Inside the Abstract Expressionist Studio

© 2016 Helen A. Harrison

This illustrated lecture was presented at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on 13 November
2016, as part of a two-day course, “Abstract Expressionism: Expressions of Change,” in
conjunction with the exhibition, Abstract Expressionism.

In his famous article, “The American action painters,” published in the December 1952
issue of Art News, the critic Harold Rosenberg made the case for a new vanguard—neither a
formal movement, like Surrealism or Futurism, nor a school such as the School of Paris,
which had a program that he described as “the linkage of practice with terminology.” “In
the American vanguard,” he argued, “the words . . . belong not to the art but to the
individual artists. What they think in common is represented only by what they do
separately.”

Today I’m going to investigate what they did separately in their studios, and how those
approaches and practices define, or perhaps contradict, what we now call Abstract
Expressionism. First, however, I want to look back to the origin of the term, and discuss
how it came to be applied to the postwar American avant-garde.

The American critic Clement Greenberg, who disliked the label, rationalized its application
by calling attention to its European roots. “What real justification there is for the term
‘abstract expressionism,’” he wrote in 1955, “lies in the fact that some of these painters
began looking toward German, Russian or Jewish expressionism when they became restive
with Cubism and with Frenchness in general.” According to Greenberg, then, the decisive
precedents for what seemed to most people so characteristically American in post-World
War II American abstract painting were to be found in the work of Hans Hofmann, Vasily
Kandinsky, and Chaim Soutine.

Two years later, in the American edition of his Dictionary of Abstract Painting, the French
art historian Michel Seuphor seconded Greenberg’s claim, asserting that American abstract
expressionism was unthinkable without the precedent of Kandinsky. He pointed out that
one needed only “to visit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and see a dozen canvases
painted by Kandinsky between 1910 and 1918, to grasp the fact that Abstract
Expressionism was and is just as European, since it was born in Munich.” But neither
Seuphor nor Greenberg mentioned that it was not only the abstract expressionist impulse,
but also the term itself, that originated in Germany.

Although the American art critic Robert M. Coates is almost universally credited with the
coinage in a 1946 review in The New Yorker magazine, it actually dates back to a much
earlier essay by the German painter Oswald Herzog. Writing in the May 1919 issue of the
avant-garde journal Der Sturm, published in Berlin, Herzog described “Der abstrakte
Expressionismus” as “the purity of formation, a physical creation of the spiritual, the
formation of objects devoid of the concrete object.” His repudiation of art that imitates
material reality in favor of “forms that are and must be carriers of [the artist’s] experience”
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echoes Kandinsky’s philosophy and that of Hofmann, whose Munich art school had been
established in 1915. The school’s first prospectus—strongly influenced by Kandinsky’s
earlier treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art—defined creative expression as “the
spiritual translation of inner concepts into form,” relying on both intuition and vigorous
control.

Here we can draw an analogy between aesthetic attitudes in post-World War I Germany
and post-World War II America. In both locales, the avant-garde promoted subjectivity—a
notion that, once again, Hofmann had already articulated in 1915. “The artist must create
his own view of nature, i.e., his own experience, be it from nature or independent of it,” he
advised in his prospectus; and Herzog reiterated that notion when he wrote in Der Sturm
that “Abstract Expressionism is the creation of life’s occurrence as such; it is creation in the
present.”

The affinity between this German approach to spontaneous abstraction and its later
manifestation in America is evident, as is the desire to transcend material reality—the
“concrete object”—to achieve “the purity of formation.” While I’m not suggesting that
artists in postwar New York were avidly translating 27-year-old copies of Der Sturm in
search of aesthetic guidance, I do see the transmission of Herzog’s basic tenets, as well as
Kandinsky’s beliefs, via Hofmann, who began teaching in the US in 1930. We will hear some
of those ideas reinterpreted in the statements and practices of the American artists we now
call the Abstract Expressionists, having forgotten that they inherited the title from
European forebears.

Returning for a moment to Rosenberg’s Art News article, his rhetoric largely aligns with the
Kandinsky-Hofmann-Herzog formulation. For example, he described the difference
between traditional painting techniques, by which an artist renders the results of
observation, and the modern painter’s approach, which involves “staining a piece of cloth
or spontaneously putting forms into motion upon it.” Now, he argued, painting must be an
encounter between the artist and his materials, what he famously called an “event,” with
the canvas as the arena in which this event takes place. The unspoken but obvious analogy
to the boxing ring, with its canvas floor and arena setting, the aggressive language
trumpeting “art as action,” and Rosenberg’s consistent use of the masculine pronoun,
reinforce the stereotypical image of Abstract Expressionism as a men’s club, albeit
punctuated by the occasional lady’s night.

