In Defence of Abstract Expressionism

In Defense of Abstract Expressionism Author(s): T. J. Clark Source: October, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994), pp.
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In Defense ofAbstract Expressionism
T. J. CLARK
1. We have come a certainwayfrom Abstract and the question Expressionism, of how we should understandour relationshipto it gets to be interesting again. Awe at its triumphsis long gone; but so is laughterat its cheap philosophy, or or boredomwithitssublimity, distasteforitsheavybreathing, or resentment at the part it played in the Cold War.Not thatany of those feelingshave gone awayor evershould,but thatit beginsto be clear thatnone of them-not even the sum of them-amounts to an attitudeto the paintingin question. They are what artists and criticsonce had because theydid not havean attitude-because something stood in thewayof theirmaking Abstract a thingof the past. Expressionism 2. Not being able to make a previousmomentof high achievementpart of the past-not to lose it and mourn it and if necessaryrevileit-is, forart under the circumstances of modernism, more or less synonymous withnot being able to make art at all. Because ever since Hegel put the basic propositionof modernism into words in the 1820s-that "art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remainsforus a thingof the past"-art's being able to continue has depended on its success in makingthatdictumspecificand punctual.That is to say,fixingthe momentof art'slastflowering at some point in the comparatively recentpast,and that discovering enough remainsfromthisfinalefor a workof ironic or melanall. The "can'tgo on, willgo cholyor decadent continuationto seem possibleafter I thinkof the relationof nineteenth-century orchestral and chamon" syndrome. ber music to the moment of Mozart and Beethoven; or of how nineteenthand literaturemanaged to continue living on the idea of "the twentieth-century or on the terminal Romantics," imagesitfashionedof Baudelaire and Rimbaud,or of the past that"Impressionism" wenton providing forFrenchpaintingdeep into the twentieth the deaths of Bonnard and Matisse),or of the feeding century(till of latermodernisms on the myth of the Readymadeand the Black Square. Hegel's dictumhad to be localized,thatis to say.And to point to the factthat it can be localized, and therefore in a sense evaded, is, of course, to confirm the Hegelian thesis,not refuteit. For Hegel did not anticipateany literalceasing,or
OCTOBER 69, Summer 1994,pp. 23-48. ? 1994 TJ. Clark.
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25
even withering-away, of activities art. He just did not see that calling themselves could remain the form in men which and women articulatedthe they possibly relationsof mind and body to possibleworlds.Or I should say,articulated themto effect. What he I did not as understand was that the full see, it, good depth and of that to on Idea and World sensuimplication inability-the inability go giving ous immediacy, of a kind that opened both to the play of practice-would itself prove a persistent, maybe sufficient, subject. That was because he had a naive hubrisabout philosophy, and because he could not detach himself fromthe sense of world-historical and that came with an adulthood beginnings endings passed in the shadow of the FrenchRevolution.And otherreasonsbesides. He could never have guessed thatthe disenchantment of theworldwould take so long. I as conceive is the artof the situationHegel pointed to, but Modernism, it, itsjob turns out to be to make the endlessnessof the endingbearable,bytimeand again imaginingthat it has taken place-back there withBeethoven scratching out Napoleon's name on the Eroica symphony, or withRimbaud gettingon the boat at Marseilles.Every modernism has to have itsown proximate Black Square. Therefore our failure to see Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still as ending or our lack of a of what it is were is something, story they ending, considerably more than a crisis in art criticismor art history. It means that for us art is no longera thingof the past; thatis,we have no usable image of itsending,at a time and place we could imagine ourselvesinhabiting,even if we would rathernot. Thereforeartwill eternally hold us withits glittering eye. Not onlywill it forego its role in the disenchantment of the world,but it will accept the role that has constantlybeen foisted upon it by its false friends:it will become one of the in whichthe worldis reenchanted.Witha magic no more forms, form, maybe the and no less powerful(here is my real fear) than that of the general conjuror of and back into our world-that the form. For the is, depth desirability commodity one thingthe myth of the end of artmade possible was the maintainingof some kind of distance between art's sensuous immediacyand thatof other (stronger) claimantsto the same power. 3. Of course the situationI have been describingmaynot be remediable.It be because we have lost modernism may thatwe have lostAbstract Expressionism toutcourt, and therefore the need to imagineart altogether-whethercontinuing or ending.I have mydoubts.But in anycase myobject in thisessayis limited.I am going to mount a defense of Still and Pollock and others,couched in historical terms.Whetherthe defensemakes any of them usable, in the sense I have been what proposing-whetherit makesthema thingof the past-depends on whether I have to saytalliesin the long termwithartpractice.At the momentI see no reason thatit should; but, equally,I findit hard to believe that the presentmythof willsustainitself All thisremainsto be seen; it is not arthispost-ness indefinitely. torians'business.I onlybringit up because itwould be futileto pretendthatI do not thinka greatdeal hingeson somebody, eventually, givingthispaintingitsdue.
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4. To talk of interpretations, then. There has been a feelingin the air for some time now thatwriting on Abstract has reached an impasse. Expressionism The variousresearchprograms thatonlyyesterday seemed on thevergeof delivering new and strong accounts of it, and speaking to its place (maybe even its called America,have run into the sand. Those who function)in the worldfiction believedthatthe answerto thelatter kindof questionwouldemergefrom a history of Abstract to a certain War Cold with Expressionism's belonging polity, patrons and artworldinstitutions to match,have provedtheirpointand offended all the But the and turned out to not have the rightpeople. story, thoughgood necessary, sortof upshot forinterpretation thatthe storytellers had been hoping for.It was one thingto answerthe question,"Whatare the circumstances in whicha certain national bourgeoisie,in the pride of its victory, comes to wantsomething as odd and exotic as an avant-garde of itsown?"It is anotherto speak to the implications of that encounterfor the avant-garde and answerthe question, "To what itself, extentwas the meetingof class and artpracticein the later 1940s more thanjust contingent?To what extent does AbstractExpressionismreallybelong, at the of presuppositions aboutworlddeepestlevel-the levelof language,of procedure, the for it took it on their travels?" It is not who and making-to paid bourgeoisie to thesequestionsare simply no longerbeingtriedfor. Work is getting thatanswers of questionsstillmostworthasking done. And certainly theyseem to me the kind the motionsof of the paintings we are lookingat-far moreso thangoingthrough in Pollock's for the time that here, Jackson Phosphorescence discovering umpteenth are made to or Clyfford Still's 1949, "bymeans of theirsensory reality, paintings led to construct an the the eyebeing constantly object, impede impulse imaginary Once back to the paintings'constitutory elements-line, color,plane."I upon a tale provokeda faintsensationof wonder.But that time even thissemioticfairy At least the tellersof the historical was in another country. story recognizethat are awarethattheir have landed themin a quandary;at leastthey theirresearches of it seems to me, are frozenin the triumph them.The semiologists, objects resist moments ofvision. theirprearranged workcomes 5. Sometimesthe wayout of thiskind of impassein historical in question thatthe paintings fromproposinganotherset of possibledescriptions in the the seen to "come be beginning, proposal,especially under"-making might one asks, withno veryclear sense of whereit maylead. How would it alterthings, whatsortsof new ordersin the objectswouldbe setup, ifwe chose to look at them would theylook? Would theylook better?Or properly thisway?How different an involves the worse? (Sometimes putting wayout of an impasseof understanding end to a false,or even true,cathexisof the object.Eliotand Leavissaid moreabout
de la peinture ou lesdessous in Fenitre 1. Hubert Damisch, "L'&veildu regard," (Paris: jaune cadmium Seuil, 1984), p. 69. The subjecthere is Mondrian,but much the same verdictand formof wordsare to Pollock,Newman,Rothko,etc. applied,byDamisch and others,
4?x,
777 wi?Willem deKooning. Collage. 1950.
