Abstract Expressionism
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There is no law, however, which requires the abstract artist to paint pictures that are subjectless except for the rapport between self and canvas. Pollock, De Kooning, and Hofmann have all broken at times into imagery. Today many painters who remain completely abstract in their approach deal, nevertheless, with specific themes and subjects outside the personal realm. Donati's Gore et Mandra was inspired by the mandragora legend and has its dark aura of magic and superstition. Schwabacher's Oedipus captures precisely the shining mood of Sophocles' description of his death, which "was not with lamentation, or in sickness and suffering, but, above mortal's, wonderful." Other artists have moved a step or two further from pure abstraction and have used a symbolic (rather than naturalistic) imagery to deal with their subjects. Nature and the moods of nature have thus returned to an art which long banished them. Stamos' High Snow--Low Sun series is based on thoughts of the equinox; sun, snow, sky, equinoctial line, are all present and recognizable, though in abstract configuration. Sometimes this new imagery creeps in unconsciously, as it did in Helen Frankenthaler's Blue Territory, which she painted on for some time before she became aware that the shape of it tree and a "moodwith-landscape" had invaded her work.
Or the imagery may start with a conscious object and develop into something different in the process of realization; Ippolito's Storm began as a spring landscape of delicate colors, "but as the summer wore on . . . the reds became stronger, the yellows heavier, the painting more rigid, the forms shifted," until it ended as a kind of symbol of the whole "cycle from spring to fall and its effect on me." In their reliance on subconscious impulses released by the act of painting, these artists remain true to the abstractexpressionist approach, but in their acceptance of imagery and their willingness to pursue it even into such traditional fields as landscape painting, they have given the movement a new orientation.
This is more significant than a simple enlargement of subject matter, for it has ruptured the shell of extreme introspection which was both the strength and the limitation of the movement. By turning his eyes outward to other men and to the material aspects of the universe, the artist has opened avenues to larger areas of experience (and perhaps of spiritual truth) than are comprised within the bounds of self. "It is not by neglecting matter but by imbuing it with life that we make apparent the spirit," as Ferren wrote. That this can be done by the abstract and intuitive methods inherent in the movement has already been demonstrated, but the new avenues still remain largely unexplored. Time alone will tell whether they lead to a dead end or a fresh adventure.
Free-form abstraction: sculpture
As long as sculpture remained tied to its traditional techniques of carving and modeling, it was bound by their limitations--by the shape and weight of the block or the structural possibilities of an armature. Although it made a virtue of these necessities and developed a "sculptural" aesthetic out of the nature of its methods and materials, it was never so free as painting, even when, in its great periods, it was stronger. The revolution which ruptured the traditional concepts of sculpture originated abroad with the constructivists and wrought a change that went far beyond their own aims, which were principally formal. Nevertheless, it was they who demonstrated that sculpture could be built directly out of unconventional materials such as metal, plastics, and wire by modern technical methods such as welding, soldering, and brazing. It remained for a younger generation of artists to turn this discovery in a more romantic direction, which has carried sculpture still further from its traditions and has brought it closer to painting in its freedom and variety of effects.
In America, David Smith and Ibram Lassaw were both pioneers in this development from early in the 1930's. It was not until the middle forties, however, when Ferber, Hare, Lipton, and Roszak all joined the trend, that it began to take on the aspects of a movement. It is almost precisely contemporary, therefore, with the development of abstract expressionism in painting--to which, indeed, it is closely related. For purely practical reasons, automatism is less applicable to sculpture than to painting, yet the works of these men seem to have been formed, to some extent, by unpremeditated impulses released in the process of creating. Accidental effects in the drip of molten metal or the color patterns made by the heat of the torch are not unlike those of poured or splattered paint. Moreover, the calligraphy of the painters has its counterpart in the free linear patterns which much of this sculpture describes in space, while the use of amorphous and mysteriously evocative shapes is common to both. Nevertheless, sculpture has its own unique problems and character--even when freed from traditional methods.
These are inherent not only in its three-dimensional character but also in the range of materials now available. Since every material has its own properties and since these properties carry tactile and psychological associations (e.g., the harshness of steel, the airiness of transparent plastics), the sculptor faces questions of the appropriateness of medium to form which are more complex than in painting, but his technical vocabulary is proportionately wider.