Where Rosenberg diverges sharply from the European precedent is his discounting of the
original Abstract Expressionism’s spiritual dimension. He maintained that “what matters
always is the revelation contained in the act” of painting, although its purpose was not to
reveal spiritual truth but instead to search for personal truth. While he likened the effort to
a religious movement, he cast it in purely secular terms. The result was, as he put it, “the
creation of private myths.” But that is not what the artists themselves said they were
doing, nor is it borne out by the results of their studio practice. Here in the Royal
Academy’s galleries we have the tangible evidence that contradicts Rosenberg’s pessimistic
view of Abstract Expressionism as a hermetic, combative activity, a self-fulfilling process
that is never resolved in a finished work of art.
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The idea that the aim of painting was painting itself—or, in Rosenberg’s words, Just To
Paint—was not accepted by the Abstract Expressionists. However, the absence of apparent
subject matter in the traditional sense was a primary issue for artists whose imagery
lacked representational references, and a problem for those struggling to understand
modern art. To many people, non-objective painting, whether geometric or gestural,
seemed devoid of content. As early as 1943, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Mark
Rothko had written a letter to The New York Times countering the notion that their art was
pure formalism. “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing,” they maintained.
“We assert that the subject is crucial.”

After World War II, as New York gained traction as a center of artistic innovation, Rothko,
Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and the sculptor David Hare founded a school, The
Subjects of the Artists, with the purpose of exposing students to “the different subjects of
all four artists—to what modern artists paint about, as well as how they paint.” Although
the experimental school was short-lived, from October 1948 to May 1949, it reflected a
more extensive effort to re-define art’s form and function in postwar culture. Not long
thereafter, in the August 1949 issue of Partisan Review, the Spanish philosopher José
Ortega y Gasset offered an explanation of what consituted subject matter in contemporary
painting. Ortega outlined the evolution of painting from Giotto to date, characterizing it as a
progression from undifferentiated optical representation through perspectival and spatial
illusionism to modern non-objective art, which expresses “subjective states through which
and by means of which things appear.” “After Cézanne,” he wrote, “painting only paints
ideas—which, certainly, are also objects, but ideal objects, immanent to the subject or
intrasubjective.”

This concept of the intrasubjective inspired an exhibition at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in
September to October 1949, for which Rosenberg contributed the brochure essay. He
summarized the approach, independent of external observation and mimetic intent, in
existential terms: “The modern painter is not inspired by anything visible, but only by
something he hasn’t seen yet. . . . In short, he begins with nothingness. That is the only thing
he copies. The rest he invents.”

Clement Greenberg, on the other hand, saw the issue in formal terms. In his now-famous
essay, “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture,” in the October 1947
issue of the British journal Horizon, he argued that contemporary artists needed to break
free of their dependence on European stylistic precedents and American-Scene subject
matter: what he characterized as “the influence of artiness on the one hand and of the
Whitmanesque blowhards on the other.” In his view, the problem facing American artists
was the struggle against the limitations of established norms and values, and the solution
was an art “in which an intense detachment informs all.” “Only such an art,” Greenberg
maintained, “resting on rationality but without permitting itself to be rationalized, can
adequately answer contemporary life” as an antidote to the “frustrations that ensue from
living at the present moment in the history of western civilization.”
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Neither of the ideological polarities—existential angst à la Rosenberg at the one extreme

and rational detachment à la Greenberg at the other—was embraced by the artists
themselves. Their views were summarized in a 1949 academic study by one of their
number, the painter Robert Goodnough, who surveyed several of his colleagues for a thesis
written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for his master’s degree in art from New
York University. (Missing for many years and thought to be lost, that document was
discovered shortly before Goodnough’s death in 2010 and published three years later by
Soberscove Press.) He summarized the challenge as a response to America’s wartime
isolation from European influences and general dissatisfaction with prewar trends in
painting that stressed the American Scene and social realism. “When there was no access to
what was being done abroad,” he wrote, “and no desire to emulate the work of previous
American artists, some artists felt there was nothing left to do but turn to themselves to
seek development. They were left on their own. They did not believe art was nationalistic,
but rather universal; it should not display the glories of Paris nor of this country but should
deal only with a language that might have meaning anywhere.”

