Martina Tanga

Department of History of Art and Architecture

Boston University

The Politics of Abstraction: Painting in the 1950s

A particular type of abstraction flourished in painterly practices in America, France

and Italy throughout the 1950s. The works that formed the core of the movements known

as Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel and Gruppo dei Otto displayed a defiant

rejection of figurative art through a bold, nonconformist visual language steeped in a

rhetoric of freedom. Artists used the brushstroke and painterly gesture as a symbol on

multiple fronts: victory over fascism and totalitarianism; over stale and institutionalized

artistic styles; as a rejection of societal constraints and even commodification. This

artistic position emerged out of the increasingly entrenched polarization of politics at the

beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s.

The looming war made a neutral position nearly impossible for artists throughout the

following decades. The pervasive academic interpretation has long been that Realism

became the sanctioned visual language of Communism during the 1950s while

Abstraction came to embody democracy.1 This interpretation, while somewhat accurate

for the latter half of the decade, does not grasp the nuanced visual politics of the late

1940s and early 1950s. In actuality, investigation of the painterly practices in both

America and Western Europe during this time suggests that a certain type of abstraction

                                                                                                               
1
Seminal essays by Max Kozloff and Eva Cockcroft ‘American Painting during the Cold War’ and
‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’ respectively, and republished in Francis Frascina’s
larger collection and commentary upon Abstract Expressionism’s political history, Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Serge Guibaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art Chicago, 1983, was the first book-length account of this issue. These authors generally sustain
that Abstract Expressionism was used as a propaganda weapon within the context of Cold War politics
against the Soviet Union’s endorsed Socialist Realist painting. Broadly, this defines abstraction embodying
a democratic ideal whilst realism a communist one.

  1  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
functioned as a contentious visual language for a wholly separate political and cultural

entity, the independent left.

I intend to argue that the rhetoric of freedom allowed artists and intellectuals to engage

in a charged political and social discourse while maintaining a position somewhat

removed from the poles of Communist dogmatism and Democratic righteousness.

Emerging in tandem with a reformulation of global cultural politics, abstraction became

increasingly important as a form of political dissent within the independent left’s

discussion of the future of socialism and the evolution of Western leftist ideology.

The United States created a particularly fertile ground for a visual language

supposedly steeped in the symbolism of freedom. Brash gestural brushstrokes liberated

from figuration on large-scale canvases expressed individuality and the peculiar genius of

the artist. The painter could be understood as nothing other than fiercely independent.

Jackson Pollock’s first ‘drip’ paintings from 1947 were described as his ‘breakthrough’ –

his radical departure from the confines of art history into new artistic territory. His

revolutionary step was to tack the canvas on the floor, giving him the ability to move

freely around the canvas. Those iconic drips, splashes and splatters were a direct result

of his newly found mobility and the abandonment of the traditional paintbrush, as we can

see in Cathedral from 1947. Each in their individual way, the main protagonists of the

bourgeoning Abstract Expressionist group in early 1950s America – William de Kooning,

Franz Klein, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still -

latched on to their own method of employing a ‘freed’ hand.

Curators and critics too were complicit in grounding abstraction in the politics of

freedom. Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art and a firm believer in

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
modernism and abstraction, premised his formulation on both the artist’s need for

creative freedom and the viewer’s need to be perpetually open to new experiences.2 In the

1950s, he was an outspoken proponent of artistic freedom, organizing several exhibitions

– Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America 1951 and Fifteen Americans 1952 – that

championed the new generation of Abstract Expressionists. In fact, in the article ‘Is

Modern Art Communistic’ published in the December 14, 1952 edition of the New York

Times Magazine, Barr condemned Socialist Realism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet

Union and argued that totalitarianism and realism were twins.3 Therefore, for Barr, to

support abstract art was to support freedom of expression.

Harold Rosenberg, one of the first critics to champion Abstract Expressionism, also

discussed the non-representational movement in terms of freedom. In ‘The Parable of

American Painting,’ he declared that the formation of an American style, distinct from

that of the European masters, was analogous to liberation and stressed the ‘instance and

individual self-consciousness that go with discovery and give the new American painting

its vitality and point’.4 In his most famous essay, ‘The American Action Painters,’

Rosenberg describes the Abstract Expressionist canvas as an arena in which the painter

acts, rather than a stagnant space of representation. He described the painter here as

reborn – freed from the earlier commitments to the WPA and the endeavor to paint

images with social content: ‘the big moment came when it was decided to paint… just to

                                                                                                               
2
Irving Sandler, Introduction to Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr by Alfred Barr,
Irving Sandler, and Amy Newman (New York: Abrams, 1986) p. 11
3
Alfred Barr, ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’ reprinted in Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred
H. Barr by Alfred Barr, Irving Sandler, and Amy Newman, (New York: Abrams, 1986) pp. 214 - 219
4
Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Parable of American Painting,’ in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon
Press, 1959) p. 20

