Marxist Critics of Abstract Expressionism, Unite!
Two Critics Turned the corner from Parochial to Expressive Abstraction.
Stati Uniti: the Venice Biennale’s catalogue entry for the American pavilion in 1950, presenting the kindred spirits of John Marin and Jackson Pollock. (Venice Biennale, 1950, Duncan Phillips and Alfred Frankfurter).
I. Venice.
John Marin and Jackson Pollock are not often referred to in the same sentence today, but in 1950, it wasn’t such an odd thing. That year, Alfred Frankfurter1 and Duncan Phillips presented Marin as the keystone of the American presentation at the Venice Biennale—flanked by his aesthetic descendants, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning.2 It was an exciting moment for American art, and Frankfurter and Phillips drew a connection between early American modernism and the soaring abstraction of the postwar years by putting Marin front and center. Two years prior, the critic Clement Greenberg offered this roundabout appreciation for Marin:
“If it is not beyond doubt that he is the greatest living American painter, he certainly has to be taken into account when we ask who is.”3
In his eloquent, serpentine way, Greenberg suggested Marin was the best and a formative influence on the new generation—while writing elsewhere that Pollock was “the strongest painter of his generation and the greatest one to emerge since Miró”4—so however you frame it, Greenberg’s view was that Marin and Pollock were there at the very, very top.
And there they were, together in Venice. Visitors to the pavilion would have seen the common threads between them—but they could not have ignored the dramatic differences. Greenberg put it this way:
“His art does not say enough, and what it says it not said with largeness.”5
Straighten out Greenberg’s serpentine elocution: Pollock’s paintings were really big; Marin’s were very small. It may seem like a quibbling point, but it’s a generational break that each painter represents: the pre-war American modernists painted small-ish, and the post-war modernists painted very, very big6. And, not incidentally, the post-war painters have become stratospherically valuable—a consider Rothkos in the tens-of-millions of dollars, the very best Marin in under two million. Something important—and valuable—turned on this point, and Greenberg thought he knew what it was.
II. Moscow.
Greenberg wasn’t alone in thinking he had it figured out. While Greenberg pounded away at a slippery notion of “significant form” as the central feature of Abstract Expressionism in The Nation, Harold Rosenberg was promulgating the “action” theory in the pages of Frankfurter’s ArtNews. These were titanic champions of the same school of painting—with titanic ideas, and titanic egos. And when they clashed over why Abstract Expressionism was so important, things got heated.
Rosenberg’s observation was that what was new in painting—different from Marin and his cohort—was the big gesture, and in 1952, he gave the new stuff a name to match: Action Painting. Greenberg responded in the pointy essay “How Art Writing Earns its Bad Name” that the Action theory didn’t explain “why the painted leftovers of ‘Action’ . . . should be exhibited . . . and looked at and even acquired by others.”7 It’s a good point: if it’s the act of painting that matters, then the painting isn’t special—or valuable. The painting is just a residue of what is really just a performance art.
But Greenberg struggled to articulate what the real reason for the new art’s greatness was. I mean, he didn’t think he was struggling, but “significant form” is famously fuzzy and Rosenberg took him to task for the vagueness.
They were probably both doomed from the start: the two were trying to apply a Marxist determinism to predict the future of painting. Rosenberg came up through The New Masses, an outlet of the American Communist Party that nominally descended from the party-unaffiliated Masses magazine. He then went to the competition, the leftist Partisan Review, which Greenberg edited before going to The Nation. While The New Masses was ideologically captured by Moscow, Partisan Review was infiltrated by the CIA8—by which time Rosenberg had softened and then reversed his Communist sympathies. By the end of World War II, both these critics were very far from Stalin—but their entire intellectual posture was still built on the dialectical materialist: the seeds of the new grow in the belly of the old. They were trying to explain new painting in terms of all the old painting; should we be surprised they both got it wrong?
III. New York.
If art is propelled forward by competing forces—if!—the germs of the new don’t come from within, but from outside. That’s just the nature of novelty: you don’t innovate by re-answering the questions that have been satisfactorily answered, but by taking up new ones. Whatever Charles Biederman or Pablo Picasso were scratching at in 1936, 1946 offered a whole new set of itches. Appetite, opportunity, and patronage: the post-war years offered a different package of incentives and demands to the working artist. We’ve talked about a lot of these before: the growth of artist’s collectives, like those that sprouted along 10th Street9; the birth of the MFA10; the rise of the collector-museum; the completion of the modern gallery system.
Next week we’ll do our own synthesis and see how those forces—external to critical discourse and artist’s manifestoes—sculpted the aesthetics of the postwar years. Criticism, especially Rosenberg and Greenberg’s, is incredibly useful to understanding the position and meaning of art. But inherent to their project was the need to place everything into a coherent narrative—and while we’re sympathetic to that impulse, we can’t help but reflect that it is a terrible predictive device. The future will sprout a thousand directions and only once it too has become history can we prune out the ones that ultimately went nowhere. To that end, Rosenberg, while a little fuzzy on the future of painting, accidentally foresaw the growth of performance art; Greenberg, with equally dumb luck, influenced more with his off-hand essay on The Avant Garde and Kitsch11 than with any of the circuitous rambling about Pollock. Join us for a tour of some of those journeys to possible-nowheres over the next few weeks.
Thanks for reading.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Frankfurter had a huge influence as editor of ArtNews; Duncan Phillips is best known for the Phillips Collection.
One last wing of supporting cast in the pavilion: Bloom, Gatch and Lebrun—not as flashy as the other trio, but the star-power in Venice was impressive that year.
As quoted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, p. 269.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 268.
Some other features of the generational fissure in our recent article, “How did Abstract Expressionism Cast out Abstraction?”
Full text here, and worth the read!
Please, please, no comments on how I’ve mischaracterized leftist factions—I know enough about it to know I know enough about it.
Read our article, “What Happened on Tenth Street?” here.
Read our article, “From Anarchy to MFA,” here.
Full text here, and rough sledding!