Exercise: Reflecting on Abstract Expressionism, Part 3,Project 2

 Reflections on Abstract Expressionism

My notes:

What do the words mean? 
The first thing I want to do here is look at the words “abstract” and “expressionism” to see what they tell me before I begin answering the questions posed in this exercise. The word “abstract”, when used to describe a concept, can be defined as “existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence” or when used to describe art, can be “relating to or denoting art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but rather seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, colours, and textures.” The word expressionism is used to describe art whose typical trait is to “present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.”  Expressionist artists seek to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality. The term expressionism has been around since the beginning of the 20^th century, and is suggestive of angst or emotional struggle.

PING! This is ringing bells for me in my training as an existential psychologist, so I am going to research the history of existential psychology and abstract expressionism. It makes me think that these artists were wrestling with issues of meaning, particularly how to give meaning to their lives. Certainly, they became popular at around the same time in the American post-war era and dawn of the Cold War.

When did art begin to be labelled Abstract Expressionism? 

It was actually used first in a magazine Der Sturm in 1919 regarding German Expressionism, then in 1929 to describe works by Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, ex-Bauhaus) and again in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates to describe the post-WW11 art movement in the US that placed New York as the centre of the art world. Emotionally intense, rebellious, idiosyncratic, somewhat anarchic, the term was used to describe works from a number of artists which are stylistically very different and some not even abstract of expressionist! Sub-genres include action paintings or gestural abstractions (Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning), and colour field paintings (Rothko, Helen Franenthaler, Jules Olitski, Adolph Gottlieb, etc.).

What are the key characteristics of Abstract Expressionist paintings?

              

• Usually no recognisable subject
• Unconventional application of paint - Dripping/Slathering/Throwing paint around OR using zones of colour to create tension (Colour Field artists)
• Bright Colours
• Letting unconscious thoughts guide the artist 

My experiment in how it feels to try this style.

Just letting my pen wander around the paper was relaxing, and I could feel a theme developing as I went along....... Thoughts came into my head as I went along, of journeys taken; of repeating myself;  of going over things; of being free to go in any direction. I can see why Jackson Pollock felt "unstuck" by adopting this loose approach to expressing himself, and how frustrating it is to sometimes feel dissatisfied that a particular piece of work hasn't turned out as one might hope. What a great way to get started too, to loosen up one's thoughts and find flow.

How did it gain mainstream acceptance in the 1950's? 

In 1952 the existentialist and art critic Harold Rosenberg described the art canvas as an “arena in which to act”(although in my my the term should have been “act out”) and this helped shift focus away from the finished work to the struggle itself that the artist was going through to produce it. The work of art was the process, rather than the finished product. 

 

In your opinion, to what extent does a concern with elemental humanity represent a reaction to the cataclysmic events of 1939-45 and the displacement of so many Europeans, including a number of artists, in the wake of the Second World War?

I'm not sure I really understand the term “elemental humanity” but I shall assume for this question that it means self-expression or self-actualisation in relation to Abstract Expressionism. There were three main influences on the development of abstract expressionism in New York –

• Firstly, the work of Wassily Kandinsky, ex-Bauhaus and one of the Blue Four group which lectured and exhibited in the US in 1924 (with Klee, Feininger and von Jawlensky);

• Secondly, political instability in Europe in the 1930s brought several leading Surrealists to New York (including André Breton, Max Ernst and André Masson), and many of the Abstract Expressionists were profoundly influenced by their style and by their interest in the unconscious. The painter and teacher Hans Hoffman influenced many students in the various movements in modernist art in Europe. It encouraged their interest in myth and archetypal symbols and it shaped their understanding of painting itself as a struggle between self expression and the chaos of the unconscious. Many of them met during the Depression era WPA (Works Progress Administration), a programme run by the government to get artists to paint murals in government buildings. During this period, Social Realism produced murals from the Mexican Muralists, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Most of the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism were influenced by these left-wing ideas of matured in the 1930's. Having matured as artists at a time when America suffered economically and felt culturally isolated and provincial, the Abstract Expressionists were later welcomed as the first authentically American avant garde. Their art was championed for being emphatically American in spirit monumental in scale, romantic in mood, and expressive of a rugged individual freedom.
   