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
5
paint.’ He further elaborated on the position taken up by the Abstract Expressionists vis-

à-vis Cold War politics in his later essay, ‘Extremist Art: Community Criticism’:

To be told what to paint was inevitably to be told how to paint and that
any decision to subject matter or form might be deadly if it happened to be
incompatible with the creative process of the particular individual. Only
when the collapse of the arts in the USSR and in Fascist Germany and
Italy demonstrated beyond doubt the irreconcilability of art and
ideological utility did the arts in America shake off the nightmare of
‘Responsibility.’6

Rosenberg made it clear that the Abstract Expressionists were liberated both in terms of

subject matter and America’s previous dependence on European art.

Clement Greenberg took a different approach to defining America’s abstract

movement. He placed Abstract Expressionism at the pinnacle of Modern Art’s

historiography, a movement that began with Courbet in mid-nineteenth century France.

For Greenberg, art was autonomous. Only within the special sphere it created for itself –

distinctly separate from any sociopolitical purpose – could art express its highest orders

of creative freedom. Already in his 1939 essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitch,’ Greenberg

described how the avant-garde had succeeded in detaching itself from bourgeois society

in order to keep culture moving. The critic believed that Modern Art arrived at

abstraction through a slow process of rejecting the representation of external reality and

instead refocusing inward upon its own materiality. Abstraction was the dissolution of the

picture into sheer texture, sensation, and the purely optical.7 The critic urged art into this

place of purity and freedom in order to maintain its standard of excellence vis-à-vis the

                                                                                                               
5
Rosenberg, ‘Action Painters,’ in The Tradition of the New. p. 30
6
Rosenberg, ‘Extremist Art: Community Criticism,’ in The Tradition of the New. p. 46
7
Clement Greenberg, ‘Crisis of the Easel Picture,’ first printed in Partisan Review April 1948

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
fast commoditization of culture. Art’s imperative was to preserve the integrity of the

modern tradition by testing its own procedures through abstraction.8

Greenberg’s literary rival, Meyer Shapiro, also discussed abstraction in terms of

emancipation. Championing modern art from a social rather than formalist standpoint,

Shapiro made his opinion on recent American painting explicit in the 1957 article, ‘The

Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art.’ Describing the move towards abstraction in the

first half of the 20th century, the article states, ‘painters who freed themselves from the

necessity of representation discovered new possibilities of construction and expression

which entailed a new attitude to art itself.’9

It appears the one characteristic American critics agreed upon in the early 1950s when

defining Abstract Expressionism was its embodiment of freedom. This is not however,

unique to America. The intertwining of freedom and abstraction were crucial to those

early postwar years in Europe, as well. Specifically France and Italy – both countries that

had been occupied by Fascist regimes—were looking to rebuild themselves anew and

abstraction offered a cultural point of departure.

In occupied France, the Nouvelle École de Paris10 had offered resistance to Nazi

politics and expressed silent nationalistic loyalty through abstract painting based on the

chromatic dominance of red, white and blue.11 This was a tacit message sent by artists

such as Jean-Rene Bazaine in works like Le Plongeur from 1949. However, this form of
                                                                                                               
8
Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting,’ 1960 first published in Forum Lectures (Voice of America),
Washington DC, 1960. Reprinted with slight revisions in Art and Literature no. 4 Spring 1965 pp. 193-201
9
Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,’ in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and
Critics: an Anthology by Clifford Ross, (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990) p. 259
10
The term École de Paris was used for the first time at the beginning of the 1930s by the critic André
Warbid to designate the group of foreign artists who came to seek conditions conducive to the development
of their art in Paris. It was Pierre Francastel in Nouveau Design who revised the label in reference to artists
working under the resistance.
11
Ida Gianelli ‘Europe: Art Informel, Abstraction and Realism,’ in 1946-1968: The Birth of Contemporary
Art (Milano: Skira, 2007) p. 90

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
th
abstraction was heavily influenced by an early-20 -century Cubist and Fauvist style that

quickly became stale to a new generation of artists emerging after World War II. Post-

war European artists needed to abandon this modernist legacy that was tied to

conservatism and certainly not ‘free.’

Instead, it was a particular type of abstraction – thick and heavy impasto gestures in

earthy tones – known as Informel that broke with the traditions of the old avant-garde.

The term was first coined in 1951 by critic Michel Tapié to describe the paintings in the

exhibition Véhémence Confrontés held at the Galerie Nina Dausset. Tapié pointed out

how each of the artists participating – Camille Bryen, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Williem de

Kooning, Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Pollock, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Alfred Russel,

and Wols – addressed the indefinite realm of formlessness with his own temperament.12

Involving French, Italian and American artists, the exhibition demonstrated a shared

sentiment that cut across national borders.

