Abstract Expressionism

is an art historian and critic, as well as Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, and Director of its Research Center. His publications include Abstract Expressionism (1990) and Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas – A Catalogue Raisonné (1998) DAVID ANFAM

is a freelance curator and former Director of Collections at the Tate Gallery, where he organised the 1999 Jackson Pollock retrospective

EDITED BY DAVID ANFAM

EDITED BY DAVID ANFAM

JEREMY LEWISON

is a Contributing Editor of Art in America. His books include The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (1998)

CARTER RATCLIFF

is Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Royal Academy of Arts, London EDITH DEVANEY

is a freelance researcher who has helped organise exhibitions for the Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York CHRISTIAN WURST

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

is Senior Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

SUSAN DAVIDSON

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

When Abstract Expressionism exploded out of New York and the West Coast in the aftermath of the Second World War, it changed the art world forever. Initially engendering shock and outrage, the intensity and mesmerising beauty of canvases by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline and others soon ensured their acceptance as icons of twentieth-century art – and immensely influential ones.

This handsome volume accompanies the first exhibition to present an overview of Abstract Expressionism in Britain since 1959. In addition to masterworks by the painters mentioned above, the selection celebrates the movement’s huge diversity, including works by sculptors such as David Smith and Louise Nevelson as well as the photographers Aaron Siskind, Barbara Morgan and Minor White.

Using fascinating archive photographs and a comprehensive chronology of the era, the authors explore the roots of the movement in the Great Depression, its reception around the world, the ground-breaking role played by the art dealers Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, and the complex and often tumultuous relationships between the protagonists.

On the cover: detail of cat. 65, Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952.

Oil, enamel and aluminium paint with glass on canvas, 212.1 x 488.9 cm.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Purchased 1973

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CONTENTS 7

President’s Foreword

8

Sponsor’s Statement

10

Acknowledgements

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An Unending Equation DAVID ANFAM

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‘A New Spirit of Freedom’: Abstract Expressionism in Europe in the Aftermath of War JEREMY LEWISON

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An Improvised Community CARTER RATCLIFF

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Feminism for the Most Masculine: How Two Women Launched an Art Market SUSAN DAVIDSON

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Chronology EDITH DEVANEY WITH CHRISTIAN WURST CATALOGUE PLATES

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Painting and Sculpture

284

Works on Paper and Photography

305

Lenders to the Exhibition

306

Endnotes

311

Select Bibliography

312

Photographic Acknowledgements

314

Index

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Pollock, Siskind, Gottlieb and Tomlin (cat. 47) of unknown scripts that feign to be a language or sign system without spelling anything – not to mention Smith’s vividly unreadable The Letter and its serried glyphs (cat. 52). What counts above

all is the urgency and inventiveness of Pollock’s mark-making, which, in Male and Female, melds with his still underrated gifts as a colourist.

With the seismic Mural executed for the entrance hallway of Peggy Guggenheim’s

Manhattan townhouse (cat. 13), Pollock at last found the work area in which the momentum of his arm and entire body, not just that of the hand/wrist, could have free rein. If any single piece jump-started the drive to Abstract Expressionism’s

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Fig. 17 Mark Rothko, Rites of Lilith, 1945. Oil on canvas, 208 x 270.8 cm. Private collection Fig. 18 Richard Serra, Belts, 1966–67. Vulcanised rubber and neon, 182.9 x 762 x 50.8 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Panza Collection, 91.3863

apogee it was Mural, the first outstanding, large-scale painterly abstraction ever created in America.58 Its size, audacity and sheer panache reverberated far and wide and fast. Within two years Mural had made itself felt in such an unlikely quarter as Rothko’s practice: his Rites of Lilith (fig. 17) evinces a combination of scale and swirling calligraphy unprecedented in the artist’s output. And the shock waves continued: from Gorky’s The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), the sudden dimensions of which are inexplicable without regard to Mural, to Richard Serra’s Belts (fig. 18) – an avowed, industrial-minded response to

Pollock’s tempestuous, biomorphic canvas.

Ultimately, Mural was the quantum leap that within four years was to make landfall in the 1947–50 pourings.

As Mural heralded a turning point, so 1946–48 witnessed Abstract Expressionism enter a new maturity. Thereafter, things moved very quickly. Hitherto the artists had been preoccupied with dark endings and dissolution. Newman’s titles, such as Pagan Void (1946; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) and Death of Euclid (1947; Frederick R Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles), conveyed this eschatology, as did their black suns, chaotic grounds and errant verticals –

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Fig. 24 Richard Pousette-Dart, Time Is the Mind of Space, Space Is the Body of Time, 1979–82.