Inspired by Ortega’s analysis and Kootz’s intrasubjectives exhibition, Goodnough

interviewed seven painters, all but one of whom were represented in the show: Baziotes,
Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Newman, Gottlieb, and de Kooning. His aim was to investigate
their attempts at inward exploration to reveal what he called the “content of
consciousness.” Yet the artists whom Goodnough interviewed expressed the desire to go
beyond conscious thought and feeling—not to paint ideas, as Ortega had it, but to release
imagery from a deeper source, which Carl Gustav Jung called the “creative unconscious.”
The closest equivalent among European precedents is Oswald Herzog’s brand of Abstract
Expressionism, but the most direct influence is Surrealism, with its emphasis on so-called
pure psychic automatism, absurdity, and irrationality. But Surrealism’s literary origins, and
its visual-art manifestation in figurative and semi-abstract imagery, limited its appeal to
painters looking for a universal pictorial language. Nevertheless it provided a springboard
from which the Americans could launch into a less anecdotal, more broadly acessible
approach to subject matter.

In response to Goodnough’s questions about their methodology, Motherwell said that his
painting “comes from imagination and memory,” and Gottlieb referred to his use of “free
association” to reach his subconscious as a source of subject matter. While Newman felt
that “painting should go beyond improvisation,” he likened his process to that of an
instrument maker who “plays his instrument while he is creating it.” Baziotes said he
worked toward the moment when “the shapes within the canvas achieve their own
meaning as images.” Rothko aimed to eliminate anything that “would interfere with
complete involvement with the particular experience at hand.” This sense of immediacy
was seconded by Pollock, who depended on “the physical energy of the painting process
itself.” Personal self-expression was considered paramount. As de Kooning put it, he
painted “to satisfy himself only.” In the summary of his research results, Goodnough
concluded, “though these artists turn to the same source [the subconscious] for subjects,
they stress individuality and believe there is as wide a range of subjects as there are
personalities involved.”
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Such tactics for developing subject matter are a long way from traditional painting, with its
emphasis on recognizable visual information. Even other forms of modernism, such as
Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, depend on references to the external world,
however distorted. On the other hand, in terms of non-objective precedents, the
intrasubjectivists rejected geometric abstraction, such as De Stijl and Constructivism, as too
theoretical and aesthetically limiting. The freedom of expression to which they aspired
called for an entirely new way of working.

Needless to say, this iconoclasm prompted widespread confusion and misunderstanding,

not only among the public at large but also within the art world. In an effort to provide
insights into the vanguard artists’ aims and procedures, the magazine Art News initiated a
series of articles collectively titled “[insert name here] paints a picture,” now considered
classics of art journalism. The series was the brainchild of Thomas B. Hess, the magazine’s
executive editor from 1949 to 1965. While the series as a whole dealt with a wide variety of
artists—from figurative painters Edwin Dickinson, Fairfield Porter, Lester Johnson, and
Jane Freilicher to non-Ab Ex abstractionists Janice Biala, Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn
and Irene Rice Pierera—it’s best remembered for its profiles of the leading so-called action
painters.

The first article devoted to an abstract expressionist, “Hans Hofmann paints a picture,”
appeared in the February 1950 issue. Hofmann was a highly appropriate choice,
considering that his principles were the basis of Herzog’s original 1919 formulation of
Abstract Expressionism, and that his 1946 solo exhibition was the subject of Robert
Coates’s New Yorker review in which the term was first applied to painting in
contemporary America. Coates described Hofmann as “one of the most uncompromising
representatives of what some people call the spatter-and-daub school and I, more politely,
have christened abstract Expressionism.” Without realizing it, Coates had chosen to bestow
the Ab Ex title on an artist who would have recognized it from its inception in Germany
nearly three decades earlier.

“Hans Hofmann paints a picture” was written by Elaine de Kooning, who contributed nine
of the “paints a picture” essays, which also included sculptor David Smith, collagist Esteban
Vicente, and mosaicist Jeanne Reynal, as well as the satirical “Pure paints a picture,” aimed
at Ad Reinhardt, the gadfly critic of his fellow abstractionists. As a painter herself, de
Kooning could write knowledgeably about the technical aspects of studio practice, but she
also had a natural sympathy with her fellow artists’ aims, as well as a fluent, insightful
writing style that conveyed a deep understanding of the creative process.

The foundation of all the “paints a picture” articles was a studio visit during which the
writer observed the artist at work. A description of the surroundings, including the
materials and tools at hand, set the scene for a detailed account of a particular work’s
evolution. After briefly reviewing Hofmann’s background as a teacher in Munich and the
United States, de Kooning focused on his approach to the composition and execution of a
still life. “Hofmann spent considerable time studying the still-life before picking up his
brush,” she said. “His beginnings vary. This time he picked up a small soft-haired brush,
dipped it in turpentine, then in blue and yellow paint, and rapidly established the
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‘architecture’ of the still-life with fine, fluid lines in a drawing on canvas that actually
evokes a blueprint.” Then he broke away from the established structure and began to
improvise. As she explained, “Qualifying the development here was the fact that . . . the
artist had to work only by the logic of the picture itself.”