A year later, Tapié published the article Un Art Autre introducing an alternative label –

the ‘other’ art – to Informel. Tapié was arguing for an art that was not against the ideas of

beauty, form, space, and aesthetics, but rather existed outside of them. This term

developed a new protocol, which was not aimed at improving upon the old principles but

was completely different both in its postulates and in its scale of values. Tapié described

this method as being freed from its formal values of signification as art turned to the

dislocated sign. According to Tapié, ‘The Occidental world is finally discovering the

Sign; it explodes it in the vehemence of a transcendental calligraphy, of a hyper-

                                                                                                               
12
Gianelli ‘Europe,’ p. 101

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
13
significance intoxicated with the cruel vertigo of pure future.’ This violently new form

of abstraction was coupled with a significant emphasis on the artist as individual, as

opposed to a conceptualization of the artist as part of a community. Freedom, for art

Informel, was achieved through a highly abstract visual language.

The main artists associated with Informel – Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu,

and Jean Fautrier – were all working in greatly individualized styles with strong gestural

expression concentrated at the center of the canvas and thick, heavy impasto. With

varying degrees of abstraction, as Informel was not a coherent movement with a

manifesto, these artists sought an artistic form free from convention. Fautrier’s Otages

series, for example - begun in 1943 while he was hiding from the Gestapo in a psychiatric

asylum outside of Paris - shows a loose central biomorphism comfortably centered within

the canvas. Gestural lines are clearly visible with a wild calligraphic quality. Tones are

earthy and the impasto is heavy with cracks that perforate the surface of the canvas. In

another example of art Informel that is wildly different, Wols’ Bird from 1949 shows a

cataclysmic explosion barely contained by the limits of the canvas. Composed of

predominantly radiating forms of white, blue and red on a green background, the

brushstrokes are raw and completely unconventional.

Similarly, artists in postwar Italy were looking for a visual language that would speak

of liberation from the Fascist regime they were desperate to forget. The 1950s saw an

explosion in new artistic trends in Italian painting. The group Fronte Nuovo delle Arti

(New Front) was one such example. Fronte formed just after the liberation in 1946 and

was comprised of a heterogeneous collection of painters and sculptors united against the
                                                                                                               
13
Michel Tapié, ‘Un Art Autre,’ first published in 1952 reproduced in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An
Anthology of Changing Ideas by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2003) p.
631

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
type of art that had been officially sanctioned by Mussolini. Twelve prominent artists

signed the manifesto: Renato Briolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morolotti, Emilio Vedova,

Giulio Turcato, Antonio Corpora, Nino Franchina, Pericle Fazzini, Giuseppe Santomaso,

Armando Pizzinato, Alberto Viani, and Leoncillo Leonardi. The Fronte Nuovo

incorporated artists working in styles that ranged from realism to abstraction.

Subscription to the group rested on a common ethical platform; namely, the recognition

of the artist’s moral responsibility to exclude any particular historical aesthetic that would

hinder the future evolution of a style.14 The coalition therefore rested on a common

rejection of the past and a search for the development of modern art. The manifesto stated

the intention to:

converge [our] apparently contrasting tendencies in a synthesis that will

emerge in the future, substituting an aesthetic of forms by a dialectic of
forms, in sharp contrast to all the proceeding syntheses, which were
governed by technical or at least a priori decisions… Art is not the
conventional face of history, but history itself, which cannot exist without
men.15

Fronte Nuovo organized its first show in Milan in 1947 and the general introduction

written by critic Giuseppe Marchiori stressed the individuality of artists. Yet despite the

diversity of styles, there was a common sociopolitical background to the group. The

critics introducing the different artists in the catalogue – Lionello Venturi introduced

Guttuso, Giulio Carlo Argan wrote about Birolli, Alberto Moravia on Leoncillo,

Marchiori on Pizzinato and Vedova, Corrado Maltese on Franchina and Turcato – all

                                                                                                               
14
Mario De Micheli, ‘Realism and the Post-war Debate,’ in Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and
Sculpture, 1900-1988 by Emily Braum and Alberto Asor Rosa (Munich: Prestel, 1989) p. 283
15
Luigi Ferrante, Arte e realtà; studi per una estetica realista, (Venezia: Fantoni, 1952) p. 5

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
expressed the pervasive themes of the Resistance – cooperation and unity – to maintain

the mutual understanding forged against Fascism and the war.16

Nonetheless, being such a stylistically diverse group, their cohesion was only possible

in the immediate postwar years, after which the ‘moral’ bond became untenable due to

strong stylistic disparity within the group. Those artists from the Fronte Nuovo working

in a particularly abstract style formed a new movement in 1952 called Gruppo dei Otto.