NOW
Milton,and Feneon about Monet, than all Milton's and Monet's admirersput in a similar The thesesthatfollow are offered together.) speculative spirit. better 6. I thinkwe mightcome to describeAbstract Expressionist paintings ifwe took them above all to be vulgar. The word for us is pejorative,and to be understood as such in the argumentsto come. But this should not present an about modernism. forthoseof us used to thinking insuperableproblem,especially as has been understood After modernism often all, derivingits power from very a range of characteristicsthat had previouslycome under the worstkind of pejorativedescriptions-fromugliness,for example, or the merelyfragmentary and disheveled;fromthe Material as opposed to the Ideal; fromthe plain and from the low and the formless. limiting fact of flatness;from superficiality; to Nonethelesstherestillmaybe a slight frisson the idea thatthe formof Abstract in was vulgarity. It is not clear how sayingof immersion bassesse Expressionism's Willem de Kooning's Collage for instance,or BradleyWalkerTomlin's All Souls' besides denigratethem.That is No. 2, thattheyare vulgaris to do anything Night, fine by me. Not to be certain for once that the negative termbrought on to describe a modernistartifactcan ever be made to earn its positive keep-to fromthe fireof discourse-may mean we are on to someemerge transfigured To an art work call thing. vulgaris obviously(at least fornow) to do something To have madeit vulgar-to have more transgressive than to call it low or informe. and had that be the qualityin it (the onlyquality) that raised it frominertness Pollock's drip paintings,for had it speak a world-must have been difficult.
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Walker Tomlin. All Souls' Left: Bradley No. 2. 1949. Night,
Garden. 1956.
Hans Hofmann. The Opposite left:
Blue,Red. 1956.
Gottlieb. Black, right: Opposite Adolph
..........
instance,seem to have been begun at the end of 1947 in a mood of triumphant access to the gaudyand the overdone-Phosphorescence in thisregard,and is typical Manheim's as beautiful it somewhat naturalizes the painting's title, is, Ralph essential tackiness.2 The drip paintingscame to an end threeyearslater when theirmakerdiscovered thateven here,or especially here (on the floor, his flicking Duco and aluminum),truevulgarity was beyondhis reach. 7. It is an advantage to the term "vulgar," as far as I am concerned, that it two the to some abjectnessor absurdity discursively points ways-to object itself, in its verymakeup,some telltaleblemish,some atrociously visual qualitythatthe will never however hard it and to the object'sexistence tries; object stop betraying in a particular social world,fora set of tastesand styles of individuality thathave stillto be defined,but are somehowthere, in the word even beforeit is deployed. of class ascriptionin the case of paintingslike Herein, I hope, lies the possibility Pollock's Cut-Out and de Kooning's Woman-the possibility of seeing at last,and even being able to describe,the waystheytake part in a particulartriumphand disaster of the petty bourgeoisie.But I am comingto that. 8. In Abstract and here is the painting'scontinuing(maybe Expressionism, for a certain of the worldwe call "individuconstruction intensifying) difficulty us,
On Manheim's titlingof worksfor Pollock's first 2. show at BettyParsons's,see Ellen Landau, Pollock Abrams, (New York: 1989), pp. 169-77. Jackson
In Defense Abstract of Expressionism
29
i li i iii~i~ iiiiiii i
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is revealedin its true,thatis to saycontingent, And so is painting; ality" vulgarity. and Adolph Gottlieb'sBlack, like Hans Hofmann'sTheGarden or rather, paintings in Blue,Red,done under the signor spell of such a construction, by "individuals" searchof the gratifications and austerities itprovides. 9. I should try to definemyterms. It willnot be easy.The entriesunder the word "vulgar"and its cognates in the Oxford revel,reallya bit Dictionary English in the slippingand slidingof meaning over the centuries,and in the vulgarly, elusiveness(but for thatveryreason the intensity) of the panics and snobberies builtinto them.The threequotationsthatseem to me to help mostwithwhatwe on are looking at are, first, turning Jane Austen in 1797, in Senseand Sensibility, in the novel and declaringit "left "thevulgarfreedomand folly" of the elder sister her no recommendation"-I thinkit was the freedomeven more than the folly thatAustenobjected to,and needed theword"vulgar" to dispatch.Then, Matthew Arnoldin 1865, makingthe linkbetweenvulgarity and expressiveness thatparticis a rathervulgarFrenchword,but like many ularlyconcernsus here: "Saugrenu other vulgarwords,veryexpressive." And lastly, George Eliot, quoted in Cross's in a letterof 1869, thathe seemed to her "themostvulgarof Byron, Lifeas saying in literature." minded will have genius thateverproduced a greateffect Everyone his or her own favorite de candidate-Still, Kooning, Kline, Hofmann,Pollock in the case ofpainting. whenthings wentbestforhim-for thepropersubstitution a common 10. Scanningthe columns,the eye stopsat OED usage 13: "having
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mean character;coarselycommonplace;lackingin refinement or and offensively Of recorded from ill-bred." actions, manners,features, good taste; uncultured, from1764. 1643; of personsfrom1678; of language from1716; of mind or spirit on the partof those as betrayal, The keyidea fromour point of viewis of vulgarity of this who byrights oughtto be above it.The OED does not seem quite cognizant It is there it evidence for its the shift, alreadyin takingplace. though provides of the day!" of of the leaders in the "sordid 1833 vulgarity Coleridge'scomplaining in volume fiveof and it becomes a nineteenth-century commonplace. Ruskin, with the "Of has a climactic Modern Painters, struggling chapter, Vulgarity," great behind shades of Quilp and Chadband and Mrs. Gamp, and of Dickens himself them,and speakingto his deepestfearsand hopes forart.The noun "vulgarian"coined or rich person of vulgarmanners"--is "a vulgarperson;freq.,a well-to-do around 1800. I guessitis whatRuskinand GeorgeEliotmosthavein mind. in Abstract 11. I am proposingthatone main kindof intensity Expressionism is its engagementwiththe dangers and falsehoods just catalogued. And whatis special about AbstractExpressionism-what marksit offfromall other modis withthevulgaras opposed to the "popular"or ernisms-is thatthe engagement and twentieth"low."I thinkwe should understandthe "popular"in nineteenththat of the of avoidance as a of art series is, figuresof vulgar; figures century avoidance of art's actual belongingto the pathos of bourgeoistaste,a perpetual and and conjuringof kinds of simplicity, directness, naivete,sentiment shifting about art's in of material and emotional force, spite