The New Ancestors

No avant-garde art movement has ever won such instant recognition--and evoked such instant outrage--as did Abstract Expressionism, the movement that sprang from the lofts of downtown Manhattan and the studios at the far tip of Long Island in the turbulent years after World War II. Its trademark was a photograph of Jackson Pollock, intently swirling skeins of paint from a stick onto a canvas laid flat on a floor. "The most powerful painter in contemporary America," declared Critic Clement Greenberg. "Chaos . . . wallpaper . . . an elaborate if meaningless tangle of cordage and smears," complained the more conventional commentators.

Today Abstract Expressionists enjoy the status, both esthetic and financial, of old masters. And like old masters, they have been declared dead by the brashest of the avantgarde. But they changed the course of art. Whether for better or worse is arguable; that they did, is incontestable.

But nowhere can these Abstract Expressionists be seen as a group. Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened a show that aspired both to re-examine the movement's range and, by implication, to plead for more space to make a permanent shrine for this radical movement that first established U.S. leadership in the world of art. In a reproachful sentence intended to inspire donations to its building fund, the museum's press releases note that all the works belong to the museum or have been promised to it, but have mostly not been displayed for lack of space.

Explosion of Spirit. Just what was this movement that unhinged years of European confidence in its own authority as custodian of Western culture? Curator William Rubin, who assembled the show, carefully avoids either the term Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting. He settles for the title "The New American Painting and Sculpture: The First Generation." The catalogue defines the school as those artists who shared "common goals, a common revolutionary elan, a common disengagement from middle-class values." They were determined to challenge modernist European tradition, and the six-year interlude of the war had proved they were no longer dependent on it. What resulted was an enormous explosion of spirit that was peculiarly American.

As the show demonstrates, the major figures were highly individual artists. Perhaps their only unifying characteristic was exuberance--exuberance of size, exuberance of gesture. Instead of the carefully calculated stroke, there was the swirl of Pollock's drip paintings, the splattered brilliance of Willem de Kooning's terrifying women. Franz Kline's huge black-on-white compositions showed no more sophistication than a Chinese ideograph, but they conveyed the energy of the man that made them--and commanded a whole wall rather than a corner of a scroll. The smoldering color clouds of Mark Rothko drew a viewer in like a smoke-filled room, where unidentified objects lurk just beyond the eye's peripheral vision.

Barnett Newman used huge canvases to state the most starkly simple images--a vertical white line on a towering black canvas, for instance.

Because the paintings of these founding fathers were mostly abstract, art historians have generally argued that Abstract Expressionism was a descendant of analytical Cubism, or the abstractionism of Russia's Wassily Kandinsky. Curator Rubin argues that the style's most immediate ancestor is Surrealism. His case is convincing.

Gathered penniless in New York in the politically volatile 1930s, artists boned up like magpies on a dozen different artistic idioms, haunting museums and devouring books when not studying at the Art Students League. Arshile Gorky, the Armenian refugee, was initially a devotee of Ingres, Leger, Matisse, Cezanne and Kandinsky. Robert Motherwell drew much of his inspiration from Matisse. De Kooning, the Dutch immigrant, was closer to Cubism and de Stijl; Pollock, the shy Westerner, studied under Thomas Hart Benton, and was influenced by Mexico's David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco. They all talked--and talked. Critic Thomas Hess observes that "a long, chaotic, brilliant, funny conversation about art began in the mid-1930s and continued for more than 20 years."

Surrealism soon became a principal topic of conversation. The surrealist emigres from Europe (Roberto Malta, Andre Masson, Max Ernst) arrived during World War II, and their intellectual intensity impressed the Americans. Some, including Motherwell and David Hare, worked with the surrealists and published in their small magazines. Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery gave many of the "new American pioneers" their first one-man shows.

Gorky became rather more a surrealist than anything else. His canvases seethed with strange, diseased, weirdly colored, biomorphic forms that hover in a mindless galaxy halfway between flower and viscera. Agony was completed in 1947 and reflects several personal catastrophes, past, present and to come. The burning down of his Connecticut studio, a cancer operation and a crippling automobile accident ultimately led Gorky to take his own life.

Lingering Symbols. The dream totems and the enigmatic pictographs of the early canvases of Adolph Gottlieb, Pollock and Rothko also betrayed surrealist origin. As Curator Rubin observes, the moody, poetic, apocalyptic spirit that broods over explicitly surrealistic pictures lingers in the later, totally abstract canvases of these same artists. To emphasize this point, Rothko's Magenta, Black, Green on Orange is placed in a small, partially darkened, melancholy chapel-like gallery, while the spiky Gothic tracery of Clyfford Still's painting, 1947-J shares a gallery with four other Stills--and a spiky Gothic metal sculpture by Theodore Roszak. Gottlieb's cryptic Descending Arrow hovers in a cerise dream world, halfway between traffic sign and sexual symbol.

Pollock in particular borrowed the surrealists' "automatist" technique of letting the unconscious direct the brush. The single room in which 15 of the museum's Pollocks are displayed is easily the highlight of the far-ranging exhibition.

From the beginning of his life, as the son of a ne'er-do-well West Coast farmer. Pollock seems to have been a depressed soul. "This so-called happy part of one's life, youth, to me is a bit of damnable hell," he confessed at the age of 18. Throughout his later life, he fought a constant battle with drink, miserably shy when sober, painfully rambunctious when drunk.

Sea Change. Yet somehow, particularly between 1946 and 1950, he produced a series of magnificent canvases, whirligigs of dazzling and dizzying balance.

"Most modern painters," Pollock once said, "work from within. The unconscious is a very important side of modern art." No other artist has ever utilized the unconscious as brilliantly as he. Full Fathom Five is not the largest or most significant Pollock at the current exhibition, but it has a special fascination, for it contains in embryo the later paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Its panorama of steely swirls is underlaid with nails, cigarettes, tacks, buttons and other detritus--yet all made lovely, as it were, by lying drowned at the bottom of a sea of paint, vividly evocative of Ariel's song in The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change . . .

Into something rich and strange.

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