Glarner Pereira de Kooning Pollock Baziotes Motherwell Tomlin MacIver Graves Bloom Lawrence Wyeth

AMERICAN ART has never experienced so sudden and so spontaneous a change as the general swing towards abstract painting that has taken place during the last fifteen years. Why this occurred is hard to say. Perhaps the catastrophe of another world war made social values seem so meaningless that the artist turned to more purely esthetic forms of expression. Or it may be that, in the natural course of action and reaction, the time was ripe for a new cycle of abstract experiment and that now we were better prepared, both artistically and critically, by our earlier experience. Whatever the causes, abstraction became the dominant trend in our creative painting soon after 1940. Glarner Pereira de Kooning Pollock Baziotes Motherwell Tomlin MacIver Graves Bloom Lawrence Wyeth

A striking feature of the new movement has been its diversity. Our pioneer abstractionists--men like Weber, Dove and Stuart Davis--brought their highly individual styles to a mature flowering and began to have a considerable influence on younger painters. Other artists reinvestigated virtually all the traditional forms of European abstraction and adapted these to their own needs. Thus we have had revivals of cubism, futurism and an especially vigorous American school of geometrical abstraction, strongly influenced by the Dutch painter Mondrian.

But by far the most fertile and popular form of abstraction grew out of surrealism and, like it, has been deeply introspective in nature. One of the first to develop in this direction was Arshile Gorky, soon joined by a brilliant group of younger painters including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes and the somewhat older Bradley Walker Tomlin. Sharing, at least in theory, the surrealist distrust of consciously wrought design, this group has sought to work instinctively, letting the brush (or the dripped paint) wander over the surface until it captured, by the character of its patterns, an expression of conscious, or more often subconscious, states of mind. This one aspect of their work--its automatism--has made it our most controversial and most frequently attacked branch of modern painting, but in practice the technique of these artists has not been quite so uncontrolled as it sounds in theory, and their art is far from formless. Its strength lies in an evocative suggestion of symbols and elusive meanings, and it has produced, in the hands of the different painters, styles of marked individuality.

In spite of its wider acceptance by artists and public, abstract art is still not popular. Periodically it is accused of being "dehumanized," a refuge from reality, a cult of obscurity. Of course abstraction has its limitations. It cannot easily treat concrete themes like the moods of nature or social justice, and it seldom has regional color. But all serious abstract painting does deal with reality, often profoundly, because the very nature and relation of its forms are symbols of the nature and order of life, and it is only through order that life acquires meaning. Nor can the abstract method be accused of anti-humanitarianism simply because it does not portray human beings. The preoccupation of much abstract art with the subconscious is comparable to psychoanalysis, except that it is intuitive rather than analytical. At the opposite extreme, geometrical abstraction is an exercise of pure intellect, though again on an intuitive rather than a scientific plane. Together they are the symbolic expression of man's sensual and rational nature.

Obviously abstract art deals with reality on a much more general level than representational art. It cannot, alone, fulfill the legitimate need for other kinds of painting that are concerned with more specific experience. Already there are some signs of slackening in the abstract tide. Whether that occurs or not, abstraction has enriched American culture not only with a notable body of work but also with perceptions and techniques that will long prove useful. Indeed, many of these have already found their way into our more naturalistic painting where their influence, together with that of surrealism, has done much to free the artist from conventional limitations. The visionary art of Morris Graves and the poetic fantasies of Loren Maclver are examples. Neither painter could be called abstract, neither could be called surrealist; yet it is doubtful whether their free play of forms and of fancy would have been possible without the example of those movements.

Our contemporary expressionists have also been affected, though to a lesser extent, by abstract and surrealist influences. Expressionism, as one of our earliest and most durable modern movements, had of course its own tradition of freedom and radical improvisation. When, late in life, one of its pioneers like Marsden Hartley finally reached the full measure of his powers, he owed little to our current abstract and surrealist schools. On the other hand, there has been a noticeable trend towards a more abstract style, and occasionally towards more fantastic content, on the part of such different expressionists as Kuniyoshi, Watkins, Weber, Lebrun, Lawrence and Hyman Bloom. In their case it involved no very great change in direction, only a somewhat different emphasis, but they seem to have responded, at least in part, to the prevailing atmosphere of our day. Virtually all of them have done their finest work in this period and thereby maintained expressionism as a major movement in our contemporary art.

Actually it is a little misleading to call expressionism a movement because its members have never been bound together by the same sense of kinship that one finds among the abstract and surrealist painters. Stylistically, they have in common only the fact that they use free distortions for expressive effect--but the degree and nature of their distortions vary immensely. In attitude they are generally romantic, but in subject matter they have no common program whatever (except for the social protest group) and range over the whole of life and death, of war and peace, of nature and religion. Probably few of these men ever think of themselves as expressionists but only as artists who are using both modern and conventional means to paint, with the utmost skill at their command, those things that matter Most deeply to them. After half a century of steady development, expressionism has lost much of its revolutionary aspect and has become a widely accepted part of our artistic tradition.

Many other kinds of painting have continued to flourish during the last hundred years. Except for militant regionalism, which has much abated, virtually all our earlier trends have persisted and, in several instances, have reached a greater power and maturity than they had achieved before. Some of the finest paintings of the American scene are to be found in the late work of Hopper, Marin, Hartley and Burchfield, though numerically the movement has probably dwindled. Social protest painting has changed its sights somewhat, but has still found ample targets in war, corruption and human suffering. All its leading figures--Shahn, Evergood, Levine and Grosz--have grown in artistic stature during these years and have, on the whole, become less polemical, deeper in their understanding of human frailty. As a result, the movement has lost some of its bitterness, but it is still primarily concerned with the social relations of men, and it is still, on occasion, a goad to the conscience of society.

At the conservative extreme, stylistically speaking, is a movement of exact, almost microscopic realism which has grown rapidly in recent years. Its genesis is complex and goes back at least to the early 1930's. One of its ancestors was probably Grant Wood's American Gothic, and while Wood himself soon abandoned the meticulous style of that picture, a group of quite different American Scene painters--principally Paul Cadmus and Jared French--pushed it in the direction of an even greater realism. Another ancestor was the precisionist painting of the Immaculates which, in Sheeler's hands, had become more and more realistic during the 1930's. Still another ancestor was surrealism and those American artists, such as Albright, Blume and Pickens, who came varyingly under its influence. A final source may have been sharp-focus photography which helped reveal the unexpected patterns of natural forms seen microscopically or in arbitrary perspective. Since 1940 these diverse currents have tended to join in a school of meticulously realistic painters who have been animated by various aims, ranging from playful fantasy to a serious concern--as with Andrew Wyeth--for the inherent poetry in places and things. At times the movement has seemed a little mannered and eclectic (particularly in its borrowings from early renaissance art or from our own trompe l'oeil realists of the 19th century), but most of its members are still extremely young and its eventual direction is far from settled.

In spite of the recent popularity of abstraction, it is apparent that the last hundred years has produced, in America, a greater diversity of styles, subjects and attitudes than any comparable period of the past. This trend toward diversity has grown steadily throughout the 20th century, which might justly be called the age of individualism in the arts. Individualism is, in one sense, the fruit of democracy because democracy permits each artist to find his own solutions without the restraint of a state-approved set of esthetic standards. But democracy does not, alone, automatically produce diversity--witness the long dominion of realism in our 19th-century painting. It is only when traditional values break down, when old faiths waver and a desperate uncertainty besieges mankind, that the artist rises instinctively to the challenge and seeks new truths by exploring with new tools the many corridors of the human heart and mind. It is a lonely search, but a heroic one.

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