everything sentimentality, actual place and function that put such qualities beyond its grasp. Abstract does littleor no such conjuring.That is whatmakesit hard to bear. Expressionism the sets offagain in searchof the true We are used to an artthatalways underlying the because the the true the where and artist) (to just tawdry maydivulge tawdry, is someone else's, out there in the mass or the margin.But Abstract tawdriness does not go elsewherefor its language, and at its best (its most Expressionism wherethepoint thevehement, in searchof thefalseunderlying it seems appalling) is thatcheap vehemence,or easydelectation,are whatpaintingnow is-the only thatit can stagewithout of individuality, values,the onlyforms Onlythose faking. consumed withtheirown canvases will do that are truly AbstractExpressionist witha ludicrousbignessand lushness withpaintingas posturing, emptyintensity, of 1950 are no longerludicrousand selfand generality. (Pollock's big paintings withtheirscale and comfortable almost become have consumingenough; they into the paintings, is back the true of of leaking generalization touch; degree of the and them coherence, great emptyperformatives displacing depth giving 1948 and 1949. This again is one wayof sayingwhythe big paintingscould not be continued.) and issuesI am claimingas mostdeeply 12. Nobodywould expect the terms to be own Abstract presentin the discourseof the time, simply Expressionism's
31
and modernity, say,were foreven the best of any more than the issues of flatness Manet's critics.But one would at least expect to findthe tracesin discourseof the issues being avoided. Here is a New York critic in 1951, writingof an artisthe admires: greatly In thiscase the backgroundis withoutquestion the mostoutrageously overwhelming the artist has ever contrived. Inspired by the most and bombasticFrenchBaroque wallpaper,[he has] intensified flagrant to a maximumits brownand orange arabesque whichsurroundsareas of the harshest blue in the centers ofwhichcluster pinkand red roses.... All thesegratuitous incidentssuperimposedon the wall and floorserve to break up and confusethe patterns on these surfacesso thatthe eye can find no securityeven in the repetition of ornamental motif-a comfort afforded in ... earliercompositions... the Decorative is a garish,violent,and upsetting Visually Figure picture. The rathermild problemswhich [the painter] had been posing forhimself exacerbated duringthe previousfive yearsare here suddenly almostto the point of burlesque.Luxe,calme etvolupti have disappeared and in theirplaces discomfort, and tensionreign.The ... excitement, Seated Nude of the year before had expressed [the painter's] rebellion thisbig odalisque adds a revoltagainstcharm againstease and softness; and good taste.It represents a triumphof art over factitious vulgarity. Yetbecause the pictureis so clearly an act ofwillin a fieldof artifice, the seemsPyrrhic.3 victory The last two sentences in particular-"It representsa triumphof art over factitious vulgarity. Yet because the picture is so clearlyan act of will in a field of artifice,the victoryseems Pyrrhic"-seem to me to provide the terms for a descriptionof AbstractExpressionism.The keyquestion, of course (which this criticunderstandably skirts over vulgarity is meant round) is whetherthe victory to seem Pyrrhic-whether the hollownessof the victory is whatthe picturewants to figuremost urgently. But of course it is rightand proper that even though these wordswere written at the heightof AbstractExpressionism, and fromthe Alfred H. Barr in a MOMA veryseat of the movement'sinstitutional power-by catalogue-they preciselycould not be writtenof Gottlieb or Hofmann or de surfond ornemental done a Kooning, but only of Matisse, of his Figuredecorative earlier. quarterof a century 13. I realizethatitis stillnot clearwhatBarror I mean bytheword"vulgarity" as applied to paintings. And I do not thinkit everwillbe. The word is opaque: it points,as Ruskinknew,to a deep dilemmaof bourgeoisculture;it is as close to an
3. His Artand His Public(New York:Museum of ModernArt,1951), p. 214. Barr,Matisse: Alfred
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ultimatetermof ethicsor metaphysics as thatculturemaybewill ever throw up. in Modern "Twoyearsago,"ends Ruskin's "On Painters, chapter Vulgarity" when I was first with beginningto workout the subject,and chatting one of mykeenest-minded friends(Mr. Brett,the painterof the Val in theExhibition of 1859), I casually askedhim,"Whatis vulgarid'Aosta to see whathe would say,not supposingit possibleto get a ty?"merely forabout a minute,then answeredquietly, sudden answer. He thought "It is merely of Death." I did not see the meaningof one of the forms the replyat the time;but on testing it,foundthatit metevery phase of and summedthe trueconthe difficulties connectedwiththe inquiry, as itoughtto be made a distinctive clusion.Yet,in orderto be complete, what form ofdeathvulgarity wellas conclusive is; for definition; showing death itselfis not vulgar,but only death mingledwithlife. I cannot, definitionwhich will include all however,constructa short-worded the minor conditions of bodily degeneracy;but the term "deathful of mental forms selfishness" willembraceall the mostfataland essential vulgarity.4 I do not bring this passage of Ruskin on in hopes of solving our problem of would but more because it shows (more clearlythan anyonenowadays definition, and bodily cocktailofclassascriptions dare to) whatthe problemis-what terrible and how fataland essentialis is an emptycontainerfor, disgustthe word "vulgar" the slidingwithinit betweena handyformof class racismand a general sense of it is a "dulnessof bodilysense," is foulnessand degeneracy; class doom. Vulgarity on a soldier'sface is not "The black battle-stain "allwhichcomes of insensibility." vulgar,but the dirtyface of a housemaid is."5But Brett'sdictum is ultimately We are all housemaidsnow. of such distinctions. impatient of Death." Bewareof takingBrett's one of the forms is merely 14. "Vulgarity and above all beware in the case of Abstract dictumtoo literally Expressionism, of converting it back into some ridiculous (vulgar) retelling of Abstract Expressionists'life stories.I thinkthere maybe some kind of fatal connection and its incessantcourtingof Death; but between this painting'sdeep vulgarity one. It is a but a formal thatis not to be understoodas a biographicalproposition again about Pollock's or Still'srepetitioncompulsion,theirconwayof thinking stant (fruitful)drive toward emptiness, endlessness, the nonhuman and the inorganic."Perhapsthe last paradox theseworkscontain is thatof death,"writes the novelistParker Tylerof Pollock's drip paintingssome time earlyin 1950, Parsons's: beforethe lastshowof themat Betty
Painters 4. n.d.), vol. 5, pp. (Boston and New York:Colonial PressCompany, John Ruskin,Modern 347-49. 5. Ibid., p. 344.
