The
second in a two-part look at the 'Abstract Expressionism' exhibition at the Royal Academy,
London, (first part here) which doubles as another entry in the series on
abstract and semi-abstract art.
”We
favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the
large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to
reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they
destroy illusion and reveal the truth.”
-
Newman, Gottleib and Rothko, letter to the New York Times, 1943
Just
Abstract Enough
So...
those Abstract Expressionists, just how abstract were they really? Or
for that matter, why feel the pull of abstraction at
all? As covered in the first part, abstraction seemed to offer
universalism in art – a pan-language of non-specifity. And not
having to choose whether to represent involved not
having to choose what to represent.
In this era
America meant the wide open spaces, the Cinemascope of the Western,
but also the skyscraping city. Rightly or wrongly, New York was seen
as the arch-metropolis, the epitome of modernity, quite literally
towering over other towns. The 1962 film 'How the West Was
Won' ended with a montage sequence between the Western trail and a modern multi-lane highway. But montage is a movie trick. How could a visual
artist convey this? By not being stuck with literally depicting
either, Ab Ex were able to suggest both at once. The artists
themselves often moved between urban and rural bases during their
careers, most famously Pollock setting up studio in a Long Island
farmhouse.
Plus, if
counter-intuitively, there's their Surrealist influence. As mentioned
last time, their main interest in Surrealism was automatism. Yet to
the Surrealists this was an end, a creative way to surrender to the
subconscious, while to the Ab Exers it was but a means. So the
Surrealists moved towards symbols, but stopped there. They tended to
blow up symbols, with Dalian hyper-realism, or codify them like Miro.
But Kandinsky's codifying of those symbols until they became
essentially abstract didn't happen for Miro. While, for good or for
ill, the Ab Exers lacked this limit.
However,
though this show is often keen to wax lyrical over, for example,
Rothko “finally pulveris[ing] the figurative residues in his art”,
the clue is not so easily found in the name. Despite such talk,
despite all the ideological fervour and shock reaction which
surrounded the movement, the answer is often 'just abstract enough'.
If Kandinsky, himself a major influence, never truly burnt his boats to representation then much of the
time neither did they.
I
don't intend saying too much about Gorky here, who isn't necessarily
well served by the works shown. But let's start with a look at
'Waters of the Flowery Mill' (1944, above). The
show comments he “had a memorable knack for camouflaging forms that
they hover between objectivity and the organic or convulsive”. And
indeed, peer into it a bit and it looks like a more representative
work overpainted, with sections of the original still poking through.
And in fact Gorky had started out depicting a ruined mill in
Connecticut.
But
if that explains half the title the coloured overpainting seems to
resemble the 'waters'. Gorky had thinned his oils with turpentine, so
they run and smear more like watercolours. It looks like an occluded
front of colour, like the most psychedelic storm ever had been
unleashed on that mill. It's Kandinsky influenced yet with none of
his cosmic elegance. There seems something wild, enticingly out of
control to it. It almost looks ahead to the 'bad trip' sequences of
Sixties cinema. Yet at the same time still pinning it to that mill is
important.
Similarly, David Smith's 'Hudson River Landscape' (1951, above) doesn't represent a
landscape directly.But it's undulations continue to suggest
serpentine river shapes. Marina Vaizey of the Arts Desk describes his sculpture as
“hovering between representation, abstraction and three-dimensional
doodling”. Smith's own picture of it places it before a
landscape.
My
Wife & Other Monsters (De Kooning)
With
Willem de Kooning, however, the show talks of a “lifelong
oscillation between figuration and abstraction”. And while at times
he seems a little confused about the whole business, calling a work
'Abstraction' (1949/50) despite such clear
representational elements as ladders and skulls, his oscillating
rather finding a midpoint seems to cover it. And what's interesting
is that it's not just the figurative works that work, but it's the
figuration that makes them. (Some of the large abstracts frankly
verge on the self-parodic.) De Kooning said “flesh was the reason
paint was invented”, and in fact seems less interested in than fixated
on the subject.
For
example, 'Pink Angels' (1945, above) is based on
the classical genre of the nude. (Anfam believes he has found the
Titian it is based on.) And the tradition of the nude was of course
static and contemplative. De Kooning plays with this, giving us what
looks like a parked posterior in the lower right, but turning giving
the rest of the composition over to a twisting tumult of forms. Is
the main torso attached to that potato head which seems to be looking
back at it? Or is another figure sticking it's neck in? Whose eye is
that in the lower left?