Venturi presented this new coalition of non-figurative painters comprising Briolli,

Corpora, Morlotti, Santomaso, Turcato and Vedova from the disbanded Fronte Nuovo

and the two younger artists Afro Basaldella and Mattia Moreni. The critic made clear that

the group’s values of autonomy and liberty were its utmost concern. Placing freedom of

expression above style, Venturi wrote:

These painters are not, and do not wish to be considered ‘abstract’

painters; nor are they, or do they wish to be considered ‘realistic.’ Instead
they propose to break away from the contradictions inherent in these two
terms, contradictions which tend, on the one hand to reduce abstraction to
a new mannerism, and on the other, to give priority to political
considerations, which can only lead to the disintegration of artistic
freedom and spontaneity.17

This rhetoric of freedom was necessary to homogenize the artists’ diverse political

leanings. Openly declaring center and leftist positions, the group embraced changes

ranging from Afro’s centrism to Briolli and Turcato’s ethical Communism. Working in

abstraction, all these artists were negotiating the increasingly polarized political tug of

war between the Communist party’s endorsement of realism and abstraction’s association

with the Americanization of Italian culture. This position was the only way to claim

                                                                                                               
16
De Micheli, ‘Realism and the Post-war Debate,’ p. 283
17
Lionello Venturi, Otto Pittori Italiani, (Rome: De Luca, 1952) p. 7

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
stylistic ambiguity and therefore freedom from a priori critique. Art historian Nancy

Jachec has argued for the extent to which embrace of non-figurative painting in Italy at

this time was imbued with dissident politics.18

We find an example of this conflict and frustration in the brash, gestural brushstrokes

of Vedova’s highly abstract series Ciclo della protesta (Cylce of Protest) no. 3 from

1953. The artist had broken with the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI), the Italian

Communist Party, in 1948 when his work was used to illustrate the type of art the party

felt was an unacceptable expression of Communist values. This perhaps prompted his

turn to violently abstract expression. The comparison of Vedova’s Campo di

concentramento (Concentration Camp) painted just three years earlier reveals a much

more contained and controlled handling of form. Signs loosely recalling the Communist

hammer and sickle are embedded and submerged under sharp diagonal lines and jagged

shapes. The deep black forms contrast forcefully with the white background. The

viewer’s attention is arrested over a red smudge at the center of the painting – a blood

shot or a wound.

Turcato on the other hand, another artist still employing abstract imagery steeped in

conflict, remained a member of the PCI. His paintings in the early fifties were highly

geometric in form with bold colors. For example, his very large work entitled Comizio

(Political Gathering) from 1950 depicts sharp triangular cones soaring up above a

landscape mass like crimson blades ready for attack. This type of deeply expressive

abstraction conveyed political dissonance without establishing an allegiance to particular

doctrine.

                                                                                                               
18
Nancy Jachec, ‘The Gruppo degli Otto,’ Third Text. 20 (2006) pp. 133-139

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
The battle between such forms of abstraction and other stylistic modes vying for

supremacy was extraordinarily heated in the Italian context. The competing neo-realist

tendency was strong in this country and had its roots all the way back in the 1930s. As a

style, it focused on the discovery of popular Italy and the everyday lives of the people. It

expressed the political commitment of artists in a polemic directed at the tradition of an

art detached from the daily problems of real life.19

The tension between realism and abstraction came to a head at the ‘Prima mostra

nazionale d’arte contemporanea’ held at the Alleanza della Cultura in Bologna in 1948.

Many of the artists included in the exhibition were at this time Communist sympathizers

working in abstraction. But comments published in the PCI’s official journal Rinascita

grossly critiqued and effectively denied any possibilities for modernist abstract painting

and sculpture under the Party guidelines. The scathing review was signed by ‘Roderigo di

Castiglia,’ the pseudonym of Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the PCI. He concentrated his

criticism on works such as, Turcato’s “Comizi” series, lampooning them as ‘elitist

scribbles.’ Criticism from the PCI throughout the course of the exhibition made it clear

that a politically neutral or even removed artistic practice would be exceedingly difficult

to maneuver.

Furthermore, anti-modernist sentiment was encouraged in the same year as the

exhibition; the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau 1947-1956) issued a

mandate that Realism was the only appropriate form of artistic expression because of its

accessibility to the masses.20 Artists reacted immediately, aligning themselves either with

or against party lines. From this moment forward there was a clear and distinct split in

                                                                                                               
19
Carlo Salinari, La Questione del Realismo. (Firenze: Parenti, 1960)
20
Jachec, ‘The Gruppo degli Otto,’ pp. 133-139

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
Italian artistic production. It was within this context that the radicalism of Gruppo dei

Otto is to be understood.