33
For in being a conception of ultimate time and space, the labyrinth of infinity, Jackson Pollock's latest work goes beyond the ordinary of processes life-however these mightbe visualizedand recognizedinto an absolute being whichmustcontain death as well as life.Hence the spatial distinctions achieved by lines and spots of color within Pollock's rectanglesgo as much beyond mere optical vision as seems possible to painting.... at an infinite JacksonPollock has put the concept of the labyrinth and unreachable distance,a distance beyond the stars-a non-human distance.... If one felt of space, beforePollock'sdifferentiations vertigo then truly one would be lost in the abyssof an endless definitionof of the picturebeing. One would be enclosed, trappedby the labyrinth But we are at it space. safelylooking it, seeing steadilyand seeing it from a whole, point outside. Only man,in his paradoxical role of the can such a featof absolute contemplation:the sight achieve superman, of an image of space in which hedoesnotexist.6 It would be easy to make funof this.Its metaphysics are vulgar. But the termsand the tone seem to me as close as Pollock got to appropriatecriticism in his own lifetime.It is fitting, that these were from deleted again, paragraphs Tyler'sarticlein 1950 byRobertGoldwater, editorof the MagazineofArt.They onlysurvive at all as of Pollock criticism because the artist seems to have been a part given typescript at the time,and keptit in his files. bythewriter 15. Maybe the Death in Brett'sdictumis simplyor mainlythat of painting. was,forBrettand Ruskinas much as Pollock and ParkerTyler. Maybeit always 16. Death makes a bad metaphor.Picturesthatsummonit up too readilyNewman'spassim, Rothko'sfrom1957 on-get to look Gothic before theirtime. That we are meant to take the portentousnessas ultimately having to do with or or some such makes matters worse. Death is "painting" "signification" only enlistedto makevulgarity look deep. 17. The troublewithBarnettNewmanis thathe was nevervulgarenough, or on onlyvulgar paper. 18. The great Rothkosare those that everybody likes,fromthe early 1950s the ones that revel in the new formula's the ones where a mainly; cheap effects,
6. Parker Tyler,unedited text of "'JacksonPollock: The Infinite Labyrinth,"in Archives of American Art,Pollock Papers 3048, pp. 548-49. (The edited textwas published in MagazineofArt, March 1950.) My thanksto Michael Leja forpointingme to the deleted paragraphsand sortingout the circumstances of theirdisappearance.For fulldiscussionof the text(s),see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract (New Haven and London: Yale University Expressionism Press,1993), pp. 313-16.
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absoluteof self-presence is maintainedin the face of absence,void,nohectoring with of reds, pinks, thing,devouringsimplicity: vulgarity-a vulgarfulsomeness lime purples,oranges, lemons, greens,powder-puff whites-acting as the transformbetween the two possibilitiesof reading. The Birthof Tragedy redone by Renoir. 19. "Whentheyare hung in tight phalanx,as he would have themhung,and flooded withthe lighthe demands thattheyreceive,the tyranny of his ambition to suffocate or crushall who stand in his waybecomes fully manifest.... It is not withoutsignificance, that the surfacesof these paintingsreveal the therefore, of that and their means are the devices of seduction and gestures negation, has made it clear thathis workis of frustration, assault.Not I, but himself, resentment and aggression. And that it is the brightnessof death that veils their and clinicalevacuations":Clyfford Stillto Sidney bloodless febrility Janis, April4, 1955.7This is verylike Fen0on on Monet: mean-spirited, partial,and tendentious, but somehowforthatveryreason (because it stepsout of the circleof deference foronce) the bestcriticism Rothkoeverreceived. 20. And so to the question of class. "Whileformalanalysis," saysAdorno in to trace the most delicate his Introduction to theSociology "was learning ofMusic, ramificationsof [a work's] manufacture,. . . the method of deciphering the of music has lagged behind pitifully and mustbe specificsocial characteristics willturn and with content Quite so, maybeimprovisation largely improvisations."8 out to beits method. But equally-this is Adorno in the same paragraph-"If we of the revolutionary listento Beethovenand do not hear anything bourgeoisiein not the echo of its slogans,the need to realize them,the cryforthattotality whichreason and freedomare to have theirwarrant-we understandBeethoven no better than does the listenerwho cannot followhis pieces' purelymusical thathappens to theirthemes." the innerhistory content, 21. What remainsto be thoughtabout Abstract (though the Expressionism textsmost those on the written haunts subject, especially everything thought one class formation; anxious to repressit) is the painting'splace in a determinate of cultural on took the which,thoughlong prepared, powerin specifictrappings class formation-not in a the yearsafter1945. I said its place in a determinate State apparatus or a newlyimprovised systemof avant-gardepatronage or a But they Not that the latterare irrelevant. museum/artworld superstructure.
A Archivesof American Art,Alfonso Ossorio papers, quoted in James Breslin,MarkRothko, 7. of Chicago Press,1993), p. 344. Copies of the letterseem (Chicago and London: University Biography at the time,eitherbyStillorJanis. to have been circulated to theSociology Theodor Adorno, Introduction 8. ofMusic (New York:Seabury Press, 1976), p. 62 modified). (translation slightly
35
cannot be what we mean, fundamentally, when we talk about a certain representationalpractice inhering in the culture of a class. We mean that the in thatclass's whole construction of a "world." We practice somehowparticipates of overlapand mutualfeedingat the levelof representational are talking practice, at the level of symbolicproduction (ideology). When we say that the novel is lists subscription bourgeois,the keyfactsin the case are not eighteenth-century Werther. or even the uses earlyreadersmade of Young 22. Clement Greenberg begins a review of an exhibition of Courbet at in January1949 by sayingthat "Bosch, Brueghel,and Courbet are Wildenstein's who expresswhatmaybe called a petty bourunique in thattheyare greatartists Like Barr,he seems to me to be avertinghis eyes fromPollock geois attitude."9 Still. What is new in theircase, of course, is that now a particular and Clyfford a (hybrid)formof petty bourgeois culture-I am includingin the term"culture" and duplicities withmyths set of politicaland economic compromiseformations, to match,as well as a set of established stylesof personhood-has become the form,the onlyviable medium, of bourgeois class power.It is not that the petty bourgeoisiein America has power,but thatitsvoice has become, in the yearsafter 1945, the only one in which power can be spoken; in it, and only in it, can be heard the last echoes of whatthe bourgeoisiehad once aspired to be-"the echo of its slogans,the need to realize them,the cryforthattotality in whichfreedom [no longerreason] is to have itswarrant."0o
9. Clement Greenberg, The Collected of (Chicago and London: University Essays and Criticism 8, 1949. A monthlater,on February19, Chicago Press,1986), vol. 2, p. 275, fromTheNation, January Gottlieband Pollock. "I feel thatGottliebshould make the factof his powermuch Greenbergreviews more obvious,"he writes(ibid.,p. 285), thoughhe welcomesthe painter'sTotemicFission (mychoice for the perfect Abstract and Hunter and Hunted as pointingin the right title),Ashes Expressionist ofPhoenix, direction. His reviewof the Pollock show at BettyParsons's is that in which he takes Number One, 1948-"this huge baroque scrawlin aluminum,black, white,madder and blue"--as finalproof that Pollock has become a major artist. The words"baroque scrawl"seem to me to be feelingforthe qualitiesin Pollock'sworkthatI am insisting on here. 10. This is not the place to enterinto the difficulties involved in making, and sustaining, the distinction between bourgeois and pettybourgeois as termsof class analysis.ObviouslyI believe the distinction is real, and I do not want my talk in the text of class "cultures"and "formations" to give the is ultimately one of economic power.A bourgeois,for impressionthatI do not believe the distinction to intervenein at least some of the important economic me, is someone possessingthe wherewithal decisionsshapinghis or her own life (and those of others).A bourgeois,forme, is someone expecting (reasonably)to pass on thatpowerto the kids.A petty bourgeoisis someone who has no such leverage or security, and certainly no such dynastic butwho nonethelessidentifies expectations, wholeheartedly withthose who do. Of course this means that everything depends, fromage to age and moment to in whichsuch identification can take place. The history of the petty moment,on the particular forms of manners, a history necessubcultures, bourgeoisiewithin capitalismis therefore symbols, "lifestyles," sarilyfixatedon the surfaceof social life. (Chapters3 and 4 of myPaintingofModern Lifetryto begin such a history for the late nineteenthcentury. The material on "Modern Man discourse" in Leja's Abstract strikes me as providing some of the elementsfora parallel description Reframing Expressionism of the 1940sand '50s.)