And
there seems something provisional, almost sketch-booky, about those
criss-crossing black lines. Some forms look to be sketched out but
then abandoned. Are the certainties of earlier eras being reduced to
their delineations of the human body, and then parodied with these
grotesque forms?
And
yet there remains something sumptuous and eroticised about all that
piggy-pink, bordered by those sinuous curves. De Kooning often based
elements of his women portraits on cut-outs from glamour magazines. Francis Bacon was painting similarly fractured human forms in
England around this time, sometimes based on classical works,
sometimes bisected by linear frames, sometimes against lurid
backgrounds. But his images were more nakedly disturbing, without
this note of eroticisation.
‘Woman
I’, (1949/50) was, as the name might suggest, the first
in an important series for de Kooning. The famous story is that he
kept reworking it over some
eighteen months, before giving up. Then when the art historian
Meyer Schapiro saw it, with accounts often suggesting a chance
encounter, he was encouraged to take it up again. The series stemmed
from there.
But what's
significant is that the paintings aren’t the result of that long
process, the answer de Kooning came to after all that working out.
The paintings are instead a record of that working out. The unerased
charcoal lines of 'Pink Angels' have now become
oil scrawls, and there's little if any of it's vivid blocks of colour
under those occluded daubs. The thing looks messy, convulsive, less
unfinished than inherently unstable. The canvas doesn't capture the
expression but the struggle to express.
Norbert Lynton
described this series as the “the daughters of 'Demoselles
d'Avignon'”, and it's hard not to think of Picasso. Once
Cubism started to depict living rather than inanimate objects, it’s
analytically divisive eye started to take on a monstrous aspect,
however unintended. It’s like dissecting a frog in science class,
the teacher describes the spread out innards as part of a mechanism
but the child still faints away. This is partly true for Picasso
himself, as some of the Cubist planes found their way into later
portraits, such as 'Weeping Woman' (1937).
But there's
more... Some have suggested that the reason for Picasso's frequent
switching of styles was his frequent switching of lovers. As his
heart would swing almost with each beat, he'd paint his latest beau
lovingly, shortly to be followed by his loathing. Whatever the truth
of this, with 'Woman I' it's like the
contradictions in 'Pink Angels' aren't resolved
but heightened, and de Kooning 's contradictory feelings are fighting
for control of the same canvas. It’s “she loves me, she loves me
not”, only all at once. It’s trying to depict someone and trying
to rub them out trapped in conflict with one another. (Unlike the
philandering Picasso, de Kooning had one long but tempestuous
marriage. Make of that what you want.)
'Woman
as Landscape' (1965/6), with a title either brilliant or infamous, is perhaps the most grotesque of the
bunch. The ‘firm flesh’ of classical sculpture, as bound by rules
of proportion as is geometry, flies out of control, multiplying
itself like cancer cells, bulbously erupting, oozing around the
canvas. It’s simultaneously comic and horrific, the very definition
of grotesque.
These portraits
share a child-like quality. We know the woman in 'Women
I' to be a woman not from anything in her features but her
exaggerated breasts and her women's clothes. (If those are her shoes
and she doesn't just have hooves for feet.) But more, it's as if he's
trying faithfully to depict the likeness of a subject but
unconsciously unloading his psychological baggage concerning it. And
this makes the savagery, the feeling of attack to
the mark-making, still more striking.
On first being
shown, they generated a debate over whether they were misogynistic or
not. It doesn't seem clear why we needed one, the answer stares you
in the face. They certainly mark a good point to reflect how few
female artists there are in this show. But they’re
interestingly misogynistic, they offer insight
into the misogynistic mind. The contradictory roles which patriarchal
society thrusts onto women, normally made into a woman’s problem,
here collide and attempt to overwrite one another.
Up
Abstraction Alley
Regular
readers might concur that I can take to art or music which might not
appeal to the majority. I like to indulgently imagine that, through
writing this stuff, every now and then I'll manage to convey to
someone else just what I see in something. But ironically, every now
and again I'll have pretty much the majority reaction. And in
particular my reaction to the artists here runs the gamut, from
absolute awe to total indifference.
For
example, Franz Klein's furious stabs with painter's brushes just look
to me like something Tony Hancock would throw up to briefly become
the toast of Paris. True, they look expressive. But they only
look expressive. Yes, you can see them as a frozen record of a
gesture. But so what? It seems doubly perplexing that Klein has such
a name when others in the show, such as Pousette-Dart, Smith or Tobey
are less-known.