Realism soon became the most forceful movement of the postwar years, not only in

the pictorial arts, but also in Italian literature and cinema.21 The neo-realists sought a

creative means of bringing art to the masses and a language of broad communication.

Containing easily legible subject matter, they focused on representing the glorification of

the plight of the working class.22 Artists like Renato Guttuso and Pizzinato had

dissociated themselves from the Fronte Nuovo and become dedicated to this realist style.

The latter’s 1948 painting Un fantasma percorre l’Europa (A Specter Stalks Europe) for

the centenary of the Communist Manifesto presents unified field workers in cubist and

futurist elements, imbuing the call to revolution with dynamic, incisive force.

The energetic presence of the neorealist artists was felt most vividly in the national

exhibitions, beginning with the Venice Biennale of 1950.23 This was the Biennale of

Realism, and Guttuso showed his enormous canvas Occupazione delle terre incolte in

Sicila (Occupation of Uncultivated Land in Sicily) in which he abandoned his previous

style inspired by Cubism and dedicated himself to a highly representational and legible

aesthetic.

In the opposite camp to Italian neorealism was an apolitical abstraction typified by the

work of Lucio Fontana and Antonio Burri. Both Fontana and Burri, the main artists from

this time known outside of Italy, were more concerned with formal abstraction than

                                                                                                               
21
For example, Vasco Patrolini and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci and films by Vittorio De
Sica and Roberto Rossellini
22
De Micheli, ‘Realism and the Post-war Debate,’ p. 284
23
De Micheli, ibid, p. 286

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
24
aligning their artistic practice to politics. Intrigued by the physicality of the painting

process, Burri’s output is characterized by the dialectic between a direct and experimental

relationship with material as can be seen in his ‘Sacchi’ series throughout the 1950s.

Burri would stitch together his own canvases from used burlap and then apply minimal

paint onto their surfaces. Fontana, on the other hand, was most concerned with the spatial

dimensions of the canvas. Coming from a background in sculpture, he elaborated his

theories of Spazialismo as he started to treat the canvas as a three-dimensional object by

perforating its previously unadulterated surface. Burri and Fontana both received a

substantial following for their artistic experiments and developed a strong painterly

language that was prominent within the art world.

Despite the seemingly irreconcilable artistic camps in Italy - neorealism endorsed by

the PCI and apolitical abstraction - there was a group, seen as precursors to Gruppo dei

Otto, who sought to maintain a political commitment to Marxism through abstract art.

Achille Perelli, Piero Dorazio, Giulio Turcato, Carla Accardi and sculptor Pietro

Consagra founded the leftist group Forma 1 in Rome in 1947. Their choice of abstraction

was more than an aesthetic one, as it signaled a rejection of Realism in favor of purely

expressive values in the non-representational. Their manifesto published in conjunction

with their official formation read: ‘We declare ourselves to be formalists and Marxists,

convinced that the terms Marxism and Formalism are not irreconcilable, especially today

when the progressive elements in our society have to maintain a revolution and avant-

                                                                                                               
24
Jachec, ‘The Gruppo degli Otto,’ pp.133-139

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
garde position.’25 However, the group soon disbanded as artists veered down different

paths – for example, Turcato would later become a member of the Gruppo dei Otto.

The tensions between all these ideological camps were heightened when the Gruppo

dei Otto and the neorealists were shown side by side at the Biennale of 1952. Here the

Gruppo’s form of abstraction ability to navigate around this polarized situation became

evident. Briolli, for example, tackled the neo-realist position by rejecting its prescribed

subject matter and presented his own work as a progressive exploration of a pictorial

language appropriating aspects of both abstract and realism able to distill the emotive

substance that resided between reality and the imagination.26 For example, his 1951

painting Leggenda di mare (Legend of the Sea) shows a decidedly flat abstract landscape

inhabited by fantastical shapes depicted in both strong and soft tones. The artists of the

Gruppo dei Otto specifically situated themselves in a position able to maneuver freely in

this polarized condition of painting.

