Gorky's use of natural forms
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Then there are solutions, even within the abstract expressionist orbit, as Arshile Gorky, one of the movement's founders, demonstrated. In his late paintings, Gorky worked simultaneously on several levels, among which observation of nature remained always important. In her recent book on the artist, Ethel Schwabacher says. "Direct work before nature greatly broadened his vision. He now gave full expression to his instinctive feeling for the morphology of living things. He noted the mutations of form as well as the equally complex stream of memory associations, and created hybrids which startle, reveal and satisfy." Gorky's use of natural forms was metaphorical; it was part of the complex method by which he dramatized the world of dreams and the obscure workings of the human heart. He did not go to nature for its own sake, but neither did he use it simply as a convenient source of symbolic form. He was endlessly fascinated by nature and found it a vital stimulus to his imagination, giving him indispensible suggestions for the visual embodiment of mental states. Gorky's art was introspective to a high degree, but to the extent that he found images of his own joys and sufferings in the world around him and seized upon them to illuminate personal drama on a more universal level, he escaped the extreme introspection of the private gesture.
Other artists have found, quite independently, a similar solution. Seymour Lipton is as deeply committed to the autonomy of medium as are the abstract expressionists. ("Sculptural reality, is the final concern.") But he has also found in metaphors drawn from the natural world a method which, for him, has "seemed right in terms of ultimate unity of form and expression." His analysis of the metaphorical process is remarkably precise: "In a sense all art and sculpture involve metaphor; that is, all significant sculpture is a rearranged, suggested and imagined realm. All such art partakes of poetry. What concerns me is something more specific. I use suggestions from two or more objects in my experience and bring them together insofar as I feel a correspondence or interrelation in terms of some general mood of sculpture reality and formal expressiveness. For example, the wings and body of a dragonfly at rest felt in terms of an airplane and a spiral stairway. They became related for me in terms of a surging aerial force. Through chance, thought and feeling, they grew together into an ambiguous single object later called Storm Bird. Each aspect in itself was incomplete, but together, simplified and coordinated, they became elements in a new unity."
The significant development of the last few years, however, has not been so much in the exploitation of metaphor as it has in a general but oblique redirection of abstract expressionism toward nature for its own sake, and in a growing tendency of the artist to identify himself, through his art, with the elemental rhythms and forces of the natural world, sometimes even with the patterns of its imagery. The important word is "oblique," for this is not a back-to-nature movement but a partly subconscious rediscovery of nature through an indirect approach. As Kyle Morris wrote in the catalogue of the "Vanguard 1955" exhibition, which he organized for the Walker Art Center, "This particular kind of painting does not start with nature and arrive at paint, but on the contrary, starts with paint and arrives at nature." While the approach is indirect, the concern is no less real. In Paul Jenkins' words, "To approach life -- nature -- indirectly is not necessarily devious. Peripheral vision is an endowment of nature, not an invention of the devil." How this works and its implications for the artist, are most clearly expressed by Morris' statement of his own methods and attitude.
"I have recently come to recognize more clearly the influence of . . . external nature upon my work although I arrived at this by an inverted approach. I must put it this way. I was not exploring 'nature' in my work, but was exploring rather the surface of a canvas and the ways paint works upon that surface; I was not responding to the images of nature, but to the painted surface. However, I did respond, and the images did have a way of leading me. When this happened, when the images did lead, it was by their implication rather than their figuration, by the fact of their being provocative rather than descriptive. I had set paint. moving across the surface in ways that interested me, but had also created suggestions which became important factors as the painting moved toward its completion. Those images and suggestions are elusive, but they are also very powerful. Maybe they didn't suggest leaves, but they may have suggested a fluttering movement. There was not the specific silhouette of things seen, but a suggestion of the forces that shape such things -- a sense of the mutability and constant change which is the force and life in nature.
"I can perhaps conclude I had moved so far away from the object that I now met it again from the other side to discover a new aspect of nature. It was not that I alone had become nature in the work of art, but in this transposed approach I had discovered a new segment of my experience which was alive, intimately vivid, and very real. I hadn't gone back to nature, though I may have entered its back door. . . . However unexpected the resulting image may be, I do assume it taps a common reservoir of human experience, and that my own experience within these terms has become accessible to others."
