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Abstract expressionism, sometimes called action painting or the New York school, is the first American-born art movement to affect profoundly every part of the world where modern concepts of art exist, from Paris to Tokyo. It has altered even more profoundly the geography of our own art during the last fifteen years, both by the number of followers it has attracted and by the strong reactions against it which it has inevitably generated. As we have seen in preceding chapters, it has also created a new kind of figurative painting which incorporates some of its methods and attitudes. Few of our living artists have been unaffected by it in one way or another.
The sources of abstract expressionism are many. It inherited from earlier forms of abstraction a rejection of subject matter and a belief in the primacy of the medium: A painting is an object to be experienced solely in terms of its own laws, its own structure; it must never be an illustration; the flat plane of the picture must always be preserved. But it broke with cubism and other formal kinds of abstraction by disavowing any aesthetic interest. Instead, it took from surrealism a faith in the guidance of the subconscious mind, and it sought a means to transfer this directly to canvas in the purest and most intense way possible. It found the fantastic imagery of surrealism frivolous, but it adopted the surrealist theory of automatism and applied it in a totally abstract manner, entrusting to the spontaneous and unpremeditated gesture of hand and brush the expression of whatever inner forces moved them. The canvas became, in Harold Rosenberg's definition, a field or battleground on which the artist acted out a drama of his own state of being (hence "action painting"). It discovered sanctions for this approach in the early abstractions of Kandinsky, the later ones of Miro and Matta, but it pushed automatism and an anti-aesthetic bias to more extreme conclusions.
It is apparent that abstract expressionism is a deeply introspective movement, for it is not concerned (at least in theory) with an interpretation of the outer world, but only with the artist's own inner life--although inevitably this is affected by his external experiences. Of all the charges which have been leveled against it, that of "dehumanization" seems the emptiest, for this is an art rooted exclusively in the mind and spirit of man. It has been accused more legitimately of being a private art which fails to communicate readily; its privacy is unquestionable, its degree of communication depends largely on the spectator but is certainly less precise than in paintings which rely on common associations. This element of privacy, which is central to its character, has also made it one of the most abused styles of our day, exploited by a multitude of inept paint manipulators who claim the privilege of the absolute freedom it offers in self-expression without accepting the discipline and rigorous selfexamination which have been so plainly involved in the work of its leading practitioners.
As in all movements, generalizations like these seldom apply wholly to any one artist. Gorky, discussed in the preceding chapter, can scarcely be called an abstract expressionist because of his persistent use of natural forms and his aesthetic preoccupations, yet he was an important forerunner in the area of introspection and irrational associations. Mark Tobey stands in a similar relation to the movement, but in his case it was the technical innovation of his "white writing," developed in 1935, which pointed a way toward expression through a personal calligraphy. Tobey himself, though a mystic, has generally been concerned with the interpretation of facts and forces outside himself. Thus Universal Field was inspired by his first visit to an airport, when "I sensed the rapidity of communications in this day and attempted to symbolize in space and accent the messages which enliven the world," while in New Life (Resurrection) the gray masses symbolize "old earth, before and upon which dance the elemental figurations of new life." So conscious a symbolism, even though private, is alien to abstract expressionism, but Tobey's continuous, threading line, which he derived from Chinese calligraphy and which seems to move with a nearly independent life of its own, anticipates by a decade the linear webs Pollock was to spin.
But it was Jackson Pollock, more than any other single artist, who gave definition to abstract expressionism and who established it (in the public's eye, at least) as the most revolutionary of the avant-garde movements. Spreading big canvases on the floor, Pollock applied house paint and metallic pigments from a battery of cans, sometimes flinging or dripping hi, odor on with sticks, sometimes pouring it on directly and letting it run in accidental patterns. Occasionally, he used the more conventional brush and pallete knife, but for the most part he found that these hampered the spontaneous gestures of his arm on which he relied. Everything about his method suggests an unbridled spontaneity and automatism, and yet the results were entirely different from what one might have expected. For these pictures have an intensity of rhythm, an ordered complexity sequences of rest and explosion, and what Alfonso Ossorio aptly called an "immediate splendor." They also have an astonishing variety, ranging from a kind of barbed ferocity to the floating, lyrical mood of Number 27, illustrated here. They suggest that a more conscious control of the medium was exercised than Pollock's method would seem to indicate, that accidental effects were incidents upon which he built, and that automatism was less important than the agonizing struggle to imbue line and color alone with a naked violence of feeling.
Pollock's personal style has never been successfully imitated. Hans Hofmann, for one, has had a much wider influence, while Willem de Kooning, soon after his first one-man exhibition, in 1948, became a leading figure in the movement. Some others who joined it during the decade of the 1940's include Robert Motherwell, Richard Pousette-Dart (though somewhat apart from the main line of development), Theodoros Stamos, Adolph Gottlieb, Bradley, Walker Tomlin, and Franz Kline. From 1950 on, it expanded more rapidly, but no study has yet been made to establish the precise chronology of its development. All we can attempt here is to point out some of the directions it has taken and how it has been partially transformed by certain artists into a less introspective art with a new orientation toward imagery.