Over in France, the debate between abstraction and realism bore similarities to the one

in Italy. In conjunction with Art Informel in Paris, many artists embraced realism. André

Fougeron, whose contribution to the Salon d’Automne of 1948 was Parisiennes au

marche, adopted a form of simple figuration removed from any avant-garde formalism

and experimentation; he was capable of transmitting a clear message of political and

social commitment. Fougeron’s vocabulary responded to the need, felt by artists like

Georges Bauquier, Marie-Anne Lansiau, Mirelle Miailhe, Gerard Singer, and Boris

Taslitzky, to bring art to the vast general public in accordance with the Communist

party’s cultural program. Having a very large presence within the Parisian art world, the

                                                                                                               
25
Manifesto Forma 1 Rome, April 1947
26
Jachec, ‘The Gruppo degli Otto,’ pp. 133-139

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
magazine Arts de France hosted a heated debate in 1948 on realism and its definition of a

Communist aesthetic. After an initial positive response to the modern vocabulary, the

clash between the Soviet bloc and the West led to an intransigent demand for an art

capable of immediate interpretation by the masses.27 The 1952 Salon was hailed as the

‘Salon of the Realist tradition.’ Realism in Paris continued to have a dominating presence

within the art world throughout the 1950s.

This was no doubt at least partially a result of the unprecedented popularity of the

French Communist Party competing in elections between 1945 and 1951, which

controlled the votes of nearly one-third of the French electorate. The rise of the French

Communist Party was part of a general European trend – the years immediately following

the defeat of the Fascist governments seemed to promise the beginning of a sweeping

change of social and institutional improvements.28 The Party’s popularity in France can

be explained in part due to the belief that they were the modern bearers of France’s

revolutionary essence.

Contrary to France and Italy, America’s once strong communist political presence had

been stifled in the 1930s. Therefore, animosity towards abstraction in the 50s came

predominately from the conservative camp. American popular culture and politicians

ironically considered abstract art ‘Communistic’; its purpose was to subvert American

free enterprise.29 In 1946, congressmen prompted the cancellation of the United States

State Department show, Advancing American Art, in the middle of a tour of Europe and

Latin America. The exhibition consisted of a cross-section of modern works purchased

                                                                                                               
27
Gianelli ‘Europe,’ p. 98
28
Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993) p. 18
29
Sandler, Introduction, p. 31

  15  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
by the government, including pieces by several artists identified with the left and a

number of abstract paintings. Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Ben Shahn, Romare

Bearden, and William Gropper – all artists who had been working since the 1920s in

America – were influenced by Cubism, Expressionism and Abstraction, although most

were a far cry from the later Abstract Expressionists.

Federal censorship of abstract art continued throughout the early 1950s. In a speech at

the convention banquet for the American Federation of Arts in 1953, Andrew H. Berding,

the Assistant Director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), said that the role

of the government was ‘delineating those important aspects of life and culture of the

people of the United States which facilitate understanding of the policies and the

objectives of the Government of the Unities States.’30 That meant communication and a

means of translating American culture to foreign countries. Therefore, the USIA was

against exhibiting experimental art and specifically abstract art: ‘our Government should

not sponsor examples of our creative energy which are non-representational to the point

of obscurity.’31 The USIA blacklisted both abstract artists and those who refused to

testify before congressional committees regarding a supposed connection with the

Communist movement.

Rejecting a realist language and all of its political associations, the Abstract

Expressionists in America, members of the Art Informel in France, and the Gruppo dei

Otto in Italy walked the tight-rope between contentious ideological positions. In actual

fact, their particular type of abstraction was more closely related to a re-formulation of

the independent leftist politics in all three countries.

                                                                                                               
30
American Federation of Arts Newsletter December 1953
31
Ibid.

  16  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
The independent left re-conceptualized Marxist theory of political engagement

precisely during the period of the 40s and 50s. Rather than being based in a theory of

class struggle, it reformulated agency as an aesthetic utopian ideal and reassigned radical

power to the artists instead of the working class. This refashioning was the result of a

shift in central theoretical concerns. Progressively, interest in the economic and political

structures was replaced with philosophy.32 The center of gravity of European and

American Marxism shifted. Socially, this meant an increasingly prominent position of the

cultural intellectual and the emerging dialogue between the intellectual and artistic

production.

For example, Abstract Expressionist artists were in dialogue with the politically

minded intellectual community of New York. Explosive debates took place in sites such

as the “Artists Club” on East Eighth Street. Journal entries belonging to Philipa Pavia, the

sculptor and an organizer of such events, record some of the speakers and the debates

between 1950 and 1951. Important figures such as Harold Rosenberg, writer for Partisan

Review – an independent left publication – delivered a talk “Planning the Future”; Robert

Motherwell and Barnett Newman debated Andre Malraux’s Voices of Silence; William

Barrett, NYU philosopher and editor of Partisan Review, spoke on ‘Existentialism’; Egon

Viotta, a philosopher, discussed ‘Heidegger and Existentialism’; Hannah Arendt spoke on

‘Art and Politics’; the philosopher David Hare considered ‘Art and Honesty.’33 At mid-

century, the intellectuals based in New York were re-thinking political agendas and chose

aesthetic excellence over revolutionary mobilization of the masses. Given the sampling of

                                                                                                               
32
Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, (London: NLB, 1976) p. 49
33
Joanna Scott Vecchiarelli. ‘Cold War Political Theory: Art, Existentialism, Beat Poetry and Political
Thinking,’ a paper delivered at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Seattle 2011.

