigment. The result is a surface so alive, so sensuously rich, that all earlier painting looks pallid in comparison. But when he releases the forces within the paint by giving it a momentum of its own-or, if you will, by "aiming" it at the canvas instead of "carrying" it on the tip of his brush-Pol­lock does not simply "let go" and leave the rest to chance. He is himself the ultimate source of energy for these forces, and he "rides" them as a cowboy might ride a wild horse, in a frenzy of psychophysical action. He does not always stay in the saddle, yet the exhilaration of this contest, which strains every fibre of his being, is well worth the risk. Our simile, though crude, points up the main difference between Pollock and his predecessors: his total commitment to the act of painting. Hence his preference for huge canvases that pro­vide a "field of combat" large enough for him to paint not merely with his arms, but with the motion of his whole body.

The term "Action Painting" conveys its essence far better than does Abstract Expressionism. To those who complain that Pollock was not sufficiently in control of his medium, we reply that this loss is more than offset by a gain-the new continuity and expansiveness of the creative process that gave his work its distinctive mid-twentieth-century stamp. Pollock's drip technique, however, was not in itself essential to Action Painting, and he stopped using it in 1953.

KRASNER. Lee Krasner (1908-1984), who was married to Pollock, never abandoned the brush, although she was un­mistakably influenced by Pollock. She struggled to establish her artistic identity, and emerged from his long shadow only after undergoing several changes in direction and destroying much of her early work. After Pollock's death, she succeeded in doing what he had been attempting to do for the last three years of his life: to reintroduce the figure into Abstract Ex­pressionism while retaining its automatic handwriting. The potential had always been there in Pollock's work; in Autum­nal Rhythm, we can easily imagine wildly dancing people. In Celebration, Krasner defines these nascent shapes from within the tangled network of lines by using the broad gestures of Action Painting to suggest human forms without actually depicting them.

DE KOONING. The work of Willem De Kooning (born 1904), another prominent member of the group and a close friend of Gorky, always retains a link with the world of im­ages, whether or not it has a recognizable subject. In some paintings, such as Woman II, the image emerges from the jagged welter of brushstrokes as insistently as it does in Rouault's Head of Christ. What De Kooning has in common with Pollock is the furious energy of the process of painting, the sense of risk, of a challenge successfully-but barely-met.

EXPRESSIONISM IN EUROPE

Action Painting marked the international coming-of-age for American art. The movement had a powerful impact on Eu­ropean art, which in those years had nothing to show of com­parable force and conviction. One French artist, however, was of such prodigal originality as to constitute a movement all by himself: Jean Dubuffet, whose first exhibition soon after the Liberation electrified-and antagonized-the art world of Paris.

DUBUFFET. As a young man Dubuffet (1901-1985) had formal instruction in painting, but he responded to none of the various trends he saw around him nor to the art of the museums; all struck him as divorced from real life, and he turned to other pursuits. Only in middle age did he experi­ence the breakthrough that permitted him to discover his creative gifts: he suddenly realized that for him true art had to come from outside the ideas and traditions of the artistic elite, and he found inspiration in the art of children and of the insane. The distinction between "normal" and "abnormal" struck him as' no more tenable than established notions of "beauty" and "ugliness." Not since Marcel Duchamp had anyone ventured so radical a critique of the nature of art.

Dubuffet made himself the champion of what he called l'art brut, "art-in-the-raw," but he created something of a par­adox besides: while extolling the directness and spontaneity of the amateur as against the refinement of professional art­ists, he became a professional artist himself. Duchamp's questioning of established values had led him to cease artis­tic activity altogether, but Dubuffet became incredibly prolific, second only to Picasso in output. Compared with Paul Klee, who had first utilized the style of children's draw­ings, Dubuffet's art is "raw" indeed; its stark immediacy, its explosive, defiant presence, are the op­posite of the older painter's formal discipline and economy of means. Did Dubuffet perhaps fall into a trap of his own mak­ing? If his work merely imitated the art brut of children and the insane, would not these self-chosen conventions limit him as much as those of the artistic elite?

