Beginnings of Mid-western Abstraction

Home

In the years just prior to 1940, there was talk throughout the midwestern U.S.A. about a book being written by an artist which would open the doors upon the mysteries of the new abstract painting. A large group waited anxiously. Young artists expected a sure guide; the teachers expected an inclusive manual. They were waiting for Hans Hofmann to complete his long-promised work.

On the eastern sea-coast many were already studying with Hofmann. In the mid-west, we continued along our way. John Stuart Curry, Thomas Benton, and Grant Wood had left their mark, but such influence was dying fast. In the universities they were painting temperas, but in the professional schools a kind of modernism relating to Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin was flourishing with variations -- frequently in a manner that revealed the influence of the recent WPA art-project on the artist's social conscience. The sombre palette, the elongated figure and the sad almond eye were very much in evidence. The stylized figure out of WPA murals also had its vogue.

Many young artists at that time had concluded they would later become teachers to earn a living, and the university art program was becoming a source of major influence. Lester Longman had already imported practising artists to his campus at the State University of Iowa, and Iowa City became an art center. Philip Guston and Maurice Lasansky had joined this staff, and these two greatly influenced painting and print making -- not only in the mid-west -but via their students as teachers, throughout the country. At the University of Texas, another group of' artist-teachers was being assembled by Ward Lockwood. Everet Spruce from Texas and Philip Guston from Iowa began to appear in the Whitney annuals in New York.

This was just prior to the Second World War. After the war, many G.Is. returned to mid-western universities (while others went to New York or Paris). At the University of Minnesota, H. H. Arnason was expanding the art department; he not only invited artists as permanent members of his staff, but also established a program of visiting artists. Some of his teachers came to him from the University of Iowa, such as Raymond Parker and Malcolm Myers. Iowa City, Iowa, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, were overcrowded with G.Is., and so was the Art Institute in Chicago.

The painting act had somehow become less important than the painted object which was to be measured off, in one way or another, to discover its secret mean. Clinging to representational subjects, and seeking an individual form of abstraction (that is, a personal distortion), I, like many others, evolved some very taut paintings. How impersonal they seem in brief retrospect, reminiscent always of another painting or of parts of many paintings! How many ways can one paint an eye, and how avoid that beautiful monster Picasso! As many departed from figurative themes, there appeared a highly stylized abstraction with roots in cubism. In some quarters, this was a decorative cubism smacking strongly of a Bauhaus flavor.

The shifting and trials reflected a general restlessness and discontent. And then there appeared the works of that group which included Hofmann, Pollock, Clyfford Still, de Kooning, et al. Pollock's exhibition in 1943 at the Art of This Century had been explosive, but we had seen the works only in reproduction. Even the reproductions were exciting, but we could not recognize that Pollock had attacked the easel tradition. The 1948 exhibition of de Kooning at the Egan Gallery was also an exciting one, but we hadn't seen these works either nor measured their scale. When we finally did see them -- in exhibitions at the universities or at the Chicago Art Institute, or on visits to New York -- the die was somehow cast. Here was promise of a new way that was less stifling to one's sense of discovery. It was an audacious way, but it held the promise of surprise. It was not an easier way, because for many it required the destruction of one's past and the re-definition of one's self in a new present. If we in the mid-west came to this painting more slowly than others, remember we had not studied with Hofmann. But perhaps this wasn't too unfortunate either, for a type of 'Hofmannism' was soon to run rampant.

In addition to other things, there was a sense of real excitement in the air. If one might have wished to be in Paris at the turn of the century, one now wanted to be near the mounting excitement in New York -- or in San Francisco -- for one heard also of activities on the west coast centering around Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, and Hasel Smith, together with such visiting artists as Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt. So some painters headed east, some headed west. As James Johnson Sweeney observed, artists were moving around so much it was difficult to associate them with any region or locale. Regional identifications were becoming meaningless.

What was this new direction that seemed to us so urgent and vital? Essentially, it was that painting development which has recently been termed 'abstract expressionism'. It is a term that has not been entirely popular with artists, who are surprised I think by the implication that they share a mutual esthetic or painting style. And it is a sort of buck-shot terminology, since it is used in reference to works that are abstract and works that are non-objective; to works executed with expressive freedom and others executed with cautious care; to works intuitively formed and works more structurally organized. Think, for example, of the distance between a de Kooning and a Motherwell, both 'abstract expressionists'. But it is a term in use, and it refers to that large group of painters -- some of whom I have already mentioned -- and to the work of many recent artists whose paintings relate in one way or another to this body of work. I have avoided saying 'movement' because, although there may be an overlapping in a general attitude toward painting, it seems to me that the works of the artists to whom I refer fall outside the idea of a school or movement or manifesto. It is not the similarities in their works which arouse one's interest, but the important differences. There is not so much a group style as there are individual styles.

Yet one had to recognize that these artists shared something in their points of view. In 1955 I was asked to assemble an exhibition of work by younger painters for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Excerpts from an introduction I prepared at the time for the catalog will perhaps best summarize my present views.

If there is a similiarity in aims within the works in this exhibit, it is perhaps at that basic level of the artist's attitude toward the whole act of painting, and in his manner of approaching the canvas. These painters are less involved in demonstrating what painting is by customary standards and more involved in discovering what else it can be or become. This is not a new search, for it has been going on for a long time, but the artists here are continuing that search. They are still attempting to go beyond notions of 'object interpretation' (which means also to lead the observer away from habits of seeking an object or image to identify). They continue to believe that one of the essential realities in painting is the reality of the surface formed by the paint upon the canvas.

Frequently this painting-surface is the only reality involved, and some level of associated reality that the observer may think he detects may not have been intended by the artist at all. Stephen Pace or Joan Mitchell may remind one of qualities associated with landscapes; actually, this is at the level of inference only, for neither artist was really depicting 'landscapes', as such . . . Many are still striving to discover new qualities inherent in paint that can be released by new methods and approaches to the canvas. Pollock was after these qualities when he discarded the brush and began to drip his paint. Others have sought other means; sometimes a new painting act or gesture has become that means. Observe that here again the artists continue to go beyond the customary idea of what painting is -- as an art object. It need not necessarily be a polished surface framed in gilt with a hooded light to spot it. Observer habits of 'identification' have functioned even in these terms, and some still say, 'It doesn't look like a work of art to me'. I believe, however, the observer will sense that the apparent affrontal to this habit is less violent in the work of these new painters. With a shift in direction, even the word beautiful is not as unpopular as it used to be, and the paintings may offer less resistance than they at one time seemed to. A painter in this group recently commented, 'I have been picking up my color. I would really like to paint some handsome things'.