In this approach, nature enters the work of art subconsciously in response to the act of painting, but its influence becomes conscious and has a varying but felt effect on the final form of the painting. Indeed the battle may be to keep its more obvious aspects from taking over too completely, so that only its deeper and intuitively sensed significance will emerge. Paul Jenkins says: "The painting experience becomes visualized in the act of painting. But this in no way means I have nothing in my 'head' when I start a painting. Nor does it mean I have visions. The very size of the canvas dictates to me. A white canvas doesn't frighten me, the grain of the canvas gives me a clue, the time of year gets in the act, everything involving nature is there, and it is a veritable Pandora's Box. Sometimes it is like keeping a storm door shut with one hand and painting with the other. Keeping the known out so the unknown may enter." And he adds, "Nature, for me, has most meaning when, through a state of being rather than watching it, as one would watch a pot boil, I am able to achieve cognizance of original meanings."
Other painters, like Helen Frankenthaler, are not averse to watching nature, or even sketching it. And when her big abstract pictures are finished, they often appear to her "as landscapes or vistas, motion caught." But they are not painted from her nature sketches, and while she is working on them she is more conscious of abstract form, color and construction than she is of natural references. "So, in one sense, I could say that nature has very little to do with my pictures. And yet I'm puzzled; obviously it creeps in! In the past couple of years I have made paintings in which an animal shape or a nose and mouth, numbers, apples, etc., appear as part of an otherwise totally abstract picture. These images are not put down to be recognized for what they are, nor are they surrealist. They seem to be spontaneous and necessary points of departure, often disappearing completely, on and off, before the picture is finished. As I say, I'm puzzled because I don't have a fixed idea about this, and I seem to find myself in something new in terms of nature. I think that, instead of nature or image, it has to do with spirit or sensation that can be related by a kind of abstract projection."
Perhaps the most significant part of these statements and many like them is the artist's identification of himself, through his art, with nature -- that is, with a larger and more imperative order of things than self alone -- and the corollary belief that his art is the expression of common experience accessible to others. Another quotation, from a statement by Richard Pousette-Dart, may serve to emphasize this point on a more philosophical level: "The only relationship of my painting to nature is simply through me as a mystical part of nature and the universe. . . . A work of art for me is a window, a touchstone or doorway to every other human being. It is my contact and union with the universe."
The paintings that reflect this general redirection of abstract expressionism have a new "feel," a new aura, although they have changed less in outward appearance than one might expect. They are still predominantly abstract, despite the fact that several younger painters, like Helen 'Frankenthaler, are hospitable to natural images if they make their entrance spontaneously. Accident and some degree of automatism still prevail, as well as that intuitive, unpremeditated quality which is at the heart of the movement. What is new is a sensation of deeper space and greater spaciousness, of the presence of light and air, of the movement of elemental forces more sweeping than those of personal passion. If these paintings have lost some of the anguished emotional intensity of the movement.'s earlier phase, they have gained in breadth of feeling, in lyricism -- one might even say in common humanity.
Not all of these qualities will be found universally, but they seem to be becoming more widespread, even among the leaders and founders of the movement. At least there is, to this writer, a strong sense of "landscape space" (as Ippolito calls it) in recent works by de Kooning and Gottlieb, forces analogous to those of storm in Kline's Laureline and swirling waters in Pollock's Ocean Grayness, palpable atmosphere and a glowing light in all Guston's paintings. These analogies may be entirely unconscious on the artist's part; both Gottlieb and Guston have denied any but the most remote involvement with nature, and there is no written evidence from the others. Nevertheless, the impression on the observer of such analogies (though certainly not of a direct interpretation of nature) remains strong. And as Guston remarks, "It is not always given to me to know what my pictures 'look like,' being more aware of my intentions and doubts."
Another quality which seems to be changing the character of abstract expressionism today is a new sensuousness, a growing pleasure in color, texture, brushwork. "Even the word 'beautiful' is not as unpopular as it used to be," Kyle Morris observes in his "Vanguard" catalogue. Insofar as this is a technical development, an assurance in the vocabulary of the movement, it is outside our inquiry. But one aspect of it, which does bear on the relation of art. to nature, is the sub-movement called abstract impressionism, actually a rather amorphous trend within the general boundaries of abstract expressionism.
Historically, impressionism was concerned with translating visual reality to canvas in terms of light and color. As the movement developed, however, and especially in the late work of Claude Monet, the object tended to dissolve, while light and color, captured for their own sensuous appeal, assumed independent, virtually abstract roles. Though coming from an opposite direction, abstract impressionism has reached a similar point, its aim, in Edward Corbett's definition, "to create the painting as an autonomy of sensation, of color -- above all, of light." This is, of course, only a special aspect of the general trend toward nature already discussed, but it is a little different in its elevation of visual sensuousness. Of the painters represented here, Hyde Solomon and perhaps Angelo Ippolito seem closest in their work to its aims, although Philip Guston, Paul Jenkins and Joan Mitchell have also been claimed for the movement.
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