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 Beneath this quality of visual excitement, supporting and renewing it, there often runs a strong current of feeling akin to religion. It may take the form of an ever-fresh wonder: "The mystical quality of the object has always kept me spellbound," Lyonel Feininger once wrote. It may be Lee Gatch's avowed pantheism. It may be Ibram Lassaw's mystical identification of self with the whole order of things: "Man is part and parcel of the total ecology of the universe and fulfills his function . . . along with plants, animals, stars and galaxies. I am nature."This widespread sense that nature is more than a convenient storehouse of forms, colors or even symbols, that it has ultimate meaning in itself as the visible, though endlessly mysterious, manifestation of an eternal order, is reflected in these artists' attitude toward their art. Painting and sculpture, for them, are means to an end -- the end being the exploration and revelation of this ultimate meaning to whatever limits it can be penetrated by reason and intuition.
Such an attitude is in fairly direct opposition to the exaltation of "the primacy of the medium," which the critic Sonya Rudikoff associates with abstract expressionism and indeed with avant-garde art of every age. While the relation of the abstract expressionists to nature will be discussed later, it is worth noting that one artist, Perle Fine, who has been closely associated with them, writes: "When I first moved my studio to the country, and the wonder and grandeur of the world of nature captivated me completely, I felt I must find new means to express these things," and that her recent use of gold and silver in her paintings was in response to this experience, rather than to purely technical demands.
Finally, one may perhaps say that the work of those artists who are consciously and principally involved with nature tends to be more objective than subjective, although these are slippery terms. In one sense, all art is subjective. Even the search for essence is deeply involved with the artist's personal response to his subject; "he is interested in what he 'feels' about it and therefore paints that; the result is often called abstract," says Mark Tobey. At times, the response seems vastly more important than what caused it, and almost unrelated to any quality inherent in its source. When Louise Bourgeois created her Garden at Night, she was not at all concerned with gardens but was seeking to objectify a recurrent experience of mixed attraction and fear inspired by the mysterious darkness lurking beneath plants under even a clear night sky. Nevertheless, the majority of abstract artists in this group maintain a certain equilibrium between the inherent character of things and their own responses to them.
Hyde Solomon speaks for many when he writes, "It is my wish to give objective form to my own subjective feelings about nature. First the artist sees the object (say a Iree), and it expresses something to him. Basically, it is the same something that attracts many other artists. But when the particular artist begins to use his own materials, something else comes out. His own personality merges. You cannot measure what occurs." Jan Gelb puts the same thought a little differently: "In one sense, my work is subjective. But my subjectivity, I hope, can arouse responses in other humans who react to natural forces and qualities in ways not too different from mine. Perhaps that is why I am not dismayed when I find myself dealing with 'clichés.' It is in the ruts of these well-worn clichés that truth lies sedimented, and where it can best be recognized intuitively."
In short, this kind of art springs from unique, personal perceptions, which are bound to be subjective, but they are perceptions of a reality which looms larger to the artist than himself and which is available to all. "If this is a subjective approach," says Karl Knaths, "the work itself should give the effect of actual reality. It must not be false to our best perception of the truth." The result is inevitably a less egocentric, less introspective art. Its ideal is militantly stated by David Hare: "Objective creation in any form of art is that which unites the individual most closely with life and living, through a fundamental and innate understanding, a symbiosis between man and life. . . . One does not live in a personalized vacuum, but with the whole, great, round, beautiful, terrifying and joyous earth, and God pity the man who turns his eyes only inward and pulls out of himself one cold, infinitely useless lump after another."
Judging by their words and their works, many artists share to a great degree the related attitudes discussed above. But stylistically one could scarcely find a less homogeneous group. Except for the fact that they are all more or less abstract, the diversity of manners ranges from Joseph Stella's futurism to Mark Tobey's evanescent "white writing." from Arthur Dove's ragged patterns to Pereira's geometric ones and William Baziotes' fluid ones, from the stark metal sculpture of David Smith to the primitive wooden forms of Louise Bourgeois. Sometimes it seems as if a common denominator nilght be found in a penchant for a more concrete imagery, for the use of fragments of' recognizable visual reality in a semi-abstract rather than purely abstract way. This is predominantly true in the case of those artists who abstract directly from nature. Stuart Davis may stand as the prototype, with his extraordinary sensitivity for equivalent shapes, colors and rhythms, which translate and intensify his observations. Yet there are other artists in this group who do not abstract from nature and whose work is more truly non-representational. Some are mystics, like Tobey and Lassavv, who find nature a part of spirit and self. Others, like Schueler and Fine, have come nearly full circle from abstract expressionism, but still share some of its distrust of concrete imagery. The true bond between all these artists is their attitude toward the external world, their search to embody the essence of its meaning. This search dictates no common stylistic or technical procedure. It leaves to every artist the painful discovery of his own best methods.
But this is only part of the story, for there are today nearly as many abstract artists who are not consciously concerned with nature in any of the ways so far discussed. Most of them are to be found within the general boundaries of abstract expressionism, a movement which has released energies felt far beyond its own limits. And abstract expressionism is, to begin with, a profoundly introspective form of art, drawing heavily on subconscious promptings, on the uncalculated motion of the painter's hand (so-called action painting), on aulomatism or semi-automatism, and on accident. Its principal aim, so far as it has been rationalized, is the expression of states of inner being, the spontaneous transferral to canvas of the complex impulses of the mind. It is an egocentric art in the literal, not derogatory, meaning of the word; the artist is more concerned with himself than he is with outer reality.