Yet even Klein
stands above Barnet Newman and Ad Reinhart. The only achievement I
could find in their blocks, squares and stripes of colour was that
they were able to drive themselves further down the blind alley where
Mondrian seemed to have already hit the back wall, an achievement of
sorts even if only of obstinacy. (And yet Reinhardt's cartoons could
be fabulous! Go figure.)
In their case I
just looked across the walls, shrugged and pretty much passed on to
the next room. There seems nothing expressive to these abstracts at
all. It might be bizarre to have such wide-ranging responses to a
show given over to a single movement, in the case of de Kooning to
different pictures by the same artist. But perhaps,
due to their afore-mentioned fixation with individualism, it's
inevitable. And it's also, in it's way, appealing. It
suggests there's no schema to be relied on, that the whole thing's
wide open, that each individual work must be looked at and assessed
on its own merits. This may be more true of visual art than other art
forms, and if so it's to be welcomed.
A much-heralded
hexagonal room, literally the centrepiece of the exhibition, is given
over to Mark Rothko's colour fields – for example 'No. 4
(Yellow, Black, Orange on Yellow/ Untitled)' (1953, above).
Being in this room was, I'll concede, the closest I've come to liking
Rothko. (Though it may have been achieved by comparison to what went
before.) The works seem to shimmer, almost to hover. There are
paintings which come out at you, and paintings which draw you in –
like portals to some other space. Rothko draws you in. And the
feeling is somehow multiplied by multiple paintings - facing each
other, like a room of doors.
This
room was described by Laura Cumming in the Guardian as “a
quasi-chapel”, and there is an association with the coloured light
of stained glass windows. Yet his 'Gethsemane' (1944), placed earlier in the show, looks like a Surrealist work with
the irreligion taken out. While these colour fields can look like
religious works with the religion taken out, like some New Age guru
emitting meaningful-sounding stuff. Notably the guide, which has up
till now said entirely sensible things, starts on stuff like “his
art should in a sense 'defeat' the walls with his plenitude”. Yeah,
deep...
Arguably
it's Rothko's very accomplishment which makes him seductive, and
therefore more dangerous than inferior artists such as Klein.
Rothko's the Pied Piper who can lead you lost. It leaves you thinking
Walter Benjamin was right after all, that art escaped religion when
it beached against modernity and Rothko was left decorating the empty
hulk as everyone else settled in the new land.
Which
seems to link to the famous story of his withdrawing his work from
the Seagram building after finding out it was to be hung in the
restaurant. Leading to the inevitable response - get over it! Rothko
may mark Abstract Expressionism at it's most extreme. He faithfully
reproduced many of Expressionism's self-romanticisations, such as the
depiction of the artist as being beyond society and in touch with
more eternal concerns, and his art thereby being above and beyond
mere commerce.
So many, in fact,
that all Pop Art had to do was to duplicate Dada's withering
critique. (Well, with populism replacing the communism.) Suddenly it
was squaresville to have seriousness of purpose or heroic ambition,
to sit in your studio contemplating a shade of blue. Suddenly it was
de rigeur to be flip and ironic. You didn’t make
art by contemplating the depths of your soul, but by taking surface
features of the world around you and recombining them, in short by
finding virtues in what Ab Ex had seen as problems.
And it was a
similar story with Conceptualism. How to fill those vast shoes Ab Ex
had left us? Don't bother, just kick them away! If they made
gargantuan, aura-emitting canvases we respond with works which are in
themselves incidental – or quite possibly entirely absent. If their
art was to do with the psyche of the individual artist, with art as
therapy, we'll make art as a cultural product, which make it's points
calmly and clearly with none of that self-important tomfoolery. In the recent Tate show 'Conceptual Art in Britain', we saw how
critic and Ab Ex champion Clement Greenberg was a target.
And besides, even
what was positive about Rothko was later supplanted by works such as
Carlos Cruz-Diez’s instillation 'Chromosaturation'
(2010), part of the Haywards' 'Light Show', in which three connected
rooms were saturated with the three primary colours. If Rothko
offered us a door into a colour field, Cruz-Diez opened it and pulled
us through.
Expressionism
Goes Fractal (Pollock)
But
if this seems to be shaping up into an overarching rule, where too
much abstraction is just too bad, it's time to come to the grand
exceptions. Let's remember the image on my visual art blog page, the one picked to sum up
the art that I like, is a Pollock. (Not one in this show, but still a
Pollock.)