  17  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
topics debated, we can see how Abstract Expressionists were influenced by the

extraordinary variety of ideas emerging from the intellectual independent left.

Recent scholarship on Abstract Expressionism maintains that the art movement had a

significant role in the development of leftist ideology.34 The artistic movement emerged

not only alongside but also in direct dialogue with the independent left during the period

of its ideological realignment. This historical revision challenges the accepted view that

Abstract Expressionism was simply the beneficiary of the larger military, economic and

political triumph of the US in Europe during the Cold War years.35

The new left underwent serious re-evaluation during the 1940s through which the very

definition of socialism was revised. This transformation of the independent left was

influenced by two variants of European Marxism popular in the US – the Frankfurt

school’s critical theory and French existentialism. The result was a migration from a class

theory of political agency to one centered upon individual subjectivity; a source of

socialist agency in the imaginative and artistic acts of individuals as opposed to the

actions of the working class. 36

This modus operandi, Jachec argues, was concurrently interpreted by the American

avant-garde as they were questioning collectivist aesthetics and developing an

individualistic mode of abstraction. The Abstract Expressionist artists were able to

consciously ground themselves in theories of existentialism and therefore privilege

                                                                                                               
34
This is the primary argument articulated in Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract
Expressionism, 1940-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
35
Nancy Jachec, in The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism specifically she challenges
Guilbaut’s How New York Store the Idea of Modern Art 1983 by claiming that it is only at the end of the
1950s that the new left became a government sanctioned ideology and critiques Guilbaut’s oversight in
treating liberalism during the 1940s and ‘50s as monolithic, instead, during the 1940s the very term
‘liberalism’ was a contested term and applied to many independent leftists political thinkers and groups at
the time.
36
Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, p. 7

  18  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
subjective perception on the basis of thought and action. Visually, this can be seen in the

transformation of collective biomorphic surrealist imagery to highly individualistic

‘signature’ styles between 1947 and 1949. Artistic intentionality played an important role

in constructing the ideological identity of the group. Thus, what appeared to be in stylistic

terms a move towards complete abstraction and formal reduction was, for the artists

involved, the development of an explicitly political art that redefined the role of the artist

in terms being theorized by the independent left’s notion of agency.37

Likewise, in Paris, intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Malraux were as

involved as their counterparts in New York in discussing Informel art and its rhetoric of

heightened individuality and freedom manifested in the gesture.38 Though Sartre would

only publish his essay on Wols, ‘Fingers and Non-Fingers,’ in 1963, proclaiming the

artist the existentialist painter par excellence, he was active within the Informel group

throughout the 1950s.

Together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre represented the independent leftist

position that challenged the Stalinist left of the French Communist Party. Their journal,

Les Tempes Modernes, provided them with a platform to reach a broad audience. It is

important to remember that the role of the intellectual in Europe was much more

prominent than in America. Sartre believed that the intellectual possesses an omnipotent

political identity, ‘responsible for everything: wars won or lost, revolts and repressions;

he is complicit with the oppressors unless he is the natural ally of the oppressed.’39 This

                                                                                                               
37
Jachec, Ibid. p. 11
38
Karen Kurczinski, ‘Ironic Gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism,’ in Abstract
Expressionism: The International Context by Joan Marter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press,
2007) p. 112
39
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Les Tempes Modernes,’ reprinted in The Aftermath of War (Situations III) by Jean-
Paul Sartre and Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2008) p. 267

  19  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
supreme responsibility inevitably presumed a matched capacity of agency, and this

allowed Sartre to claim for the writer a status equal to that of the politician.40 Yet by

virtue of critical stance, the writer remained distinguished from and morally superior to

the politician. Sartre clung to the possibility of a third way between the bourgeois

Republic and the Party. The writer was the symbolic embodiment of this median

position.41

Sartre’s 1956 publication, Being and Nothingness, provided a concept of freedom

aiming for a renewed Marxism, one that portended a new stage of consciousness with

radically democratic needs and desires, and yet remained at specific points still rooted in

the individual. It placed freedom at the center of human existence, not as a privileged

state of being that one earned or developed through arduous self-discipline. The notion of

freedom in Sartre’s thought created a new historical subject, one that was not content to

be free in signing a labor contract, but one who might demand self-determination in
42
experiences where liberal society prohibited it. Sartre’s concept of freedom troubled

both camps: the dogmatic Marxists who accepted Stalin’s trials and labor camps; and the

modest Catholics and liberals whose pluralism justified the existence of imperialism,

poverty and exploitation.