While his subject matter—a bowl of fruit on a table—was utterly conventional, relying on
“the careful disposition of objects,” de Kooning maintained that he transformed and
personalized it by approaching it intuitively. “Hofmann has evolved no rules for the making
of a picture,” she wrote. “On the contrary, always on guard against intellectualism and
virtuosity, he says: ‘At the time of making a picture, I want not to know what I’m doing; a
picture should be made with feeling, not with knowing.’”

This is remarkably similar to Pollock’s 1947 statement, “When I am in my painting, I’m not
aware of what I’m doing.” Although Pollock was never a Hofmann student, the two artists
were well acquainted, and were actually next-door neighbors on East 8 th Street in
Greenwich Village before Pollock moved to Long Island in 1945. So it’s interesting to
speculate which of them transmitted this concept to the other, or whether each arrived at it
independently. In any case, it establishes a fundamental tenet of Abstract Expressionism:
namely, that spontaneity is paramount. The idea that an artist must begin with a blank
canvas, not work from sketches, plans or preliminary drawings, and have no
preconceptions about the eventual outcome, is a given. Yet it was not in fact the only
approach.

In “Kline paints a picture,” which appeared in the December 1952 issue of Art News—
coincidentally, the same issue in which Rosenberg’s “The American action painters”
appeared—Robert Goodnough described Franz Kline’s method of developing an abstract
composition: “He does countless drawings, quickly in broad strokes; often on pieces of
newspapers. Later he goes through these and may find a theme that has been
unconsciously working its way into the open; something that is common to all or most of
the drawings. He may then select one drawing that seems to contain this element most
concisely and work directly from it on to the canvas.” Goodnough emphasized, however,
that the sketches did not dictate the final form of the painting, which might evolve over
several months and many revisions, until “the picture could now be an entirely new thing
with the sketches far in the back of his mind and only the energy they had built up to
remaining to be expressed.”

What Goodnough did not discuss was the origin of Kline’s vocabulary of abstract form.
With a long and successful career as a figurative painter behind him, in 1949 Kline
experienced what Elaine de Kooning later described as a “conversion” to abstraction. He
had hit an impasse in his work, and with Abstract Expressionism in full flower, he was
being marginalized. His friend, Elaine’s husband Willem, proposed a novel tactic. In her
account, in a November 1962 Art News article, “Franz Kline: Painter of His Own Life,”
Willem suggested that he create abstractions by enlarging details of his lively
representational ink drawings using an opaque projector. “One day,” Elaine wrote, “Kline
dropped in on a friend who was enlarging some of his own small sketches in [what she
wrongly identified as] a Bell-Opticon,” actually a Bausch and Lomb Balopticon. Kline often
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made quick studies of familiar objects in his studio. “‘Do you have any of those little
drawings in your pocket?’ the friend asked. Franz always did and supplied a handful. Both
he and his friend were astonished at the change of scale and dimension . . . .” A 4-by-5 inch
brush drawing of a rocking chair “loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any
image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any reality but that of
their own existence.”

By the time the December 1952 Art News article appeared, Kline no longer needed to start
with a representational sketch to be enlarged. A series of photographs shows preliminary
works, in India ink and oil paint on paper, by which the artist established the basis for
Abstract Painting, 1952. According to the article, the process lasted from January to
November and involved multiple campaigns of black and white paint. “It was a process of
changing often from one [color] to the other,” Goodnough explained, “so that neither of
these two opposites might dominate the other.” This passage describes another of Abstract
Expressionism’s fundamentals: the lack of illusionistic space, one of the unwritten rules
that was made to be broken.

Among the so-called action painters, Willem de Kooning was the champion rule-breaker.
When the figure was being expunged from the vanguard artist’s vocabulary, he defiantly
painted a series of grotesque women—although, in an interesting coincidence, Pollock was
also painting grotesque figures in the early 1950s, explaining later that “when you’re
painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.” While the idea of working
from sketches was anathema, de Kooning used the Balopticon to project them onto the
canvas, and collaged fragments of drawings to aid in adjusting the composition. When the
act of painting was supposed to be improvisational, he labored at length, sometimes for
years, over his compositions. His process was described in Thomas B. Hess’s article, “De
Kooning paints a picture,” published in Art News in March 1953, which recounts the
creation of Woman 1, 1950-52. “De Kooning has devised a method of a continuous series of
drawings which are cut apart, reversed, exchanged and otherwise manipulated on the
painting,” wrote Hess. “It is like Procrustes, who cut or stretched travelers to fit his bed, but
with the important difference that this Procrustes does not know the dimensions of his bed.
He needs such doubt to keep off-balance.”