This
show was pre-announced with the news that his 'Mural'
and 'Number 11, 1952', better known and henceforth
referred to as 'Blue Poles', were “to be united for the first and probably only time”. And it
not only dedicates it's largest room to them but hangs them on facing
walls, inviting us to compare them.
Certainly,
both are affecting works. I'll often notice other gallery-goers
spending more time reading the indicia than looking at the works.
They'll quickly glance over the thing they nominally came to see, and
they're off. Yet with the Pollocks people knew to linger, trying to
take in the immensity of the thing. We are, however, better off
contrasting them...
'Mural'
was painted in 1943, when Pollock was commissioned by Peggy
Guggenheim to cover a wall of her Manhattan townhouse. It remained
his largest work, and in the words of curator David Anfam
“jump-started abstract expressionism”. It is a
great work. And yet placed in this context, when we can see what
comes ahead, what's most noticeable is how rooted in representation
it is. Another work is called 'Enchanted Forest'
(1947), and like it this is a forest. You can see the canopy at the
top of the picture, the accumulated debris of the ground at the base,
the black thrusts of the tree trunks and branches taking up the
centre. The colour scheme is verdant greens and autumnal yellows.
And
there are ways in which 'Blue Poles' (1952, above)
is similar, thick black lines running over and connecting swirls of
colour. The 'poles' were even made by applying planks of wood. And
yet now the forest is truly gone...
Formally the
change is that this is one of Pollock’s drip works, where he'd
flick the brush above the canvas without directly touching it. These
works have sometimes been called Fractal Expressionism, an evocative
name as one effect is that you never know when to stop looking. Bald
canvas is visible at the edges. Yet there still seems to be no back
to the picture, no canvas wall for your eye to come to rest against,
just further fractal-like recessions. And the harder you look, the
foreground seems to move out, into the room with
you, in almost a 3D effect.
Lou
Reed once said that with 'Metal Machine Music' he
wanted to create a long composition not based around repeated beats
but which never stood still - “like the universe”. And the poles,
the most immediately striking part of the painting, grow nodes at
intervals - like the lines which join up the bright stars in maps of
constellations. (Those long central strokes appear in other works,
for example 'Phosphoresence', 1947.) But then, if
a clear night, as you keep watching the sky the once-dark background
behind those constellations becomes richer and richer. With Anselm Kiefler, as he left the earth behind and grew more cosmic, he
left me behind. But with Pollock it's the exact opposite. His heart
belonged out there in the stars.
Except
that 'Blue Poles' isn't depicting the universe,
even in part, the way 'Mural' is in part depicting
a forest. Note in the Lou Reed quote he says “like” the universe,
and similarly with Pollock this is merely an analogy. Pollock is
painting the cosmic in the other, broader sense of the word – the
immensity and irresolvable complexity of everything, the way we
struggle to comprehend what's inside an atom and at the same time
look hopefully up at the sky. Pollock was more like Mark Tobey than
he was Gorky or de Kooning, his desire was to describe the
indescribable and abstraction was his chosen means. He could take
abstraction and make it work.
And there's
another point which seems associated. People hear of his drip
painting method and imagine a kind of rock’n’roll painter,
throwing up works in some state of absolute abandon while swigging
from a bottle of JD, outside of and against any artistic tradition.
’Time’ magazine’s nickname for him, Jack the
Dripper, best conveys this. The fact that he died in 1956, when
rock’n’roll was still starting up, should tell us how accurate
any of that was.
In fact Pollock
was a deliberative painter, who tried out his drip technique before
he’d exhibit any of the works, ensuring he’d mastered it like a
neophyte labours to master a brush. (And this was precisely his
innovation. Ernst had already dripped paint onto works, but used it
as a random element he could then paint around.) And, having invested
all that time and energy, he did not always take kindly to the
suggestion he just chucked paint about for a living, barking back “no
chaos damn it!” A page on the Tate’s website specifically debunks Pollock myths, including “probably the most absurd and easily refutable fantasy…
that he… created his best works while drinking.”
And in fact we
need to refute all this from an earlier point. When you hear Harold
Rosenberg coined the term 'action painting' the same year as 'Blue
Poles', it might seem auspicious. Yet when the Telegraph describes it in terms of “spiralling
skeins of paint that recorded the physical reach of [Pollock’s]
body and arm” they're reciting the received wisdom. We’ve been
trained to see those arcs of paint like the motion lines in comic
strips.
