How did Abstract Expressionism cast out Abstraction?
The remaking of Abstraction in the late 1940s.
Alfred Barr’s spaghetti-like attempt to diagram the origins of abstract art, in 1936. Could he have simplified by waiting ten years?
Henry Adams makes an interesting argument in Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock1: Jackson Pollock’s all-over/action/drip/ abstract-expressionist masterpieces are manifestations of the direct influence of Thomas Hart Benton, the regionalist painter. It’s a sensational claim, and Adams puts it in park after the introduction; the rest of the book amply demonstrates that Benton had a profound impact on Pollock’s life with a moving double-portrait of the two men.
What makes the claim sensational isn’t that there was an improbable medium of influence between the two, but rather that mature Pollocks just don’t look anything like Bentons—not like any kind of Benton.2 Adams highlights the young Benton’s embrace of the abstract Synchromist style, and reveals that Benton worked abstractly with some seriousness across his entire career. It wasn’t a secret,3 but Benton wasn’t exhibiting his abstract work. These observations help the claim, but it remains sensational because Pollock’s abstraction departed from Benton’s abruptly and enormously. That break is a telling one, much bigger than these two generously-apportioned talents, because the same break was occurring all across America at just the same moment.
II. Concretionists be damned.
The difference between Benton and Pollock is interesting and instructive. Benton built carefully-balanced compositions around poles and spheres—solid forms, with weight, depth, and shadows. He often sculpted—physically modeled his compositions in clay—and so the early drafts and the final masterpieces all have the hefty, volumetric “Benton” quality, bulging and billowing and bubbling along. It’s nice.
Pollock—do I need to describe Pollock? There are no closed figures, no modeling, no centers. There is a flatness and a depth, but something more like an evocation of the void than a sculptural form. In short—it’s really not Benton.
These are two strategies of abstraction, and they summarize two different moments: abstraction of the thirties, and abstraction of the post-war years.
Consider the Five American Concretionists we’ve been discussing for the past month.4 No matter that “Concretionist” was a made-up term; Biederman, Gallatin, Calder, Shaw, Morris, and Ferren all worked in a mode that postulated a plausibly-real form in an imaginary space. They all made pictures of something solid, if not necessarily in poured concrete. (Several of these painters took the obvious next step and became sculptors.)
By 1950, you couldn’t say that anymore. Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Balcomb Greene, Arshile Gorky, Richard Pousette-Dart: even when they painted recognizable things, they would be impossible to realize in sculpture. Figures occasionally appear in these putatively abstract oeuvres, but they dissolve and flutter ambiguously, space swelling and receding.
(Sculpture of the moment shared this center-less-ness—the open-forms of David Smith are revelatory for just this reason.)
III. Expressionism?
The puzzling thing to me is the nomenclature. When expressionism was coined, it was used with incredible elasticity; it was applied to everything from the Blau Reiter and Die Brücke groups to early Cubism. Almost anyone could be an expressionist, and it’s no help for my thesis that the founders of the German movement were architecture students.5 Certainly the American Concretionists were every bit as expressionistic, and as architectural, as the painters who later won the name abstract expressionists.
So, what gives?
What gives is that the arts all got out of the mimetic business at about the same time: you stopped getting a picture of something and finally got the thing itself, and only that. If you want a concrete sculpture, you should get out the cement mixer, not the linseed oil. If you want a shark in formaldehyde, you should get a shark in formaldehyde, etc. Clement Greenberg is famous for rallying around this principle, and he seems to have been right about this if nothing else. Regardless of what a painting should be, the death of mimesis came around 1950, and while most of the other principles of the abstract expressionist moment vanished, that’s one that stuck.
Let sculptures do what sculptures only can; let paintings do what only paintings can; let Hollywood handle the rest.
(Greenberg had an adversary in the critic Harold Rosenberg, who thought that the most important part of Abstract Expressionism is the gesture of painting—he coined the term “Action Painting” for the moment. There’s something to that, too, of course, but Greenberg had his finger on something when he identified the nature of the fissure between 1930s abstraction and everything else that followed.)
“Why?” is a bigger question, and the answer is more interesting than tracing influences like Benton-Pollock, but we’ll do all that and more, starting in two short weeks.
Next week: we take the market’s temperature: how is 2024 shaping up? The answer may surprise you.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
More on Pollock vs. Benton here.
There’s a delightful anecdote comparing a particular early attempt at regionalism (by Pollock) to a brimming toilet bowl, too.
Among other things, Benton was a very active, didactic teacher at the Art Students League of New York, and he was sharing abstract processes with anyone who took his class.
The article on John Ferren should catch you up.
Kirchner and co. met at the Dresden polytechnic institute, studying to be architects. What a miss! Their parents must have been so disappointed.