He is also more concerned with the "act" of painting than with the use of painting as means to an end. This has undeniable logic in the theory of action painting because of the importance given to the unpremeditated gesture of the brush on the canvas. In actual practice, however, the degree of automatism in this kind of art, though variable, does not seem generally as great as the theory might indicate. The highly organized character of Jackson Pollock's late work and of Willem de Kooning's major paintings as well as the explicit statements of others (and the evidence of their work) all point to a predominantly conscious control. Oddly enough, therefore, the abstract expressionist attitude, though coming from a different direction, approaches that of the pure abstractionists, who hold that the work of art is a completely meaningful object in itself.
Both maintain its essentially selfsufficient nature, which communicates only in terms of its own laws -- esthetic in the case of the purists, psychological in the case of the abstract expressionists. And these laws, though different in inception, turn out to be not so different in character: an insistence on the flat plane of the canvas, on preserving the character of the medium rather than using its as a tool for illusion, a sense that forms and colors affect each other and must be organized to "work" together for the end sought. The ends of abstract expressionism are poles apart from those of the purists, but the methods and the basic attitudes are related. No purist could have painted Adolph Gottlieb's Red Sky, but he might well have written the essential part of Gottlieb's statement: "I never use nature as a starting point, I never abstract from nature, I never consciously think of nature when I paint. . . . In the painting Red Sky my intention was simply to divide the canvas roughly in two, using red paint in one area and black paint in the other. . . . Just a simple statement about disparate elements." Several abstract painters, outside both the purist and expressionist orbits, share these beliefs, which Charles Schucker sums up as, "The reality begins at the canvas."
And yet relatively few abstract expressionists feel quite so sure as Gottlieb of their independence of nature. "Every medium has a life of its own," Hans Hofmann writes. "A creative mind senses and uses this life to produce pictorial motion. Motion reflects the impulses from which it has arrived. . . . Pictorial motion, therefore, reflects the impulses which the mind receives from visual experience. All forces that animate the creative act go through a process of enlightened spiritual digestion. The creative act consists, therefore, in the dual act of embodying visual and human experience in the nature of the medium of expression." This appears to give considerable importance to visual experience in the creative act, but we must still try to determine what kinds of visual experience are involved and what the process of their spiritual digestion is. One answer is supplied by Rosemarie Beck when she says, "If I seem to approach nature, I do so only by analogy. I never directly abstract from nature or use nature as a motif, but I want my 'thing' to be natural, to have a natural teleology. In the degree that I succeed, I don't escape nature. But I can't answer honestly without avowing my first loyalty, which is to the syntax of painting itself." This is also the interpretation of the critic Meyer Schapiro when he remarks, of the abstract expressionist, "Ignoring natural shapes, he is alert to qualities of movement, interplay, change and becoming in nature."
These are certainly among nature's aspects and to the extent that they enter, consciously or unconsciously, into painting of this kind, they may be said to constitute a natural influence. We can perhaps go further and show that even natural shapes are not without an obscure influence, too -- if only in the resistance of the artist to them, or perhaps more accurately in his sense of a disturbing relationship between them and his own forms. "The ethics involved in 'seeing,' as one is painting -- the purity of the act, so to speak -- is more actual to me than preassumed images or ideas of picture structure," Philip Guston writes. "But this is half the story: I doubt if this ethic would be real enough without the 'pull' of the known image for its own 'light,' its sense of 'place.' It is like the impossibility of living entirely in the moment. without the tug of memory. The resistance of forms against losing their identities, with, however, their desire to partake of each other, leads finally to a showdown, as they shed their minor relations and confront each other more nakedly."
Still, the fact remains that the abstract expressionist has been primarily concerned with self rather than a larger sphere of reality; he has reached a point, in Beck's words, "where we are unwilling to trust much of anything except our own inner realities," and certainly not images or equivalents or symbols of a natural order. Paradoxically, his art, which started as a gesture of supreme freedom, has tended to imprison him within the confines of self. As Guston once wrote in a letter, "I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol, in our time, should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart." And in his statement he adds, "I think the only pressing question in painting is: when are you through? For my own part it is when I know I've 'come out the other side.' This occasional and sudden awareness is the truest image for me. The clock-like path of this recognition suppresses a sense of victory; it is an ironic encounter and more of a mirror than a picture."
A mirror, presumably, of the artist himself. "Art makes and destroys itself," says Beck. "So what you see, the impulse to go back to nature, is perhaps only an effort to rid ourselves of a crippling selfconsciousness and to acquire richness, which can once again be destroyed." Abstract expressionism has produced some of the most memorable paintings of our day -- memorable for a self-searching intensity, which may be said to parallel, in the creative sphere, Freud's early and agonizing struggles with self-analysis. But it has also confronted the artist at times with a paralyzing dilemma between weariness of self and distrust of any other source of understanding, a kind of introspective impasse such as that which appears to have shadowed Jackson Pollock's last years. No escape is possible if the loss of faith in image and symbol is the genuine symtom of a deeper loss of faith in the things imaged and symbolized. Actually, it seems more often to be only the loss of faith in an older method, which is too obvious and oversimplifies the complexity of human experience.
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