Page 19 - Studio International - January 1973

Abstract Expressionism I

Charles Harrison

`What about the reality of the everyday world and published in the Partisan Review in Spring 1955 work of Jackson Pollock.2 The important issues
the reality of painting ? They are not the same and was reprinted in his collected essays, Art and concerned in critical approaches to Abstract
realities. What is this creative thing that you have Culture. His writing maintains a consistently Expressionism have been in danger of sinking
struggled to get and where did it come from ? What high level of responsibility to the actual formal from view beneath a morass of accusations, from
reference or value does it have, outside of the appearance of the paintings, but his increasing one camp of rampant avantgardism and debased
painting itself ?' — Ad Reinhardt (in a group devotion to a 'Modernist logic' of historicity and debasing materialism, and from the other of
discussion at Studio 35,195o). (particularly after the mid fifties, and perhaps elitist aesthetics and naive ontology.
partly in reaction against Rosenberg's rabid Despite overwhelming evidence from the
Means of approach existentialism) leads him to straitjacket extant writings and reported statements of the
As a label for the different works of a particular interpretation.' abstract-expressionist painters themselves, the
generation or community of artists, the term As the influence of Rosenberg's criticism priority they accorded in the forties to concerns
`Abstract Expressionism' is misleading, waned, so the Modernist position hardened, with 'content' and 'subject' was not well
embracing as it does at one extreme the work of particularly in the work of those younger critics respected by spectators of their work until
Willem de Kooning, which is rarely 'abstract', influenced by Greenberg. The formal elements comparatively recently. More recent studies,
and at the other the work of Barnett Newman, of abstract-expressionist painting were perhaps partly in response to the progressive
which is not characteristically 'expressionist'. emphasized retrospectively in the most publication of original documents from the
The term has gained currency, however, and can hard-working American criticism of the sixties forties and early fifties, have tended somewhat
therefore be assumed to be relatively 'neutral' in (i.e., Modernist criticism, pejoratively to redress the balance, or at least to provide
use. characterized as 'Formalise), to the exclusion of material for alternative hypotheses. The
More partisan positions, within American much that was necessary to provide a catalogue for the important Los Angeles County
criticism, are represented by Harold Rosenberg's well-rounded picture, largely in the interests of a Museum exhibition, 'New York School — The
label 'Action Painting', and by Clement subsequent generation of painters little First Generation Painting of the 194os and
Greenberg's "American-type" Painting' (i.e., concerned with 'content' or 'subject matter', 195os', 1965, included excerpts from writings
positively non-European painting). Rosenberg's whose paintings required to be seen in terms of and statements by all the artists represented and
essay, 'The American Action Painters' essentially formal developments beyond contained the first really detailed bibliography
(originally published in Art News in 1952 and Abstract Expressionism. The 'rival' school is of the movement.3 Irving Sandler's recently
reprinted in Rosenberg's first collection of pejoratively characterized as 'Literalist' and is published study of Abstract Expressionism has
essays, The Tradition of the New) offered, at best, ideologically derived in part from aspects of the done much to readjust the overall picture in
a sense of intense and early sympathy with the work of Jasper Johns and more substantially terms of substantiated history and original
enterprise and an assertion of compatibility from the work and writings of the 'sculptor' documentation.4
between the poet and the painters for which the Robert Morris. Such criticism is seen as taking One wants to establish a view of Abstract
latter must generally have been grateful; but his its point of departure from a response to the Expressionism which is broadly heuristic
theatrical prose as it gathers impetus tends to `literalness' and `evidentness' of the procedures rather than dogmatic; a view which caters to a
outstrip the requirements of sense. Greenberg's of paint-application and of the painted surface in need for some reliable understanding of the
"American-Type" Painting' was originally Abstract Expressionism and especially in the painters' formal and technical concerns and of

Jackson Pollock, Portrait and a Dream, 1953. Enamel on canvas, 4 ft 10 1/4 in x 11 ft 2 1/2 in. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts
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