But in fact,
unlike 'Mural', rather than picture it being flung
into life you can't really conceive of 'Blue Poles'
being painted at all. I know full well how it was done, there's
abundant film of him at work. (While almost any art book can be
guaranteed to have a still of him.) But I can't stand before the
painting and apply the knowledge, I can't visualise it in the process
of happening. Rather than see the expressive gestures you do in
Klein, or the ceaseless overpainting of de Kooning, it seems almost
impossible to trace it back to the hand of the artist who made it.
There's no unpicking it like a jumper. It's too intricate, too
endlessly layered. Even the human touch of the signature, in the
lower left, looks slightly incongruous. The thing looks just
there, impossible to trace back to it’s
construction.
Above
all, and contrary to the stereotype of An Ex angst, 'Blue
Poles’ is not melancholic but rhapsodic. To quote Norbert Lynton it's “graceful rather than violent or wild,
rhythmic rather than random, balletic and mystical in effect”.
True, every word.
Cosmic
and Visceral (Clyfford Still)
If
Pollock has the largest room of the show and Rothko the centrepiece,
Clyfford Still is given the next size up. Plus it's a piece of a
Still, 'PH-950' (1950) making up one version of
the poster (see up top). He seems to be the the third of the show's
self-styled hits. It's an audacious move to so big up an artist most
won't have even heard of. But it's one which delivers. A great favourite of
mine was 'PH-150' (1950), detail below.
Still
seems to have been an individualist among individualists, a maverick
even compared to mavericks. In 1961, keen to distance himself from
the art market, he moved from New York and spent the rest of his life
on a Maryland farm. While his conditions for showing his work were so
exacting they pretty much guaranteed it wasn't shown at all. Happily,
things seem to be changing with a dedicated Still museum existing in
Denver since 2004. (From which the works on show here were loaned.)
If
Pollock's signature mark was the fleck, Still's was the tear. To the
point where I initially assumed he'd been influenced by the look of
torn wallpaper and peeling paint. (Perhaps influenced by a photo in
the previous room, Minor White's 'Resurrection (Peeled Paint on Window, Jackson Street, Produce Area, SanFrancisco', 1951.) The idea of blown-up images of something
everyday set against Pollock's cosmic macroscopes seemed appealing.
And in fact something still clings to it in my mind, even if it's an
official wrong answer.
In
fact, they seem intended as something more geological. (Which of
course still offers a complementary opposite to Pollock, just of a
different sort.) The show describes them as “by turn visceral and
cosmic”, and they seem redolent of the way the geography we treat
as facts on the ground is in fact the result of rupturous violence,
mountain ranges thrusting themselves into being. The show speaks of
“verticality being Still's enduring leitmotif”, representing
“spiritual transcendence”, navigating”yawning abysses” like
seismographs of soul journeys.
Despite
such talk, despite their vast size, they don't seem at all
ostentatious and self-important. In fact, in another comparison with
Pollock, it's hard to imagine them being composed. They look too
immediate to be deliberated. The best works are those where the
colour is applied flatly, without a 'painter's touch'. They all have
those alphanumeric titles, as if just named after catalogue numbers.
Like all great artists, Still can make the whole thing look easy.
Time
was when I saw American Abstract Expressionism as a load of
self-important, man-paining flim-flam designed to impress art
critics, with Pollock and de Kooning as the exceptions that proved
the rule. True, I had already gone past that not altogether nuanced
view. But one advantage of this group show is that it brings to the
fore some of the lesser-known names. Some of which have cropped up
here. Others were more deservedly forgotten, but that's life.
But putting on a
show now also creates a direct comparison between our era and theirs.
And times have long since shifted from the days when Ab Ex occupied
the cutting edge, championed by critics and often derided by a
bemused public. The two have effectively swapped sides, almost as
much as they have over Impressionism. And these works are so at odds
with today’s post-modern art market they confirm the old adage
about the past being another country. Which makes now a very good
time to look at them again.
Once Ab Ex seemed
to have trounced all criticism, been given it's head and gone off the
deep end, and Pop Art seemed a necessary corrective. But for us it’s
the reverse. And the surprising thing is that many reviews did seem
to acknowledge that. To quote the Telegraph again: “At a time when
the virtual world has rendered most aspects of life slightly ersatz
and people crave authenticity, the art here has all the realness and
rawness anybody could possibly want.” Yup.
Waldemar Januszczak on the show...
...an exhibition
video on Pollock...
...and on
Still...
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