Hess went on to note: “Before making changes, De Kooning frequently interrupted the
process of painting to trace with charcoal on transparent paper large sections of, or the
whole composition. These would be cut apart and taped on the canvas in varying
positions.” This allowed the artist to decide on changes without “taking irrevocable steps,”
and it created ambiguity “by interchanging parts of the anatomy. The artist points out that
a drawing of a knuckle, for example, could also be that of a thigh; an arm, that of a leg.
Exactly such switches were often made during the painting of Woman.” No doubt such
practices had been reinforced by de Kooning’s close association with Arshile Gorky, whose
painstaking process of theme and variation, vision and revision, produced numerous works
in which similar forms mutate and recombine. Gorky’s biomorphic shapes, often with
anatomical or vegetal associations, suggest an interchangeable quality comparable to that
found in de Kooning’s figural abstractions.
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In “Gorky: Painter of his Own Legend,” published in the January 1951 issue of Art News,
Elaine de Kooning described Gorky’s practice of analyzing the work of artists he admired,
such as Rembrandt, Poussin, Ingres and David, and mining them for abstract forms
“directly inspired by these highly organized representations of reality. He would cut up
prints and, turning the isolated fragments upside down, work from them as from a still-
life.” She noted how, when he was employed on the Works Progress Administration’s
Federal Art Project—a jobs program initiated by the government during the Great
Depression of the 1930s—Gorky sometimes spent years working and re-working his
abstractions until “the geometric forms began to take on a perverse animation and shapes,
almost unbearably weighted with pigment, seemed to shiver and sway, about to tear loose
from their moorings for an impossible flight.”

Regarding his later, nature-inspired abstractions, such as The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, de
Kooning wrote that “Gorky’s gardens at first flutter with a light and witty loquacity, but, in
an overpowering flux of successive and simultaneous images, forms change, as you look,
into a cruel and opulent sexual imagery.” In the various aspects of her analysis—the years-
long evolutionary process, the abstracting of representational details, the cutting up and
reconfiguring of graphic source material, and the ambiguously suggestive, erotic forms that
resulted—she could have been describing her husband’s working method and imagery
instead of Gorky’s.

Similar concerns are reflected in the studio practice of Lee Krasner, who was closely
associated with both Gorky and Willem de Kooning years before she knew Jackson Pollock.
From her days at Hans Hofmann’s school in the late 1930s, Krasner obsessively revised her
neo-Cubist compositions. Early in her relationship with Pollock, searching for a new
direction, she went through what she later called her “grey slab” period. According to notes
in Ellen G. Landau’s catalogue raisonné of Krasner’s work, the result was “canvases so
incessantly re-worked that all that remained visible was the buildup of dense layers of
muddy pigment.” None of those paintings survive; they were all scraped down and re-
worked after she and Pollock married and moved to Springs, a hamlet on eastern Long
Island about 100 miles from Manhattan, in 1945.

Having struggled to, as she put it, “lose Cubism,” Krasner embarked on a series of allover
abstractions known as her Little Image paintings. Whether organic, like Noon, or
calligraphic, like Stop and Go, they retain the Cubist grid structure while dispensing with
the observed subject matter—figure study and still life—that was the mainstay of her
Hofmann School training. From then on, however her imagery evolved, she would rely on
intuition and improvisation in a process of continual re-evaluation and experimentation.
For example, in 1950 she began a series of so-called Personage paintings, in which
pictographic figures danced across the canvas. These were all re-worked in thick impasto
or otherwise revised into unrecognizable variations.

The year after Pollock’s death in 1956, Krasner moved her work space from a small
upstairs bedroom in the house to the converted barn that had been his studio. There, the
size of her canvases increased, and her imagery reflected more strongly the influence of
the natural environment, but her penchant for revision continued. Although she later
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claimed that she prefered to paint without revising, she acknowledged that, while “it would
be nice if it always worked that way, of course it doesn’t. . . . In one canvas it may come
through in that immediate sense. And it makes me feel pretty good. On the other hand, I’ve
re-worked until I’m blue in the face and have gotten what I consider favorable results. . . . It
depends on what’s in the painting and my obstinacy and that other element of something
beginning to happen that you want to stay with.”

