Page 26 - Studio International - January 1973

kinds of subject matter in face of the apparent Kooning is still painting figures; Pollock died
exhaustion of painting's traditional in 1956 when only 44.
representational functions. When a group of It has been a tenet of extreme Modernist/
the Abstract Expressionists founded a school in Formalist criticism that Pollock's works after
1948, they called it, at Barnett Newman's 195o generally represent a decline after the
suggestion, 'The Subjects of the Artist'.32 high point of the preceding three years.35
According to Motherwell, the name 'was Among the paintings which would be
meant to emphasize that our painting was not derogated under this programmatic critique
abstract, that it was full of subject matter'.33 are several which are surely among the highest,
If one is to find a generally viable most intense achievements of
characterization of the shared concerns of the twentieth-century art : Blue Poles of 1952,
Abstract Expressionists during the forties, it Portrait and a Dream and Ocean Greyness of
can only be in terms of shared concerns with 1953 and many others. These paintings do not
content. Pollock's 1947-50 paintings need to seem to have opened up any radical new
be seen in terms which allow for some possibilities for figurative art (nor, in any
acknowledgment of this. short-term or evident way, did Rembrandt's
In the most elegant of Pollock's works of late self-portraits) but this does not
195o — such as Autumn Rhythm (Number 3o, necessarily imply that they are art-historically
195o), One (Number 31, 1950) and Number 32, retrogressive. To see them as such implies a
1950 - the procedures of rhythmic composition reading of Pollock which would see him
in an increasingly self-sustaining technique essentially as an innovator of styles of
do indeed seem to declare a holistic priority for abstraction. Such a view seems to contradict Willem de Kooning
the painting in its non-referential aspect; but the known facts about Pollock's points of Woman r (June 1950-June 1952)
75 1/8 x 58 in. MOMA, New York
even here individual 'incidents' detach departure, and to depend upon a sadly
themselves and assume particular function as selective view of the work. I suspect that the
one's concentration intensifies. One senses that idea that there is a (strong) necessity for compatible with the 'mythic' interests of the
the 'resolved' quality of these paintings abstraction in painting, which this view mid forties (titles include Black Friday,
represents a hard-won achievement in a wider implies, is in turn a result and a function of a Orestes and Dark Pond); but essentially de
context than that of the simple canvas surface; too restricted — in the long term perhaps Kooning was concerned with problems more
and it seems that that response can only be dangerously restricted — purview of art. central to the cubist than to the surrealist
explained in terms of an intuition of the presence traditions of twentieth-century painting. Of
of some signifiers of 'states' requiring 6 Willem de Kooning course by 1940 the two streams were not always
resolution. These 'states' are hard to Pollock remained a comparatively isolated easy to distinguish. Picasso in particular had
characterize in terms other than those in which figure. He belonged to none of the artists' been concerned to inject possibilities for high
they are embodied, i.e. in 'visual' terms; but it is groups, ideological, social or whatever, which expressiveness into contexts suggesting that
perhaps not unreasonable to expect that the began to form from around 1948 onwards as a formal problems were there for solving.
`emotional range' — the sense of unsparing, sense of community developed. In 1945, the Paintings like the Three Dancers of 1925 suggest
unreassuring involvement in existential year of his second one-man show at Art of the possibility of 'strong' emotive subject
problems — conveyed by the imagery of This Century, he had moved out of New York matter in post-cubist space; but the price paid
Pollock's pre-1947 work, should continue to to East Hampton. In 1948, in his first one-man is the reinstatement of just those stage-set
characterize his means and motivation for show at Betty Parsons Gallery (his fifth characteristics of perspectival painting which
self-expression after that date. In these great one-man show in New York), Pollock exhibited Cubism had supplanted — which, in fact, the
and unrelenting paintings the images his all-over drip paintings for the first time. Post-Impressionists had largely abandoned.
themselves, like the emotional relationships of In the same year Willem de Kooning had his And devoid of the narrative function of earlier
the alienated, are 'characterized by absence'. first one-man show, exhibiting the series of art, the tendency of such paintings is towards
It is significant that the next major series of black-and-white works which he had begun 2-3 rhetoric. The figures become puppets; Picasso
works — the black-enamel canvases of 1951-2 — years earlier. (His works were rarely dated.) the puppeteer par excellence.
recapitulate much of the specific imagery of the De Kooning had in fact been known and De Kooning's ambitions collided on this
pre-1947 paintings (and, more evidently, of admired among painters since the mid thirties. point : how to implant a fully sensuous
pen-and-ink drawings of the early forties). In the later thirties he was one of a group of particular volume within the conventional
There is an analogy to be made here, I think, friends which included Gorky, Stuart Davis, frame of the canvas without abandoning — as
with the conditions under which Braque and the sculptor David Smith and the painter, Picasso was forced to do (denying Cezanne
Picasso used collage to reintroduce figuration writer and man of many other qualities, the in the name of self-exposure) — the evident
in 1912-13, thus providing themselves with an influential John Graham. The association with resolution of painting and drawing upon the
alternative direction to that suggested to them Graham was important to de Kooning, as it flat surface. In 1910—11, when Analytic
(and to many later painters of real ability, was to Pollock, whom Graham befriended in the Cubism was both at its most complex and its
Pollock among them) by the gathering late thirties. Graham's writings, which most hermetic, Braque and Picasso resorted to
abstractness of Analytical Cubism in 1910—I I. embraced both post-cubist technology and an codifications — necks of violins, sound-holes of
I'm inclined to think that the greatest painters involvement in myths, primitivism and the guitars, brand-names from bottles, etc. — to
of this century (`painters' specifically, not theory of the unconscious, instantiated at an conventionalize the fact that a certain 'space'
necessarily 'artists' in general) have been those early date the possibility of compatibility was 'occupied' by a specific volume. The
who had reasons for being unwilling to see between formal abstraction and mythic Abstract Expressionists, with the exception
absolute abstractness as a necessary preserve imagery. of Gottlieb and Motherwell (an honorary
for their art.34 It is important to remember that De Kooning's black-and-white paintings European), were by the mid forties as unwilling
in the early fifties both Pollock and de Kooning are his most 'abstract-expressionist' works, to employ such synoptic devices as they were
were painting major, large-scale figure employing as they do automatist techniques of to resort to 'deep' space.
compositions; at the date of writing, De composition and a 'resonant' imagery De Kooning has been characterized by
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