Although abstract expressionism allows the artist complete freedom in the choice of his formal methods, in practice it has established three main devices which the majority of its practitioners have used either singly or, more often, in various combinations. One of these is a personal calligraphy, like that of Tobey and Pollock. A second is the expressive brush stroke, such as Hofmann's or De Kooning's. A third is the use of amorphous shapes and stains of color, sometimes accidental, sometimes controlled, which was an important element in Gorky's work.
Of these, the calligraphic approach may well be the most difficult; certainly it has attracted fewer artists than the others. About 1948, Adolph Gottlieb began to paint a series of linear canvases which eventually reached a labyrinthine complexity and which appear to have had a considerable influence on Bradley Walker Tomlin's elegant arabesques. During the same years, however, Gottlieb was also experimenting with mysterious floating shapes, like the irregular circles and squares of The Frozen Sounds, Number 1, and these eventually became more important to him. It was Franz Kline, starting in 1949, who made the most impressive use of calligraphy by enlarging it to monumental proportions and by limiting his palette to stark black-and-white oppositions. His big canvases, such as Mahoning, are drained of any elegance or decorative quality and have the impact of a sledge hammer. By contrast, Kenzo Okada's handsome patterns, with their delicately blurred lines, return calligraphy toward its Oriental sources, though in a purely contemporary manner.
The range of expression through predominantly linear means has proved great, but the range of expression through the character of the brush stroke-its shape, direction, weight, and texture--has proved even greater. James Brooks, in Rasalus, for instance, has built a picture almost entirely out of disparate strokes which stand apart from each other, seldom overlapping, barely touching here and there along their ragged edges. They are like sentinels ranged in static ranks and only occasionally breaking into action. Paul Burlin uses nearly as definite a stroke, in a counterpoint with line, but he sets both elements in turbulent motion. They dart about the canvas colliding, stopping, starting again with a restless energy which seems almost to be inherent in the paint itself. Compared with the breadth of treatment in these works, Philip Guston's Dial seems withdrawn, complex, and infinitely subtle. It is as if the artist's brush had endlessly probed the surface, searching its way through the most delicate nuances of touch and color until it emerged with the bolder but still strangely tentative areas of red in the center. Though just as delicate, Milton Resnick's Genie is more relaxed, more lyrical in feeling. Here the strokes move across each other in a kind of animated scribble, creating a network of pale colors which traps light like an impressionist canvas. Still other handlings are found in the sinuous ascending strokes of Helen Frankenthaler's Blue Territory or the arrow-like ones in Jack Tworkov's Duo, I, with their variety of weight and transparency.
The third device of abstract expressionism--the use of amorphous or irregular shapes--is apparent in many of the paintings discussed above, but it may be observed even more clearly in work where the character of individual brush strokes is subordinate to the forms they construct. Whether these forms are born from associations in the artist's mind with a specific subject or whether they come from a move general realm of feeling and emotion, the mystery of their incarnation is equal. They seem to grow from the subconscious with a kind of organic inevitability. Sometimes they are extremely simple, like the irregular bands and squares of pulsating color which give Mark Rothko's mature work (later than the painting illustrated) its hypnotic quality. In Adja Yunker's big pastel, Tarrasa, XIII, they rise with a more romantic presence--vague and ominous masses which trail off at points into insubstantiality. In Ethel Schwabacher's Oedipus at Colonos, Number 2 they seem to move and dissolve into each other with the splendor of cloud formations. They may be earthen and heavy, as in some of Robert Motherwell's pictures or Enrico Donati's Gore et Mandra, with its massive, textured blocks of paint. Sometimes they are not at all amorphous; Conrad MarcaRelli's collages, for instance, are quite sharp-edged and precise, yet even so are endowed with a strangely symbolic look. Other artists combine in the same canvas fluid and concrete shapes; Theodoros Stamos'
High Snow--Low Sun, II breaks two solid black bars with a dark, watery mass and a flamelike eruption of red. Again the pattern may resemble organic shapes of growth, as in John Ferren's The Garden, or the configurations of landscape, as in Angelo Ippolito's Storm.
The discovery that line, brush motion, abstract shape, and color can embody impulses which are not primarily aesthetic is the singular achievement of abstract expressionism. In its purest form it has demanded of the artist a nearly superhuman degree of introspection and concentration in order to achieve the most direct expression of the deepest part of self. In this process, canvas and paint have assumed a reality which seems ultimate and essentially inexplicable. The artist has been consumed by his art in a kind of mystical union. Perhaps this is one reason for his reluctance to speak of his aims in any other terms than those of the act of painting. "My whole desire is to be as deeply in painting as possible," Jack Tworkov writes, "without holding any prepared position or maintaining any preconceived . . . attitude. To experience, not painting in general, but each particular picture as deeply as possible is my desire." When James Brooks notes that Rasalus evolved from "no theme or idea" but required months to bring to unity, or when Milton Resnick says that he named his picture Genie"because at some time before it had been finished, the painting itself had a way of looking back at me," they are speaking from the same position. Richard Pousette-Dart has been more explicit: "Art is always mystical in its final meaning, it is structure which stands up by the presence and significance of its own reality. . . . It is my belief that ultimate reality can only be achieved by a passionate, burning devotion to one's work."
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