Unlike Krasner’s nature-derived imagery rendered with muscular gestural brushwork,

Mark Rothko’s floating chromatic forms are devoid of associative shapes and linear
markings. There is evidence, however, that his evolution from representation to
abstraction was influenced in part by his experience of the eastern Long Island
environment. After an early period of figurative painting as a member of The Ten group,
and of myth-based pictographic imagery, in 1947 Rothko began his so-called multiform
abstractions. The following summer he and his wife Mell rented a cottage on Louse Point in
East Hampton, not far from where Pollock, Krasner, Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg
already had homes. In late July, at the end of his stay, he invited several people, including
Rosenberg, to see his new work. Rosenberg later recalled that Rothko “trotted out about,
oh maybe fifty paintings he had done that summer.” Rosenberg thought they were
“marvelous, it was just one of the most exciting visits to an artist's studio that I have ever
had. He took out one painting after another and set them down. They were just absolutely
terrific.” It’s hard not to see, in the hovering clouds of color and shimmering translucent
shapes, echoes of the luminous maritime atmosphere so characteristic of the locale where
they were created.

In fact the comparison between “the hues of a sunset” and the emotional effect of Rothko’s
colors was made in a feature article on Abstract Expressionism in the November 16, 1959
issue of Life magazine. This was the second in a two-part series—the first was a lengthy
profile of Pollock—that aimed to demystify “Baffling U.S. Art” for the lay public. According
to the subhead of part two, “Analogies with nature help explain abstract-expressionist
work.” Thus Rothko was photographed in front of a painting, slightly out of focus, with an
equally blurry sunset below, showing the supposed similarity, as if the sunset were his
subject.

Rothko disavowed any such associations. In the text that accompanies Life’s misleading
illustration, he remarked: “A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”
(I should add parentheticaly that Clyfford Still, another of the artists featured in the article,
was incensed at the comparison of the “jagged, fluctuating shapes” in his paintings to “the
restless flickering of flames.” In spite of the text’s disclaimer that “the flame-like forms are
not used to portray a fire,” the subhead and photographs tell a different story, one that
prompted Still to complain angrily to the article’s author, Life art editor Dorothy Seiberling,
who told me that he was furious.)

Interviewed by Robert Goodnough in 1949, Rothko had emphasized that his aim was to
express content without reference to representation, symbolism, or any other external
stimulus—in other words, the content had to be found within the painting itself. To do that,
he eliminated “anything in his work which might deal with association or remind one of
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previous attachments, since any outside experience would interfere with complete
involvement with the particular experience at hand.” Beyond the removal of outside
references, Rothko also eliminated “any distracting awareness of paint by applying his
colors without texture,” in order to create “a total experience.” As Goodnough explained:
“He wishes the observer not to find a portion of himself involved but to be totally involved
to the exclusion of everything else. . . . To avoid the use of objects does not mean to avoid
reality but to view reality in a diferent way.”

In the October 1949 issue of the magazine Tiger’s Eye, Rothko elaborated on this theme. He
wrote: “The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be
toward clarity, toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea,
and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among
others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one
might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve
this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” Nine years later, lecturing to art students at
Pratt Institute, he discussed his preference for large canvases: “Large pictures take you into
them. Scale is of tremendous importance to me—human scale. . . . I think that small pictures
since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one
participates in a direct way. The different subject necessitates different means.” The
subject, he implied, was not the painting but the viewer; not the image itself, but the effect
of the image on those who experience it.

Landscape analogies are inevitable in the painting of Joan Mitchell, who was profiled by
Irving Sandler in the October 1957 issue of Art News. Stressing that she did not paint
directly from nature, Mitchell told Sandler, “I carry my landscapes around with me.” While
Sandler was making his studio visit, she started, then abandoned, a painting titled Bridge,
for which “a recollected landscape provided the initial impulse.” Bridge was rejected, she
explained, because the image was not what she called “accurate.” “To her,” Sandler wrote,
“accuracy involves a clear image produced in the translation of the substance of nature into
the nature of memory.”

