Abstract Expressionism
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To return to abstract expressionism as a whole, can we say where its new trend is leading? Obviously not, since the artist alone will determine this. But there are straws in the wind, and one of them is the attitude of the younger painters and sculptors toward abstraction. The word is no longer a challenge or banner of revolution. The earliest professional training of some of these artists was under leading abstract painters: Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and others. Their students have accepted abstraction as naturally as an earlier generaiion of students accepted American scene painting. This does not mean that they will necessarily abandon it to seek the formation of a new avant garde in representational art (although some have done exactly that). But abstract expressionism has a vitality that is not likely to be extinguished, even by the assurance with which it is now practised. Its younger members are finding their own challenges, and these lie not so much in the development of an abstract vocabulary, largely perfected already, but rather in the transformation. of art once more from end to means, and the use of the movement's oblique approach to explore a larger realm of truth and human experience than has yet been attempted in such terms.
This gradual transformation preserves much of the abstract expressionist method -- a heavy reliance on subconscious promptings and spontaneous expression, technically a continued insistence on what Schapiro calls surfaceness. The vital difference is in the character of "subject" and the greater control it exerts on the work of art. Consciously conceived "ideas" have returned to painting, and exercise their influence in a kind of counterpoint with the intuitive and the subconscious. Of his most recent work, Theodoros Stamos says, "The whole combined series evolved from thoughts of the solstice. As I worked, things which a painter knows about picture-making began automatically to take their rightful place in controlling the abstract arrangement, the distribution of form and color on the canvas, but always retaining one thing above all, 'the idea.' "
So we return nearly full circle from the original character of abstract expressionism to the search for essences, and not so much those of individual personality as of the classic forces in nature and man which have concerned artists for centuries. "Many of my paintings," says Ethel Schwabacher, "involve the themes of love and death, man dominated by fate, transitions of states of being. I try to deal with the expression of such themes through establishing a certain quality of mood and feeling; especially I try to invoke inner responses that are reached by essences rather than pure ideas. It has been my lifelong preoccupation to get to the essence, the exact quality of the thing in itself."
If this is a traditional aim of art -- its immemorial search for understanding and communication -- it is also one which every generation must rediscover for itself and pursue in its own way. The abstract approach confronts the contemporary artist with agonizing difficulties and a series of nearly impossible choices: between image and gesture, order and chaos, expression and communication, truths private and universal. Yet it has also given him a tool of extraordinary sensitivity with which to probe beneath the surface of things to the very heart of human experience.
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