• The atom bomb had been developed and was still being tested; WW11 had shown people how violent and ruthless the world could be, and the US had entered the McCarthy era when the outside world, particularly the Soviet Union and Communism, was to be viewed with deep suspicion. Artistic censorship was rife, and political opinion of the time did not tolerate social protests of the kind made by the Social Realists, so abstract art was “safe” to exhibit as it was seen as apolitical. The artists themselves saw the events leading up to to the War, and the War itself as demonstrative of the fact that the world was in moral crisis and they were asking themselves how civilised societies could treat each other as they had done in the Great Depression and in WW11. Why? What was it all about? What was the purpose in life? Why bother striving if the world could end tomorrow by the press of a button? Given the atrocities of WW11, artists were drawn to the existential philosophy ideas of Heidegger and Sartre, who stressed the importance of the individual's actions in giving life meaning. Abstract expressionists tried to express their inner feelings directly through making art, and validated the importance of their own personal experience. The artists working in the abstract expressionist style were in agreement with the view of Viktor Frankl (existential psychologist and Logotherapist) who said “In his creative work, the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving fro the spiritual unconscious.

But in addition to the above, there developed a maturity among the US-based artists, that they had not felt during the isolated or inferiority complex years of the Depression, when they felt they could assert themselves in developing art that was American, embodying the monumental proportions of their vast country, romantic in mood and expressive of a rugged individual freedom.

Rothko said that, “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point” (p.838). Does it matter if viewers of art works “miss the point” provided that they take something from it?

Mmmm. This is a difficult one. I understand that this quote comes from an interview of Rothko by Seldon Rodman, a poet, who put together a book in the 1950's based on interviews with artists of the time. So Rothko was not talking about the paintings he did for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, but was talking about his colour field paintings. All of his non-figurative colour field paintings of the 1950s and beyond can be seen as profound meditations on the Holocaust, as Rothko was public in his abhorrence and would not even exhibit in Germany after the War. These compositions of layered bands of contrasting or complementary colours set against a monochrome background with rectangular forms that look a bit like the haunting images of mass graves that Rothko would have seen in American newspapers and magazines during and after the War. The titles he gave are often the colours he used in the composition, like Black on Maroon. He is quoted as saying that he was primarily concerned with the viewer's reflection and emotional response, yet I had to read about his life and beliefs and what critics had written about him to know that the panels on Black on Maroon have been described as “doorways to Hell” and likened to rims of flames, definitely images we can all imagine of facing death in a concentration camp. Everything I have read about Rothko suggests that his life was one of profoundly sad experiences, from losing his father at a young age and having to go to work: being the subject of bullying at school because of his Jewishness – just the reason his father had brought the family to the US from Russia to escape; then getting a scholarship to Yale which was taken away (anti-Semitism?) to losing his court case for non-payment of work done (anti-Semitic?) and then finally committing suicide. These colour studies all seem to be intended to encourage mediatation and self-reflection, which makes me wonder if Rothko used his painting as form of therapy. Was he meditating and contemplating when he was painting? He was certainly dealing with his own powerful emotions, but I believe he was mistaken in thinking that all human beings live with this extent of emotional angst.

   Black on Maroon, Tate Modern

I can remember going to the Rothko exhibition in 2012 at Tate Modern, and being very impressed with the scale of the paintings in the exhibition, most of which were of his colour field paintings. I didn't know anything about Rothko at the time, apart from what I read at the exhibition, but I do remember feeling very depressed and bleak when contemplating some of the darker compositions. Was I moved to tears? I might have been had I understood then the details of Rothko's life and inner suffereings and past experiences. Was I saddened? Definitely. Was I in tune with the emotions that Rothko had when he painted the picture? To some extent, yes – at least I was on the sadness spectrum and not on the happy spectrum. I am not religious, so I couldn't possibly have the same religious experience that Rothko had when painting. Did I miss the point? I don't believe I did, as Rothko's colour field paintings have immense power to evoke emotion in their viewers. I don't believe it's important that these emotions are the same for each of us, or that the depth of these emotions is the same, because we are not all the same. We differ in age, background, culture, education, personality, experience, etc. Yet we can all take something from the works of artists and be moved by them. 
 

Is it possible to make any sort of formal analysis of these artists' works – or of the Pop Art discussed on pp.845-77?