We may be tempted to think so at our first sight of Le Metafisyx from his Corps de Dame series-even De Kooning's wildly distorted Woman II seems gentle when matched against this shocking assault on our inherited sensibilities. The paint is as heavy and opaque as a rough coating of plaster, and the lines articulating the blocklike body are scratched into this surface like graffiti made by an untrained hand. But appearances can deceive; the fury and concentration of Dubuffet's attack should con­vince us that his demonic female is not "something any child can do." In an eloquent statement the artist has explained the purpose of images such as this: "The female body. . . has long. . . been associated with a very specious notion of beauty which I find miserable and most depressing. Surely I am for beauty, but not that one. . . I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider-without ques­tion-as grace and beauty [and to] substitute another and vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised. . . I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and . . . a work of ardent celebration."

APPEL. L’art brut and Abstract Expressionism provided the mainsprings for the COBRA group in Denmark, Belgium, and Holland, which took its name from Copenhagen, Brus­sels, and Amsterdam, the capitals of those countries. The Dutch artist Karel Appel (born 1921), one of the group's co­founders, soon distinguished himself as the finest pure painter of his generation in post-war Europe. To the subject matter of Dubuffet he added the slashing brushwork and vivid colours of De Kooning.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, after several extended visits to the United States, his palette became even more so­norous, the texture more sensuous, and the space more com­plex, the results of being directly exposed to the Action Painters and inspired by jazz musicians. Burned Face, one of the personages that inhabit Appel's work from that period, is an explosion of colour applied with a brilliant technique that at first hides the figural elements lurking within the painting. In maintaining the importance of con­tent while thoroughly integrating it with the style of Abstract Expressionism, Appel established a precedent, which was followed by many other European artists, as well as by a num­ber of American painters who have become preoccupied with the same problem.

BACON. The English artist Francis Bacon (born 1909) is allied not with Abstract Expressionism, though he is clearly related to it, but with the Expressionist tradition. For his power to transmute sheer anguish into visual form he has no equal among twentieth-century artists unless it be Rouault. Bacon has often derived his imagery from other artists, freely combining several sources while transforming them so as to infuse them with new meaning. Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef reflects Bacon's obsession with Velazquez' Pope Innocent X, a picture that haunted him for some years. It is, of course, no longer Innocent X we see here but a screaming ghost, inspired by a scene from Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky, that is materializing out of a black void in the company of two luminescent sides of beef taken from a painting by Rembrandt. Knowing the origin of the canvas does not help us to understand it, however. Nor does com­parison with earlier works such as Grunewald's The Crucifixion, Fuseli's Nightmare, Ensor's The Intrigue, or Munch's The Scream, which are its antecedents. Bac0n is a gambler, a taker of risks, in real life as well as in the way he works; he competes with Velazquez here, but on his own terms, which are to set up an almost unbearable tension between the shocking vio­lence of his vision and the luminous beauty of his brush­work. What he seeks are images that, in his own words, "unlock the deeper possibilities of sensation."

COLOUR FIELD PAINTING

By the late 1940s, a number of artists began to transform Action Painting into the style called Colour Field Painting, in which the canvas is stained with thin, translucent colour washes. These may be oil or even ink, but the favoured mate­rial quickly became acrylic, a plastic suspended in a polymer resin, which can be thinned with water so that it flows freely.

ROTHKO. In the mid-1940s Mark Rothko (1903-1970) worked in a style derived from Gorky, yet within less than a decade he subdued the aggressiveness of Action Painting so completely that his pictures breathe the purest contempla­tive stillness. Ochre and Red on Red consists of two rectangles with blurred edges-one a rich yellow ochre, the other a clear red-on a dark red ground. The canvas is very large, over seven and one-half feet tall, and the thin washes of paint permit the texture of the cloth to be seen throughout. But to use such bare factual terms to describe what we see hardly touches the essence of the work, or the reasons for its mysterious power to move us. These are to be found in the delicate equilibrium of the shapes, their strange interdependence, the subtle variations of hue (note how the pink "halo" around the lower rectangle seems to immerse it in the red ground, while the yellow rectangle stands out more assertively in front of the red). Not every beholder responds to the works of this withdrawn, introspective artist; for those who do, the experience is akin to a trancelike rapture.

FRANKENTHALER. The stained canvas was also pion­eered by Helen Frankenthaler (born 1928), who was inspired by Rothko's example as early as 1952. In The Bay Frankenthaler uses the same biomorphic forms basic to early Action Painting but eliminates the personal handwrit­ing found in the brushwork of Gorky and De Kooning, with results that are at once more lyrical, more decorative, and just as impressive.