Acrylic on linen, three panels, each 227.3 x 158.8 cm.

Private collection Fig. 25 Andy Warhol, Yarn Painting, 1983.

Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 137 x 523 cm.

Kunsthalle Bielefeld – Permanent loan of STAFF Stiftung Lemgo

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glory of punchy, trowelled colour (cat. 113); Pousette-Dart pictured the supernal harmony of the spheres with almost Phileban geometries (fig. 24) and Smith’s ‘Cubi’ gleamed with light, texture and openness – sturdy material portals onto further metaphysical prospects (cat. 119).

Perhaps most movingly, Guston brought the wheel full circle by returning in 1970 to the existential figuration and loaded metaphors with which the artists had begun some thirty years before (cat. 130).

In his Low Tide the hobnail shoe sole/soul in The Porch returns,86 aggrandised, as a shifting signifier. It mimics the ultimate Greek letter ‘omega’, a nascent hairdecked head, which in another work from

the same year becomes that of the artist’s wife, Musa, and a sun rising or setting on the blood-red swell of the horizon. Thus, eschatology and new beginnings, fear and hope, contend. In fact, these revenants even multiply across the picture as though giving birth to themselves, an impish testament to the inherent fecundity of image-making whereby a stroke or two of paint begets fresh forms out of flatness. Howsoever, as the title implies, they will not be erased by time or tide.

And by the time Abstract Expressionism’s last major exponent, de Kooning, died in 1997, Pollock & Co. had passed into the stuff of legend, Warhol had created his savvy machine-made ripostes to

Jackson’s auratic, hand-crafted traceries (fig. 25),87 Brazilian-born Vik Muniz had twice removed this selfsame subject from reality by translating Namuth’s ‘action’ photographs into iffy chocolate syrup and Foucault had long since proclaimed a nihilistic postmodern era in which the ‘human’ would be erased, ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.88 However, Abstract Expressionism is unlikely ever to be erased as long as there is a history of art. Indeed, given its address to the human condition, its ongoing legacy, the flow of new interpretations and its sheer heft and spread, our phenomenon looks like an equation at once unruly and unending.

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An Improvised Community CARTER RATCLIFF

In 1926 a young native of Rotterdam named Willem de Kooning stowed away on a westbound ship and landed, eventually, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Just across the Hudson River stood Manhattan.

Visits to the metropolis convinced him that America was exactly as the stereotype defined it: a nation hurtling into the future. Enthralled, de Kooning got a job with Eastman Brothers, a design firm with offices near Manhattan’s theatre district.

His training at the Rotterdam Academy made him more than equal to any task the Eastman brothers could assign; and he soon learned that Old-World standards need not be met.1 Clients wanted flash, not solid craftsmanship. De Kooning supplied it with ease – and with pleasure, for he admired the raffish indifference to decorum that charged Manhattan with its slangy verve. In work done for himself, however, he was impossibly demanding.

Fig. 41 Willem de Kooning (centre with light hair) with the author Noel Clad and his wife on the steps of 88 East 10th Street, next door to the Tanager Gallery, New York, 5 April 1959. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Premium Archive, Getty Images Collection

Before the 1920s were over he had earned a reputation for being unable to finish a painting. Often he would destroy a canvas in a fit of frustration. He had, he realised, no very clear idea of how to be a modern artist. Then, as he recalled nearly four decades later, ‘I was lucky enough … to meet the three smartest guys on the scene: Gorky, Stuart Davis and John Graham’.2 Davis was the oldest of the three, the inventor of a distinctively American variety of Cubism: brightly coloured, assertively flat and enlivened by a syncopated angularity. Sporting a shaved scalp and a cavalry officer’s posture, John Graham – born Ivan Dombrowsky, in Kiev – was a charismatic figure given to proclaiming the importance of African sculpture, the occult and the art of Picasso (fig. 42). A writer as well as a painter, he published System and Dialectics of Art in 1937. Part visionary tract, part insider’s guide to the hidden world of New York artists, it featured a list of America’s ‘outstanding’ young avant-garde painters.

Although de Kooning appeared on this list, he did not yet feel confident enough to abandon his career as a commercial artist.3 Not until he first visited Arshile Gorky’s

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1960

1962

1964

Frankenthaler, first retrospective, the Jewish Museum, NY, curated by Frank O’Hara.

Kline dies of heart disease on 13 May.