Mitchell then embarked on George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold,
based on the memory of an East Hampton summer day in 1954 with her poodle, George.
The dog became “the mnemonic cataylist which provided the remembered attitude, and the
beach in East Hampton furnished the remembered landscape image.” With those sensory
impressions as the impetus, Mitchell let the painting itself take over. What began as a warm
yellow canvas became a cool, almost icy white, and sweeping blue strokes added the chill
that gave the painting its title. The general agitation prompted Sandler to observe that “it
seemed as if the hurricane that struck East Hampton in the autumn of 1954 invaded the
picture.” In fact that storm, Hurricane Carol, which hit Long Island on August 31, had had a
profound personal effect on Mitchell, who had rushed to East Hampton from New York City
to take an ailing George to the vet. As she told Sandler, “It was a very devastating
experience. . . . It seemed as if the wrath of God fell upon East Hampton.” Sadly, George died
not long thereafter. Mitchell painted four canvases in response to those traumas, and
Sandler interpreted George Went Swimming, painted three years later, as a coda to the
series and “the realization of what was attempted then.”
 11

Mitchell’s tactic of internalizing experiences to stimulate subjective, intuitive responses for

which she then developed appropriate pictorial equivalents echoes the process that yielded
Jackson Pollock’s most profound works. In reply to Hofmann’s admonition that he should
work from nature, Pollock famously answered, “I am nature,” a seemingly arrogant
statement but one that succintly summarizes that approach. Contradicting the simplistic
notion that Abstract Expressionism springs sui generis from the unconscious in a random
outpouring of uncontrolled energy, Pollock’s assertion acknowledged that his imagery
grew and blossomed as naturally as organic forms, and with equal reliance on a
germinating source.

When Pollock was interviewed by Robert Goodnough for his 1949 master’s thesis, he was
not very forthcoming about his intentions or his method of realizing them. “He feels that
the creative development of the artist should determine his means of expression,”
Goodnough reported, “and that the artist should be free to choose those materials most
suited to him and to use them as he pleases.” Hardly an enlightening explanation of what
was widely regarded as a mystifing, even perverse, process yielding what critics were
describing as “a meaningless tangle of cordage and smears,” “a mop of tangled hair,” “a
snarl of tar and confetti,” and “baked macaroni,” representing “an advanced stage of the
disintegration of modern painting.”

The following year, knowing that Goodnough had already spoken at some length to Pollock,
Hess asked him to write “Pollock paints a picture” for Art News. “Flabbergasted, I thought it
over for one-tenth of a second—and said yes,” Goodnough later recalled. In June 1950 he
and photographer Rudy Burckhardt traveled to Springs to visit Pollock in the studio. But
unlike the other “paints a picture” articles, Goodnough’s was not based on first-hand
observation of the artist at work on the painting that was illustrated. As Deborah Solomon
wrote in her biography of Pollock, he had agreed to “start a new painting and attempt to
finish it in the presence of the writer-photographer team.” Unfortunately when they
arrived he announced that he had just completed a large canvas and didn’t want to carry it
any further, so he suggested pretending to paint for the camera. Hess rejected the results,
and the photographs that did illustrate the article were taken later that summer by Hans
Namuth, who recorded the creation of the painting indentified in Goodnough’s caption as
Number 4, 1950, now known as Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950.

This lack of first-hand experience caused a curious mistake in Goodnough’s account. He

wrote that, after beginning the painting with a layer of black enamel and studying the
results for a couple of weeks, Pollock applied reddish brown enamel, then silver-colored
aluminum paint “to add a feeling of mystery and adornment to the work and to keep it from
being thought of as occupying the accepted world of things,” and finished off with white
enamel. But there is no aluminum paint in Autumn Rhythm. In all other respects,
Goodnough’s account is accurate—the canvas measures roughly 9 by 17 feet, and is
composed of layers of black, brown, and white paint applied in the manner described. It
may be that since, by his own admission, Goodnough didn’t actually watch Pollock paint it,
he confused it with one of the other canvases in Pollock’s winter 1950 exhibition at the
 12

Betty Parsons Gallery. Together with Autumn Rhythm, the much smaller painting titled
Number 4, 1950 was also in that show, and it does contain aluminum paint.

Notwithstanding this unfortunate bit of misinformation, “Pollock paints a picture” offers

useful insights into the artist’s motivation and creative process. Asserting that Pollock’s
imagery, like that of other Abstract Expressionists, “is not something that has lost contact
with reality, but might be called a synthesis of countless contacts which have become
refined in the area of the emotions during the act of painting,” Goodnough asked
rhetorically, “Is this merely an act of automatism? Pollock says it is not.” Goodnough then
suggested that “his work may be thought of as coming from landscape and even the
movement of the stars—with which he seems almost intimate at times—yet it does not
depend on representing these, but rather on creating an image as resulting from
contemplation of a complex universe at work, as though to make his own world of reality
and order.” Nevertheless, both the impulse to create and what it produces are, according to
Goodnough, “forever unknowable.”