Like certain abstract-expressionist painters, some of these sculptors think and work primarily in terms of the manipulation of their material. Thus Her bert Ferber says of his Sun Wheel, "The forms and shapes are chosen, the surfaces used, the directions indicated, in an attempt to animate the space described with excitement and tension." The roof at the top is solely a device "to give a sense of compression to the space." The sun wheel has no symbolic significance; it is used because its whirling, thrusting shape contributes to the dynamic design. Similarly, Lassaw feels that Procession "shows a greater facility [than before] in the use of various metals and colors (a growth in the understanding of the nature of these materials and how they want to be shaped)." His title yields no more clue than Ferber's; it was given to the piece only after it was finished, "because it looked to me somewhat like a procession." Yet there can be no doubt that the free forms each of these artists uses have a "meaning" (possibly subconscious) beyond their aesthetic function. The brilliant reflections in Ferber's polished brass and copper, the organic vine and plant forms pushing upward from the pelvic shape below, have their own connotations, as does Lassaw's more subterranean and nodular growth pattern. Lassaw himself is quite conscious of the mysterious forces that shape his art. "My work stems like a plant out of the nature of my soil," he wrote. "I feel myself inextricably interwoven both outwardly and inwardly in all events of the universe. There is a growing sense of identification with and participation in the universal process. . . . The cosmos is an organism." His art is the intuitive expression of this organic and spiritual unity.
Other sculptors in the group make franker acknowledgment of the part that consciously chosen subjects play in their work. But they maintain, with justice, that the subject is only a starting point, that the work of art is not simply or even primarily an interpretation of the subject, that it exists on many levels, from the associative to the purely formal. David Smith's Hudson River Landscape came, as he wrote in the College Art Journal ( Winter, 1954), "from dozens of drawings made on a train between Albany and Poughkeepsie. . . . Later, while drawing, I shook a bottle of India ink and it flew over my hand. It looked like my river landscape. I placed my hand on paper. From the image that remained, I traveled with the landscape, drawing other landscapes and their objects, with additions, deductions, directives, which flashed unrecognized into the drawing, elements of which are in the sculpture. Is my sculpture the Hudson River? Or is it the travel and the vision? Or does it matter? The sculpture exists on its own; it is an entity." Seymour Lipton, somewhat like Gorky, often derives his forms from both natural and man-made sources, which become linked by the mysterious process of association and emerge in his art as a unified metaphor. Thus Sorcerer appears to be partly a man with arms outstretched in incantation, but it also suggests a primitive totem or instruments of magic. The title of Louise Bourgeois's One and Others suggests at first only a study in disparate shapes, which it is; yet the longer one looks at the piece, the more it resembles strange growths pushing or huddling against each other; its aura is secretive and frightening. All of these works are highly organized formally, but they also evoke elusive associations which cannot be completely explained by their ostensible subjects or lack of subjects.
Finally, we have yet another group of sculptors who have moved still further from abstract expressionism in that they use a quite specific imagery and that their formal methods are consciously related to the communication of the image's significance. Theodore Roszak is a symbolist, who has found in the sharp, cruel aspects of nature--the claw, the thorn, the beak and talon--an expression of one aspect of our age. His use of these natural forms is never naturalistic; they go through a process of metamorphosis and hybridization before they are embodied in the remarkably appropriate medium of brazed and pockmarked steel. One is never in doubt about their allusions, which are direct and forceful; their power comes from the logic of the imagination which has built them into such compelling visions. David Hare is another sculptor who has turned his back on introspection as a principal source of inspiration. "One does not live in a personalized vacuum, but with the whole, great, round, beautiful, terrifying, and joyous earth," he wrote, "and God pity the man who turns his eyes inward and pulls out of himself one cold, infinitely useless lump after another." He has used a wide variety of techniques, from traditional to modern, and his style has varied nearly as greatly, with Juggler representing his more abstract phase. Through it all, however, there runs a direct feeling for his subject and an irrepressible vitality. Several younger sculptors, too, have turned the methods of abstraction to the service of a fairly precise imagery, such as Richard Stankiewicz, who builds witty and sometimes even graceful figures out of refuse from the junkyard (a kind of neo-Dadaism), or James Wines, whose Monad, I is inspired by rock formations and symbolizes those elementary beings in nature who embody within themselves the whole universe.
These are some of the artists responsible for endowing sculpture with a versatility it has never had before, a versatility which has permitted it to take part, to nearly the same degree as painting, in the exploration of an intuitive sphere of feeling and expression.
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