LOUIS. Among the most gifted of the Colour Field painters was Morris Louis (1912-1962). The successive veils of colour in Blue Veil appear to have been "floated on" with­out visible marks of the brush, mysteriously beautiful like the aurora borealis. It is their harmonious interaction, their del­icately shifting balance, that give the picture enduring ap­peal.

JENKINS. Other artists, such as Paul Jenkins (born 1923), have developed distinctive variations on the theme of Colour Field Painting. In Phenomena Astral Signal the liquid medium has been made to flow in currents of varying speed and density. The resulting veils of colour may be gossamer-thin or have the rich depth of stained glass. No spattering, no dribbling betrays the painter's "action"; the forces that give rise to these shapes seem to be of the same kind as those governing the cloud formations in a windswept sky and the pattern of veins in a leaf.

LATE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Many artists who came to maturity in the 1950s turned away from Action Painting altogether in favour of hardedge painting.

KELLY. Red Blue Green by Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923), an early leader of this tendency, abandons Rothko's impressionistic softness. Instead, flat areas of colour are cir­cumscribed within carefully delineated forms as part of the formal investigation of colour and design problems for their own sake.

STELLA. The brilliant and precocious Frank Stella (born 1936), having conceived an early enthusiasm for Mondrian, soon evolved a non-figurative style that was even more self~contained; unlike Mondrian, Stella did not concern himself with the vertical-horizontal balance that re­lates the older artist's work to the world of nature. Logically enough, he also abandoned the traditional rectangular for­mat, so as to make quite sure that his pictures bore no re­semblance to windows. The shape of the canvas had now become an integral part of the design. In one of his largest works, the majestic Empress of India, this shape is determined by the thrust and counterthrust of four huge chevrons, identical in size and shape but sharply differenti­ated in colour and in their relationship to the whole. The paint, moreover, contains powdered metal, which gives it an irides­cent sheen-yet another way to stress the impersonal preci­sion of the surfaces and to remove the work from any comparison with the "hand-made" look of easel pictures. In fact, to speak of Empress of India as a picture seems decid­edly awkward. It demands to be called an object, sufficient unto itself.

WILLIAMS. The legacy of the Expressionists can still be seen in the work of William T. Williams (born 1942). Wil­liams is a member of the lyrical Expressionists from the early 1970s whose contribution has been largely overlooked. After a period of intense self-scrutiny, he developed the sophisti­cated technique seen in Batman. His method can be compared to jazz improvisation, a debt that the artist him­self has acknowledged. He interweaves his colour and brush­work within a clear two-part structure that permits endless variations on the central theme. Although Williams is con­cerned primarily with the presentation of the encrusted sur­face, the patterns, light, and space evoke a landscape. Instead of depicting nature, however, the painting uses colour and ab­straction to capture an evanescent memory of the artist's past.

Williams belongs to the generation of African-Americans born around 1940 who have brought black painting and sculpture to artistic maturity. In the 1920s, the Harlem Re­naissance had produced a cultural revival that unfortunately was short-lived, its promise dashed by the economic catas­trophe of the Depression. Following World War II, however, African-Americans began to attend art schools in growing numbers, at the very time that Abstract Expressionism marked the coming of age of American art. The civil rights movement helped them to establish their artistic identities and to find appropriate styles for expressing them. The turn­ing point proved to be the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, which pro­voked an outpouring of African-American art.

Since then, these artists have pursued three major tend­encies. Mainstream Abstractionists, particularly those of the older generation, tend to be concerned primarily with seek­ing a personal aesthetic, maintaining that there is no such thing as African-American, or black, art, only good art. Con­sequently, they have been denounced by activist artists who, stirred by social consciousness as well as by political ideology, have adopted highly expressive representational styles as the means for communicating a distinctive black perspective di­rectly to the people in their communities. Mediating between these two approaches is a very decorative form of art that frequently incorporates African, Caribbean, and sometimes Mexican motifs. No hard-and-fast principles separate these alternatives, and aspects of each have been successfully com­bined into separate individual styles. Abstraction has never­theless proved the most fruitful path, for it has opened up avenues of expression that allow the black artist, however private his concerns may be, to achieve a universal, not only an ethnic, appeal.