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I wantto say,is the styleof a certainpetty 23. Abstract bourExpressionism, to to a cultural It is the art of geoisie's aspiration aristocracy, totalizing power. that moment when the pettybourgeoisie thinksit can speak (and its masters allow it to speak) the aristocrat's claim to individuality. is the formof Vulgarity thataspiration. is the formof the pettybour24. Or could we say:Abstract Expressionism to at that fateful moment when the bourgeoisie geoisie's aspiration aristocracy, no longerso aspires;when the petty itself has to stand in fora hiddenbourgeois elite. we with two class course are here (Of nay,vanished-bourgeois dealing or two fictions not two brute constructions, formations, sociological entities.We of representation-which is not to saythatthe kindof repare dealingwithforms sometimesbrutal, resentationaldoubling described here does not have specific, in which the bourgeois effects. was one of them, McCarthyism sociological its Frankenstein was fora whilereally by petty bourgeoisMonster.) paralyzed formof that then (to returnto our subject),is the necessary 25. Vulgarity, that will allowed the engage and susindividuality bourgeoisie.Only painting petty whichcan be seen to recognize,and in some sense to articulate, tain our attention which be a painting thislimitedconditionof its own rhetoric. Maybeitwillalways here we as Adorno mime-for this condition to valorize touch, quand struggles link between never tired of tellingus, on some constitutive (mayberegrettable) or transcendence-butwhatwe shallvalue most artand an ethicsof reconciliation of (self-) in the paintingis the ruthlessness exposure,the courtingof bathos,the also be Pyrrhic. if there is The one, mustalways victory, banality. unapologetic has more and more the notion 26. You see now whythe concept "vulgarity" written into it as the nineteenth of betrayal goes on. For the bourgeoisie's century to speak for retain it can is that only powerbyallowingits inferiors greattragedy itself to hear the and for of the leftovers them the it,giving totality, steeling cry to hear and of it-to make ludicrousmishmash pretend approve,and maybe they in the end to approvewithout pretending. turns out to workat forAbstract 27. If thisframeof reference Expressionism of the stale at is a be best it to one of the all, comparison rethinking things ought
stillhave class and lifestyles about this.Sometimessymbols There is no need to be oversubtle ten feettall.Whatcould be more disarmingly inscribedon themin letters bourgeois,in the old sense, And what more dismally section on an airplane crossingthe Atlantic? than the first-class pettybourairlinecalls Connoisseur-class would take geois than coach? (Those in business-or whatmyfavorite of some going up, some going down.A lot depends on particular a bit more ad hocclass sorting, styles corporate reward to middle management,for instance,whichvaries fromcountryto countryand the roughbalance of numbersin thiscase seems to me phase to phase of the businesscycle.)Anyway, in theworldat large. forthe balance of numbers quite instructive
37
Paris 1959. byNight. AsgerJorn. the war,alas, comes out of betweenAmericaand Europe. European paintingafter a verydifferent is not its set of class formations. Vulgarity problem.In Asger Jorn, for example-to turnfor a momentto the greatestpainter of the 1950s-what as its limitconditionis alwaysrefinement. Jornis a paintingconfronts Paintingfor of of to terms fact that however this set with the process coming qualitiesmaybe or erased theystillend up being what(European) painting tortured, exacerbated, is; and the torture,exacerbation, and erasure are discovered in practice to be that is, the formsrefinement refinement, presentlytakes if a painter is good or dross (it turns out are what refines to a new preciousness enough; they painting thatpreciousness and drossare the same thing). 28. In callingJornthe greatest painterof the 1950s I meant to saynothing The about the general healthof paintingin Europe at the time.On the contrary. on the cliches in the books are true.Jorn's reallywas an endgame. Vulgarity, other hand, back on the other side of the Atlantic,turned out to be a way of all the timewith keeping the corpse of paintinghideouslyalive-while coquetting Death. 29. An AsgerJorn can be garish, florid,tasteless,forced, cute, flatulent, froma tamperit can neverbe vulgar.It just cannot preventitself overemphatic; back into the realm of and its which them of effects pulls ing framing desperate in full of their ironizes done declares them them, emptiness. knowledge painting, American painting,by contrast-and preciselythat American painting that is
38
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closestto the European, done byEuropeans,byGermansand Dutchmensteeped in the traditiontheyare exitingfrom--doesnot ironizeand willnevermake the (false) declarationthatthe game is up. Hofmannand de Kooning,the closerthey areJorn'sdirectopposites. get toJorn'svocabulary, 30. It is my hope that conceivingof AbstractExpressionism as vulgarwill lead to a new set of discriminations betweenparticular the group, within painters and between momentsin the workof a single artist.I have alreadyreferred to one or two such possibilities-forinstance,the difference betweenPollock'sdrip paintingsin 1947 and 1948 and theirfinalappearance in 1950. I have tried also to givea preliminary sense of the new priorities, and the new kindsof belonging under the together general (too capacious) banner, by means of the pictures text. Let me saya wordor twomore on thissubject. accompanying my will have Gottlieb, noticed,emergesas the greatand implacable maestro you of AbstractExpressionism. He is Byronto Greenberg'sGeorge Eliot-the most in oils. A Mantovanior a vulgar-minded genius thatever produced a greateffect LawrenceWelk. Charlie Parkerplayinginsolentvariationson the theme of "I'd Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China"-feeling fora wayto retrieve, and make is at the for those it was written for. Gottlieb unbearable, properly song's contempt his bestwhen he goes straight forthe cosmological for the jugular,straight pages of Timeor Life-his worldson firelike atomic-ageparodies of Lissitzky's Story of in theirbeautification of destruction. TwoSquares, ghastly 31. Certainmomentsand sequences of workin Abstract that Expressionism a the new then and to have been for since, agrees everyone, turningpoint to make a bit more sense. For example,de Kooning's paintingbegin,in thislight, Woman series and the vehemenceof Greenberg'sreactionto it. What Greenberg I think, is the waychoosingWoman as his subjectallowed de was recoilingfrom, to extrude a Kooning qualityof perceptionand handlingthat stood at the very heartof his aestheticand fixit onto an Other,a scapegoat."The blackbattle-stain but the dirty face of a housemaid is." For "dirty on a soldier'sface is not vulgar, smile of the model in the Camels advertiseface of a housemaid" read "perfect ment."Greenbergdrew back fromthis not, need I say it, out of concern at de but froman intuitionthat such splittingand projection Kooning's misogyny, the right to go on sustaining would make it impossibleforde Kooning'spainting I he think was ironic of right. self-regard. overweening facility, pitch tawdriness, be his own again-or Only when de Kooning found a wayto have the vulgarity it onto cliche landscape or townscapeformatsthatwere rather,to half-project his art mere props-did he regainthe measureof meretriciousness transparently ifhe was to paint had to be unfocused needed. The male braggadocio,thatis to say, It had to be a mannerin searchof an object,and somehowaggrieved up a storm. war of one. Whatwas wantedwas general paranoia, not particular at not finding the sexes.