Sartre’s existentialism was particularly appropriate for the leftist anti-communist art

form of abstraction. It was a political philosophy for the far left, but as Sartre’s troubled

relationship with the Communist party in the 1950s suggests, it was unacceptable to hard-

line Communists because it prioritized the individual rather than class-based agency. By

                                                                                                               
40
Sartre, Ibid, p. 267
41
Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, p. 60
42
Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1975) p. 80

  20  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
association, Informel also occupied this middle ground between the PCI and the Center,

thereby appealing to the very constituency that the Center-Left - the political force under

formation - sought to attack.

Similarly, in Italy, the negotiated language of abstraction, both of the Forma 1 and

Gruppo dei Otto, was explicitly aligned with the independent left. Venturi, the critic who

conceived Gruppo dei Otto, was a socialist wanting to explore the relationship between

abstraction and concrete from. What mattered to his reformulation of the art movement

was an art of engagement – but one that was decidedly different from the communist-

endorsed style. As Jachec has argued, Venturi reformulated the artist as the individual

now in charge of interpreting and expressing reality rather than just merely representing

it.43

The publication of Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks) in

1948-1951 had a great effect on the Italian left and, specifically, on the role of the

intellectual in the independent left. Gramsci highlighted themes of the intellectual, the

party as the ‘modern prince’ and the national-popular tradition in Italian history.

Challenging the aged philosopher Benedetto Croce’s traditional values of Liberal

Idealism, which entrusted the function of the intellectual above everyday politics,

Gramsci’s polemical Marxist alternative – the cultural intellectual working together with

political parties – identified with the subordinate classes.44 More importantly, what

constituted an intellectual for Gramsci cut across traditional class divisions to include all

whose function was the transmission of ideas, from university professors to primary

school teachers, and importantly even artists. Nonetheless, when Gramsci’s Quaderni
                                                                                                               
43
Jachec, ‘The Gruppo degli Otto,’ pp. 133-139
44
Stuart Woolf, ‘The Post-war Era,’ in Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1900-1988
by Emily Braum and Alberto Asor Rosa (Munich: Prestel, 1989) p. 275

  21  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
were first published, the Communist Party censored their more radical stance to make

sure it was in line with the Party’s politics as they claimed Gramsci as one of them.

Elio Vittorini was yet another intellectual writing on the independent left outside of the

Communist Party doctrine. Between 1945 and 1947, he published the journal Il

Politecnico. The journal represented ‘not an organ for the diffusion of an already formed

culture, but a working instrument in a culture in formation’ seeking to renew Italian

culture by subjecting it to an international outlook.45 In its short lifespan, it covered

unorthodox political, cultural and social topics such as articles on psychoanalysis and

Existentialism as well as surveys of working class and peasant life in Spain, Japan,

France and the USSR. Hollywood cinema, jazz, and comic art were all given serious

attention and, alongside political commentary, many foreign authors were translated into

Italian for the first time. It became apparent relatively quickly that Vittorini was

advancing not simply a cultural policy that was different from that of the Party, but one

that situated itself as an independent left reforming liberalism as one of its principle

objectives.46 The journal came under vehement attacks from the PCI and was

discontinued, revealing the more forceful power the Italian Communist Party had on the

independent left during the 1950s.

To conclude, despite the many nationalistic and cultural differences between America,

France and Italy in the immediate postwar period and the beginning of the Cold War era,

the prevalence of painterly abstraction among the international avant-garde reveals a

common denominator in Occidental artistic production. The particular type of non-

                                                                                                               
45
Stephen Gundle, ‘The Communist Party and the Politics of Cultural Change in Postwar Italy, 1945 –
1950,’ in The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought, and Film, 1945-50 by Nicolas
Hewitt (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989) p. 24
46
Gundle, Ibid, p. 26  

  22  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
representational art formulated concurrently in Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel and

Gruppo dei Otto employed a visual language of freedom – from convention, from the

past, from the proscribed painterly gesture – that allowed the artists to maintain a political

stance as an independent left without choosing one of two sides in the bipolar conflict

between American democracy and Soviet communism. Writers and intellectuals such as

Rosenberg and Sartre created a literary analogue to this visual discourse of measured

dissent. Gatherings and vocal debates in cultural epicenters like New York provided a

lively forum for the dissemination of independent left politics, while outspoken critics

such as Venturi both narrated and helped clear a path for the movement. Across these

three countries, abstraction provided a painterly language that was at once frustratingly

obstinate to the dominant cultural authorities and yet capable of shape-shifting and

infinite expressivity for the savvy post-war artist.

  23  
 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University

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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
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Boston University
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 Martina Tanga
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Boston University
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