De Kooning receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

‘60 American Painters, 1960: Abstract Expressionist Painting of the Fifties’, Walker Art Center, MN. De Kooning is elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1961 Rothko retrospective, MoMA. Smith begins the ‘Zig’ sculptures (cat. 105).

De Kooning takes American citizenship and moves to Springs, East Hampton, NY. ‘Newman–de Kooning’, Allan Stone Gallery, NY. Hess describes Newman as one of the ‘most remarkable artists alive today’.

‘Franz Kline Memorial Exhibition’, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington DC.

1963 Pousette-Dart retrospective, Whitney Museum (fig. 103).

Smith features in Documenta III in Kassel, West Germany.

1965 Two key exhibitions cement the Abstract Expressionist canon: ‘The Decisive Years: 1943–1953’, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and ‘New York School, The First Generation: Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s’ at LACMA, CA. Motherwell retrospective, MoMA.

Still moves to New Windsor, MD.

Fig. 100 William Baziotes in his studio, New York, February 1962. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah.

Getty Images Collection Fig. 101 Ad Reinhardt at work on a ‘black’ painting in his studio, New York, July 1966. Photograph by John Loengard. The LIFE Picture Collection Fig. 102 Franz Kline in his studio on 14th Street, New York, April 1961. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images collection

Rosenberg, ‘Barnett Newman, A Man of Controversy and Spiritual Grandeur’, Vogue.

Kline, exhibition at MoMA, organised by Frank O’Hara; tours to Amsterdam, Brussels, Basel, Vienna, London and Paris.

Gottlieb, major exhibition, Walker Art Center, MN. At the 7th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil, he becomes the first American artist to be awarded the Gran Premio.

President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints Smith to serve as one of the first members of the National Council of the Arts. However, the sculptor is fatally injured in a car crash on 23 May, at the age of 59.

Krasner retrospective, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Newman figures in the United States pavilion at the 8th Bienal de São Paulo.

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1966

1968

1971

Newman, first solo museum exhibition, ‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Although critics are not sympathetic to the exhibition, the public attendance is good.

De Kooning retrospective, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The artist makes his first visit to Netherlands since 1926 for the opening.

The exhibition tours to MoMA; Tate Gallery, London; Art Institute of Chicago; and LACMA.

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX, is inaugurated. Commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil in 1964, it features fourteen paintings by the artist (fig. 104).

1967

Gottlieb, retrospective exhibition at the Whitney and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

1972

1969

Publication of Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Viking Press, NY), a seminal study of the movement.

Guston, frustrated by abstraction, moves to Woodstock, and returns to representation. The paintings he produces there include depictions of the Ku Klux Klan.

‘New York Painting and Sculpture 1940–1970’, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Marca-Relli retrospective, Whitney Museum.

Pollock retrospective, MoMA.

Fig. 103 Richard Pousette-Dart in his studio, Suffern, New York, February 1962. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images Collection Fig. 104 North Walls of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Photograph by Hickey-Robertson

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1974

1970

Gottlieb dies on 4 March. MoMA organises a memorial exhibition.

Publication of Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (Praeger Publishers, NY).

1979

Deeply depressed, Rothko commits suicide at his studio in New York on 25 February.

Guston exhibits his representational paintings at Marlborough Gallery, NY, for the first time. The scathing reviews lead to his increased self-imposed isolation.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art devotes a retrospective to Still – the largest such exhibition that, until then, it has ever granted a living artist.

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8 Arshile Gorky, Self-portrait, 1937 Oil on canvas, 141 x 86.4 cm. Private collection

9 Willem de Kooning, Untitled, c. 1939 Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 95.8 x 73.7 cm.

Private collection

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51 David Smith, Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith, 1949–50 Steel and bronze on marble base, 117 x 103.5 x 58.1 cm. Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg

52 David Smith, The Letter, 1950 Welded steel, 95.2 x 63.5 x 30.5 cm.

Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica

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71 Barnett Newman, Ulysses, 1952 Oil on canvas, 335.3 x 127 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. Formerly in the collection of Christophe de Menil, 1991-43

72 Clyfford Still, PH-4, 1952 Oil on canvas, 299.7 x 232.4 cm. Lent by the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver.

Gift of the Clyfford E. Still Estate to the City and County of Denver

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88 Sam Francis, Summer No. 2, 1957 Oil on canvas, 183.2 x 243.8 cm. Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections.

Gift of the Richard and Jeanne Levitt Family in memory of Ellis and Nelle Levitt, 1984.25

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