39
. ........
i;3vy:
:
:-:::-Mi i
a i pp
... ... ...
Gottlieb. Under and Over. 1959. Adolph
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32. Vulgarityis gendered, of course. At the time we are examining, it to heterobelonged (as a disposableproperty) mainlyto men, or more precisely, sexual men. Not thatthismeantthatthe artdone under itsauspiceswas closed to reading fromother points of view.What Cecil Beaton and AlfonsoOssorio and ParkerTylerand FrankO'Hara did to Pollock,withor without Pollock's permishave be as I have central would to a said, sion, part-of any part-sometimes, of the New YorkSchool. It seems importantthat,apart from defensiblehistory not Greenberg, the strongestearly readings of Pollock's work (the strongest, and films the all came from men. Namuth's best) photographs necessarily gay partake of the same homosocial atmosphere. Perhaps the deep reason why was neverable to realizehis cherishedprojectof a book on Pollockwas Greenberg thathe foundno wayto contain,or put to use, the erotichero worshipthatsings in the prose of his shorter pieces.11 thatthe set of isssuesI 33. I do not mean to give the impression, bythe way, am pointingto neverappeared in criticaldiscourseat the time,or did so onlyin but whatis striking utterly displaced form.Now and again theysurfacedirectly, seems not to knowwhatto do withthe issues when thathappens is how the writer and terms once they show up. The termsare embarrassing. Greenberg, for Still'scolor and painthandlingin to sayabout Clyfford instance,had the following in 1955: Review hisgreatessay"'American-Type' Painting," publishedin Partisan Stillhas paid to Monetand I don't knowhow much consciousattention on the powerwithin has been musing [Greenberg just Impressionism AbstractExpressionismof "an art like the late Monet's, which in its time pleased banal taste and still makes most of the avant-garde withpopular taste, has an affiliation shudder"],but his.., .art likewise thoughnot by any means enough to make it acceptable to it. Still'sis the first reallyWhitmanesquekind of paintingwe have had, not only ... butjust as much because, as because it makes large,loose gestures withvarying Whitman's success,large quantitiesof poetryassimilated, with stalejournalisticand oratoricalprose,so Still'spaintingis infused Newmanhas given thatstale,prosaickindof paintingto whichBarnett the name of "buckeye." Though littleattentionhas been paid to it in
It would be too easy to catalogue the more flagrant 11. phrases here-"His emotion startsout etc.-and in orderto be put into a picture," it does not have to be castratedand translated pictorially; Whereas the point is the have the flavorof Freudian "now-it-can-be-told." the resultwould inevitably I think, obviousness-whichis integral, and the factthatthatvery obviousnessof the verballove affair, to Greenberg'sinsightsand descriptionsfrom1943 to 1955-was only allowable (or manageable) tone about everything-thetone when it went along with a no-holds-barred, take-it-or-leave-it In a bookcolumnsand occasional aphoristicsurveys. of fortnightly as a writer Greenbergperfected on Mir6 had been-there would have been too obvious as Greenberg's even one as briefand essayistic was more and more anxious to mode (Greenberg, a seam betweenthe documentary understandably, disinterPollock fromunder a mountain of biographicalfilth)and the awe at Pollock's energyand maleness.
41
print, "buckeye"is probablythe most widelypracticed and homogeneous kind of paintingseen in the Western world today.... "Buckeye" as faras I am aware,do landscapes exclusively and workmore painters, or less directly fromnature.By pilingdrypaint-though not exactlyin and the process impasto-they tryto capturethe brillianceof daylight, of paintingbecomes a race between hot shadowsand hot lightswhose invariable outcome is a livid, dry,sour picture with a warm,brittle surface that intensifies the acid fireof the generallypredominating and reds,browns, greens, yellows."Buckeye" landscapes can be seen in GreenwichVillage restaurants(Eddie's Aurora on WestFourthStreet used to collect them), SixthAvenue picturestores (there is one near Eighth Street), and in the WashingtonSquare outdoor shows. ... I cannot understandfully should be so universal and why[these effects] so uniform, or the kindofpaintingculturebehind them. to have put "buckeye" effects into seriStill,at anyrate,is the first ous art.These are visiblein the the frayed dead-leafedges thatwander down the marginsor across the middle of so manyof his canvases,in the uniformly dark heat of his color,and in a dry, crusty paint surface Still seems to no have in faith diluted or (like any "buckeye"painter, thinpigments).Such thingscan spoil his pictures, or make themweird in an unrefreshing but when he is able to succeed with,or in spite way, of them,it represents but the conquestbyhigh artof one more area of experience,and itsliberationfromKitsch.12 There is a lot going on here, and no one interpretation will do itjustice (the and in redundancies the which I have left out forthe sake of brevity, text, tangents are actually vitalto itsdetective-story But I what see tone). Greenbergdoing essenis to describe and come to terms with a tially struggling specificarea of petty taste. He rolls out the names and bourgeois place pieces of New York City with a cultural all the better to be able to plead class geography explorer'srelish, in the cannot understand the kind of paintingculture end-"I ignorance fully... behind them."Readers of Greenbergwill know that the final enlistment of the wordkitsch is heavily loaded. Kitschequals vulgarity, In roughly. Greenberg's original scheme of thingsthe word had strongclass connotations.But 1955 is Trotskyite too late, by severalyears,for Greenbergto be willingto pursue this any further than he does. It is interesting (thisis myargument)thathe pursuesit at all-that Still's paintingseemingly forceshim to thinkagain, at some length,about high art's courting of banality.And he is in no two minds, at this point, about the importanceof such a tactic,for all its risk.The next sentence afterthe one on Still and kitschreads as follows:"Still'sart has a special importanceat this time because it showsabstract paintinga wayout of its ownacademicism."
12. and Criticism, vol. 3, pp. 230-31 (fromPartisan Greenberg,Collected Essays Review, Spring 1955).
Still. Untitled.1951-52. Clyfford
This sentenceis alteredout of all recognitionin the versionof "'Americansix yearslater.13 All of Type' Painting"Greenbergput in his book Artand Culture more "one to The word kitsch the sectionon Stillis givenheavysurgery. givesway Kitsch word. the is of where area art," surely"depressed" exactly wrong depressed is manic. Above all it is rigidwiththe exaltationof art.It believesin art the way to the pointwhere the cult of are supposed to-to the point of absurdity, artists art becomes a new Philistinism.That is the aspect of kitsch which Still gets
Artand Culture See ClementGreenberg, 13. (Boston: Beacon Press,1961), pp. 223-24. Part of the reason for the changes was the vehemence of Still's and Newman'sreaction to Greenberg'soriginal blastfromStill (dated April 15, 1955,whichsuggeststhat wording.See Greenberg'sreplyto a typical Still's original lettermay have been sent offat much the same time as the one to SidneyJanis on and Critics Creators (New York:Abrams, Ross, Abstract Rothko), quoted in ed. Clifford Expressionism: is one of the main bones of contentionin the exchange. Still 1990), pp. 251-53. The term"buckeye" suspectsthatGreenbergborrowednot onlythe termfromNewman (whichGreenbergacknowledges) one I heard name a certain was the first but also itsapplicationto hiswork.Greenberg saysno. "Barney kind of paintingas buckeye,but he did not apply the termto yours.When I, some time later,told or rathersome aspects BarneythatI thoughttherewas a relationbetweenbuckeyeand yourpainting, was too good for that" (p. 252). Since Greenberg and said yourstuff of it, he protestedvehemently (as Expressionists regularly gets told offthese daysforbeing waspishand superiorabout the Abstract in retrospect, it is worthpointingto the well-nigh and letterwriters) conversationalists saintly patience ofhis 1955 dealingswithStillon the rampage. attackon Stillin TheNation,"Art,"January MarninYoungpointsout to me thatin his spirited 6, seizes on Greenberg'scomparisonto "Greenwich 1964, Max Kozloff Village landscapists"(he quotes a fewsentencesfromthe Artand Culture text) and goes on: "Criticalattemptsto portray[Still] as an or as an exponentof the 'Americansublime,'overlookhis into a new freedom, artist who burstsforth him an expoexaltedness"(p. 40). But is not thatwhat makes static,one ought to say,vulgar, terribly withKozloff's nent?(Of course,giventhe date,one sympathizes distaste.)