Precisely because the content of Pollock’s poured paintings was so ineffable, his process
often became the focus of interest. The artist himself bought into this, apparently finding it
easier to explain what he was doing than why he was doing it. As early as his 1947
statement for the little magazine possibilities, he spent two of his three short paragraphs
describing his working method and materials. His most illuminating revelation was his
belief that “the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.” By the summer of
1950, when Hans Namuth took the still photographs that illustrated Goodnough’s article,
Life magazine had already run its widely-circulated feature story on Pollock, and curiosity
had migrated from the narrow confines of the art press to a much wider audience.
Realizing that still images couldn’t convey “the dance around the canvas, the continuous
movement, the drama,” Namuth decided that “Pollock’s method of painting suggested a
moving picture.”

Armed with his wife’s Bell and Howell “Turret,” an 8-millimeter home movie camera,
Namuth shot a short black-and-white film in the studio, using available light. This was his
first effort at film making, and his lack of camera skill is evident. He later decided to shoot
in color, which required more light, and so moved the project outdoors, where the action
had to be carefull staged. But despte its technical shortcomings, the studio film—which
simply observes Pollock working normally, first from a platform above the canvas and then
from ground level—is far more revealing. It records the improvisational process by which
the artist used liquid black paint applied with sweeping full-body movements to establish
the painting’s structure, then elaborated on it using different gestures to apply another
layer of black, then white. Here is the film in its entirety:

[SHOW FILM: 5 min, b/w, silent]

And here is the finished painting, Number 27, 1950, which acquired several more colors
after Namuth’s film ended.
 13

In “Pollock paints a picture,” Goodnough quotes Pollock making a very interesting

statement that seems to contradict the original definition of Abstract Expressionism as
posited by Herzog in 1919, which I cited at the beginning of my talk. Goodnough wrote that,
after reaching the point where “the artist decided that there was nothing more he could do
with it, Pollock felt that the work had become ‘concrete’—he says that he works ‘from the
abstract to the concrete,’ rather than vice versa.” Herzog, by contrast, described the process
of abstract expressionist creation as “the formation of objects devoid of the concrete
object.” Yet in fact Pollock and Herzog are saying essentially the same thing. As Goodnough
summarized Pollock’s approach, “the painting does not depend on reference to any object
or tactile surface, but exists ‘on its own.’”

This independence from evident outside stimuli—the so-called “physical creation of the
spiritual” of which Herzog wrote—finds its equivalent in the subjective, experiential
practices of Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Krasner, Mitchell, Still and other abstract expressionists.
“These artists are not concerned with representing a preconceived idea,” said Goodnough,
“but rather with being involved in an experience of paint and canvas, directly, without
interference from the suggested forms and colors of existing objects. The nature of the
experience is important. It is not something that has lost contact with reality, but might be
called a synthesis of countless contacts which have become refined in the area of the
emotions during the act of painting.” Thus the aim, and the successful result, was an art at
once deeply personal and universally resonant—spiritual in the broadly humanistic sense,
and expressive of a deeper, more meaningful reality than representational art can convey.

© 2016 Helen A. Harrison

Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Director
Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
East Hampton, New York, USA
pkhouse.org
 14

RECOMMENDED READING

Anfam, David. Abstract Expressionism. London: Thames & Hudson (second edition), 2015.

Artists Sessions at Studio 35 (1950). Chicago: Soberscove Press / Wittenborn Art Books,
2009.

Comenas, Gary. Abstract Expressionism. warholstars.org

http://warholstars.org/abstract-expressionism/abstractexpressionism.html

De Kooning, Elaine. “Hans Hofmann paints a picture,” Art News, February 1950.
http://www.artnews.com/2012/11/19/hans-hofmann-paints-a-picture/

Elaine de Kooning: The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism / Selected Writings. New York:
George Braziller, 1994

Goodnough, Robert. “Pollock paints a picture,” Art News, May 1951.

http://www.artnews.com/2012/11/26/pollock-paints-a-picture/

Harrison, Helen A., ed. Subject Matter of the Artist: Writings by Robert Goodnough, 1950-
1965. Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2013.

Marter, Joan, ed. Abstract Expressionism: The International Context. New Brunswick, NJ and
London: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

Pollock Painting: Photographs by Hans Namuth. New York: Agrinde Publications, Ltd., 1980.

Sandler, Irving. “Mitchell paints a picture,” Art News, October 1957

http://www.artnews.com/2012/11/05/mitchell-paints-a-picture/

Seckler, Dorothy. Oral history interview with Lee Krasner, 1964 Nov. 2-1968 Apr. 11,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-lee-krasner-12507

Seitz, William C. Abstract Expressionist Painting in America. Cambridge, MA and London:

Harvard Univesity Press, 1983.

Shapiro, David and Cecile Shapiro, eds. Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.