The short answer to this is yes, although I write this knowing how difficult it is going to be when I try to analyse an abstract expressionist painting! Using the guide given in the OCA course book for developing annotations into analyses, it must be possible to describe, interpret and evaluate a work using the framework provided, although I think the “describe” part might be the easiest. If we look at Rothko's colour field paintings or the action paintings of Pollock as examples, there are many people who dislike them on sight and would describe them as totally unsuccessful in communicating anything other than acts of self-expression and indulgence – such is the extreme reaction to works of non-figurative art. Part of the problem with Abstract Expressionism and indeed Pop Art is that the works embrace so many different characteristics and are not consistent. They look very “easy” (although in fact took much planning). The fact that they were so differenct and distinct was useful to the Establishment in the US as the distinctive style seemed to reflect the individualism, cultural achievement and democracy that the government wanted to project during the Cold War years. But the baby boomers who emerged in the years of economic prosperity after the War were a much more optimistic and free-thinking generation, brought up on consumerism and mass production and their art was a deliberate move away from the tortured delving into the sub-conscious and simply more fun – expendable, replaceable, and reproduceable. In terms of evaluation, it is easier to measure the “success” of Pop Art images than it is to evaluate soe abstract expressionist works. The Marilyn Monroe image and Campbell's Soup image have come to represent a certain era in the same way as looking at Doric Columns conjures up Classical civilisation. Pop Art also ensured that people came to realise that art or creativity is all around us, in the design of everyday things and is affordable to all.

What do you make of Clement Greenberg's assertion that “realist, illusionist art had dissembled the medium using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art?

When I read Greenberg's assertions in the concept page of History of Western Art (p844) for the first time, I felt myself trying to put myself in the shoes of someone from that period of history, where the politics and social mores of the time would affect my interpretation in a certain way – we are all “conditioned” by and products of the culture(s) we are exposed to. “Engagement with contemporary themes and with the norms of contemporary culture was felt to be essential for a modern artist” according to HWA, and I find myself agreeing with Greenberg's view in 1961 when he wrote this, (although I didn't agree with all of his declared views later on). If I understand this quote, it hinges on how Greenberg narrowly defines “art” which reminds me of a joke I heard that:-

Impressionism is where you paint what you see;

Expressionism is where you paint what you feel;

and Social Realism is where you paint what you are told to paint.

Greenberg would presumably have disagreed with all of these definitions, even although (like all jokes) there is a grain of truth in them, because he saw Modernist art as characterized mainly by surface and pattern, where its nature lay in the uniqueness of the medium. At first I thought his was the classic case of “be careful what you wish for” as Post-Painterly Abstraction embodied his idea of what art should be, yet as a movement has had little and short-lived public appeal, and is seen as very limiting to artists of this century and time. But.......when I read the original context of this quote in his Forum Lecture (Washington, D.C. Voice of America) and his Postcript written in 1978, I felt that Greenberg's view that “the essence of Modernism lies in the use of characteristic methods to criticise the discipline itself.” Modernist Art called attention to the modern era and what was characteristic of culture at that time, i.e. rejection of what had gone on before and a need for a completely different approach and a striving for artistic purity.

References

Web-sites:

http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ARTH208-5.1.2-Abstract-Expressionism.pdf

http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/wittgenstein/files/2007/10/Greenbergmodpaint.pdf

http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/a/colorpsych.htm

http://www.rothkochapel.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36&Itemid=47

http://www.theartstory.org/jewish-artist-rothko-mark.htm

http://arthistory.about.com/od/modernarthistory/a/abstract_expressionism_10one.htm

http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/the-context-of-abstract-expressionism.html

Books:

Chip, H.B. (1992) Theories of Modern Art:A Source Book by Artists and Critics, California, University of California Press

Anfam, David.(1990) Abstract Expressionism, New York & London: Thames and Hudson
Honour, H. and Fleming, J. (2009) A World History of Art (revised 7th edition). London: Laurence King.
Karmel, Pepe, et al. (2009) New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Collection New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University
Kleeblatt, Norman, et al. (2008) Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976 New Haven: Yale University Press
Sandler, Irving. (2009) Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Re-evaluation
Lenox: Hard Press
Sandler, Irving.(1978) The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors from the Fifties, New York: Harper and Row
Sandler, Irving. (1970) The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism
New York: Praeger