In Defense Expressionism ofAbstract
43
of the PartisanReview textis abandoned in favorof horribly right.The "buckeye" or "demotic-Impressionist" "open-airpainting in autumnal colors." (Abandoned almostcompletely-Greenbergcannot resista single,unexplained appearance of the word towardthe end.) There are no more names and addresses on Eighth talkof a separate,impenetrable"painting culture." This is Street,no more baffled I feel.And I thinkI see why. frompreviousinsights, a criticin flight 34. Then, finally, there is the problem of Hans Hofmann. You will not be to hear that it was in coming to terms withHofmannin particularthat surprised the vocabularyof the presentargumentfirst surfaced.For everyone who has ever cared at all about Hofmann (including Greenberg,who cared verymuch) has alwaysknown that in Hofmann the problems of taste in Abstract Expressionism come squawking home to roost. A good Hofmann is tasteless to the coretastelessin its invocationsof Europe, tastelessin its mock religiosity, tastelessin its Color-by-Technicolor, its winksand nudges towardlandscape format, its Irving Stone title,the cloyingdemonstrativeness of its handling.Tastelessand in complete controlof itsdecomposingmeans. 35. Seen in its normalsurroundings, sofasand the calla past the unobtrusive as of that blend of and which is the tasteof lilies, part unique opulence spareness the picture-buying classesin America,a good Hofmannseemsalways to be blurting out a dirty secretthatthe restof the decor is conspiringto keep. It makes a false with its destination.It takesup the language of its usersand exemplifies compact self-satisfied riffs on the main tune,playing it to the hiltit,runningmonotonous, to the point of parody,like Mahler with his sentimentalViennese palm-court melodies.A good Hofmannhas to have a surfacesomewherebetweenice cream, of Nature-of the chocolate, stucco, and flockwallpaper.Its colors have to reek worstkind of Woolworth Its forest-glade-with-waterfall-and-thunderstorm-brewing. titleshould turnthe knifein the wound.14 For whatit showsis the worldits users inhabitin theirheart of hearts.It is a pictureof their"interiors," of the visceralof the rich. And all above it can have no illusions about its cum-spiritual upholstery own statusas partof thatupholstery. It is made out of the materials it deploys. Take them or leave them,these ciphersof plenitude-they are all paintingat present has to offer. made dreadfully if "Feeling"has to be fetishized, (obscenely)exterior, is to continue. painting 36. I do not believe thatwhatI havejust offered is an account of Hofmann's more than if I had been for the coldness and hardnessof intentions, any arguing Matisse's hedonism, say,or the pathos of Picasso's late eroticism. (Of course it would be possible to give an account of all three which argued that our under14. Pass comes froma poem by the AustrianRomanticNikolaus Lenau, And, .... And Thunderclouds OutoftheCavesfromRilke'sSonnets toOrpheus, 2, 11.
Hans Hofmann. "And,Out of the Caves,the NightThrewa Handful of Pale Tumbling Pigeonsinto the Light."1964.
Hans Hofmann. "... And ThundercloudsPass." 1961.
Studio. Marcia DouglasM. Parker SimonWeismanResidence. Circa 1962.
45
standingof theirintentionshad been deficientup to now,and ought to include the pathos or the coldness or the capacityforself-parody. I just do not thinkthe inclusions are necessaryor plausible in Hofmann's case.) No doubt Hofmann "believed in" his own overblownrhetoric. (What would it be like to go in for it at thispitch of intensity without believingin it? Like AsgerJorn,maybe;not like And I Thunderclouds dare Pass.) ... sayhe thoughthis titleswerewonderful.(Who is going to quarrelwithNikolausLenau and the Sonnets to Orpheus?Onlya modernistcyniclike me.) And as for the place of his paintingsin Marcia Weisman's room?He surely assumed thatat the level thatreally mattered-the levelof sitting as to a was of taste, opposed day-to-day preference-there profoundcommunity interest between himselfand the best of his clients.And so therewas. He could not have painted theirinteriors ifthey werenot his interior too. These are not the matters at issue, finally. The task for the criticis to find an adequate language for the continuingeffect of, say,Hofmann'soverblownness am not even that this is the or (I saying only primary qualityof Hofmann'sversion of Abstract but it is the one that over time). Expressionism, gets more interesting The overblownness matters because it seems to be what lends the only pictures theircoherence, maybetheirdepth. I am not meaning to congratulate Hofmann on gettinga qualityof petty The qualityis bourgeoisexperience somehow"right." not hard to perceive and mimic.What is hard (what is paradoxical) is to make thatdoing so paintingsout of it. That is whatHofmanndid. Of course I am saying involved him in an encounterwiththe conditionsof productionand consumption of his own art. That is mybasic hypothesis. But the encounter could only take at the level of of work, painterly place practice-the encounter was gettingthe overblownness to be pictorial,or discovering thatit was the qualityout of which now had to be made. Even to call this an "encounter"is to give it too paintings much of an exterioror discursive flavor. It was what Hofmann did, not what he discovered. 37. This is not an argument, about Abstract social or afortiori, Expressionists' Of I course relish the fact that Still political opinions. Clyfford supported or that Pollock was "a Goddamn Stalinistfromstartto finish,"15 in McCarthy, much the same way that I like to know Manet was a frightful Gambettistand Renoir believed that "sidingwiththeJewPissarrois revolution."16 But I knowmy interestdoes not count for much in understanding what any of the four did as At best the factsmay strikeus as dimlyconsonant withone or another painters.
15. On Still's McCarthyism, see Susan Landauer, "Clyfford Still and Abstract in San Expressionism Still 1904-1980: The Buffalo and San Francisco Francisco,"in Clyfford ed. Thomas Kellein Collections, on Pollock's politicsis Greenberg's, (Munich: Prestel,1992), p. 93. The verdict in an interview withme in 1981. I thinkhe meantit seriously. 16. in that Rough draftof letterto Paul Durand-Ruel,February26, 1882, discussingparticipation exhibition. See Lionello Venturi,Les Archives de l'Impressionisme year's Impressionist (Paris and New York:Durand-Ruel,1939), vol. 1, p. 122. (The sentencewas omittedin Renoir'sfinaldraft.)
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or handling-withManet's aspect (usuallya surfaceaspect) of theirsubjectmatter or Renoir's over-anxiousness to please. But theyget brittleness, epigrammatic say, us nowherewithwhatreallymatters, whichis the artists'ability to have these surface qualitiescoexistwithothersseemingly at odds withthem:Manet'spessimism forinstance,or Renoir'sdeadlyeconomyofmeans. and compassion, 38. I am not saying thatAbstract social attitudes arejust irrelExpressionists' evant.No doubt it helps to knowthatRothko,forinstance,had his own visionof the pettybourgeoisfuture; and again, the factthathe saw it in the shape of the of University-the University Colorado at Boulder-is forme irresistible: The University...is on the hill.At its base are the faculty apartments whichare shells around appliances facinga courtinto whichthe chilin which the dren are emptied. Two hundred yardsawayis Vetsville, itselfhad lived only fouror fiveyearsago when they presentfaculty were preparingto be faculty. Vetsvilleitselfis occupied by graduates fromarmy headquarters, alreadymarriedand breedingwho willbe facultyin faculty quartersthreeor fouryearshence. Theybreed furiously the expansionwhichwillperpetuatethe processinto the guaranteeing future. itselfis allowed to stayhere only2 yearswhereupon The faculty theymust assume mortgagesin similarhousing slum developments where thereafter theymustrepair theirown cracksand sprinkletheir grass..... Here is a self-perpetuating peonage, schooled in mass communal living,which will become a formidablesixthestate withina decade. It will have a cast of features,a shape of head, and a dialect as yet and removedfrom and willpropagatea cultureso distorted unknown, thatitsimage is unpredictable.17 itsorigins, stylesof ironyat the expense of the Anyone familiarwith nineteenth-century this as generic (solecisms and all). nouvellescouchessociales will recognize Look at Condescensionjust is the formof the petty bourgeoisie'sself-recognition. not this does All even on yuppies. the same, the recentliterature help me passage artist: Rothko as an and about withwhatis reallyinteresting, ultimately baffling, at one moment of the death lead to loftiness could brightness whythe same banal (1950), and to clinicalevacuationat another(1965). was not meantironically. 39. Mytitle"In Defense of Abstract Expressionism" and of is the bestdefensepossibleof thisbodyofwork, whatI think I have offered has turnedintoa termof course I am aware thatin doing so the noun '"vulgarity"
of AmericanArt,HerbertFerberpapers,letterto the Ferbers, 17. Archives July7, 1955, quoted in MarkRothko, Breslin, p. 352.
Aeternum. 1962.
Hans Hofmann. Memoriain
Gottlieb. Coalescence. 1961. Adolph
value, whetherI wanted it to or not. If the formulawere not so mechanical, I whenit is most would be preparedto saythatAbstract Expressionist paintingis best of representait then that it most the conditions because is vulgar, grasps fully moment. tion-the technicaland social conditions-of itshistorical The momentwas brief.By the time of the two paintingsI choose to end with-1961 and 1962-it was almostover.The mode and indeed the titlesof the is straight Death putsin itsusual appearance.The coffin nothingifnotvaledictory. out of Evelyn And this overstuffed, end-and-beginning-of-theoverwrought, Waugh. worldqualityseems to me, to repeat, the keyto these paintings'strength. They artin NewYorkfeltobliged to have a truepetty bourgeoispathos.One can see why a lasteffort and why from retreat such dangerousgroundin theyearsthatfollowed, in its was made to restabilize (exhausted) trajectory. avant-garde practice previous The popular was easier to handle than the vulgar-it had more of the smell of art about it. Reduction was a betterwayto generate recognizablemodernistart was preferableto worksthan thiskind of idiot "Ripenessis all." The site-specific art mainlyto norArthad to go on, and thatmeant returning the class-specific. mal avant-gardechannels.18But for some of us-certainly for me-the price high. paid for this accommodation in the 1960s and afterseems prohibitively
and thesefewsentencesdo not claim to charac18. This defenseis not intendedas a covertattack, from1967 terizewhatwas mostproductive(and genuinely excessive)in the artof the 1960s,especially of the 1960s willhave to be onward.But I let themstand,because I do thinkthatpartof the history fromAbstractExpressionism'simpossible class-belonging--its writtenin termsof art's withdrawal
two pictures-Hofmann's
Memoria in Aeternumand Gottlieb's Coalescence-are
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OCTOBER
The ridiculousmomentof coalescence,or of mourning, or of history, is whatwe stillwantfrom and what Abstract to painting, Expressionism manages provide. 40. So now I thinkI understandwhat I have been defendingall along. It seems thatI cannot quite abandon the equation of Artwithlyric.Or rather--to shift froman expressionof personalpreference to a proposal about arthistory-I do not believe that modernism can ever quite escape fromsuch an equation. By I mean the illusionin an artworkof a singular voice or viewpoint, uninter"lyric" claim to a of its I world own. mean those rupted,absolute,laying metaphorsof and self-centeredness that enforce our of agency, mastery, acceptance theworkas the expressionof a singlesubject.This impulseis ineradicable, hard alas, however one strandof modernism have time after to undo or make fun worked, time, may of it.Lyriccannotbe expungedbymodernism, onlyrepressed. Whichis not to saythatI haveno sympathy withthewishto do theexpunging. For lyric in our time is deeply ludicrous. The deep ludicrousness of lyricis Abstract like a tongue to a loosening subject,to whichit returns Expressionism's tooth. This subject,of course, is farfrombeing the pettybourgeoisie'sexclusive That is notwhatI have been arguing. who caresforthe painting property. Anyone of Delacroix or the poetryof VictorHugo willbe in no doubt thatthe ludicrousness of lyrichas had its hautbourgeois avatars.But sometimesit fallsto a class to of individualism in pure form-unbreathably offer or suffer the absurdities pure, a of as the last almost, gasp oxygen plane goes down. That was the case, I think, 1945. withAmericanpaintingafter
horriblehonestyabout artand its place. Onlypart.Because the point is thatthe projectof "returning channels"was and remainsa hopeless one in America.The grounds artmainlyto normalavant-garde of one, simply do not exist.In or even the myth autonomy, (always shaky)foran enduringavant-garde been made to have subsequently the later 1960s and early'70s the projectimploded. Franticefforts critical or refurbished or set of art forms, reconstitute the project around some "new" technology, is the waythese phenomena cannotescape the gravitational discourse;but whatis striking pull of the to the preponor a formof anti-matter, thatthe later1960s are a satellite, later 1960s.And I am saying in Aeternum. and Memoria derantblack starof Coalescence is thatart could make Abstract A finalthingI do not want to be taken as sayingor implying to go one betterthan it in the vulgarity a thingof the past by imitating it, or trying Expressionism tacticin the lasttenyearsor so. stakes.That has been a popular,and I think futile,

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism Author(s): T. J. Clark Source: October, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994), pp.

In Defense ofAbstract Expressionism

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Walker Tomlin. All Souls' Left: Bradley No. 2. 1949. Night,

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In Defense Abstract of Expressionism

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Gottlieb. Under and Over. 1959. Adolph

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Still. Untitled.1951-52. Clyfford

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Hans Hofmann. "... And ThundercloudsPass." 1961.

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Gottlieb. Coalescence. 1961. Adolph

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