Non-Figurative Art: Abstract Expressionism in America

Abstract Expressionism was a movement in American painting that flourished in the

1940s and 1950s, sometimes referred to as the New York School or, very narrowly, as

Action Painting, although it was first coined in relation to the work of Vasily Kandinsky

in 1929. The works of the generation of artists active in New York from the 1940s and

regarded as Abstract Expressionists resist definition as a cohesive style; they range from

Barnett Newman’s unbroken fields of colour to Willem de Kooning’s violent handling of

the figure. They were linked by a concern with varying degrees of abstraction used to

convey strong emotional or expressive content. Although the term primarily denotes a

small nucleus of painters, Abstract Expressionist qualities can also be seen in the

sculpture of David Smith, Ibram Lassaw and others, the photography of Aaron Siskind

and the painting of Mark Tobey, as well as in the work of less renowned artists such as

Bradley Walker Tomlin and Lee Krasner. However, the majority of Abstract

Expressionists rejected critical labels and shared, if anything, only a common sense of

moral purpose and alienation from American society. Abstract Expressionism has

nonetheless been interpreted as an especially ‘American’ style because of its attention to

the physical immediacy of paint; it has also been seen as a continuation of the Romantic

tradition of the Sublime. It undeniably became the first American visual art to attain

international status and influence.

The roots of Abstract Expressionism lie in the social and artistic climate of the 1920s and

early 1930s. Apart from Hans Hofmann, all its major exponents were born between 1903

and 1915 and grew up during a period of American isolationism. Although Europe

remained the traditional source of advanced culture, American efforts during the 1920s to
develop an aesthetic independence culminated in the direct, homespun realism of

Regionalism. Consequently, the development of the art of Willem de Kooning, Arshile

Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, for example, illustrates a complex interaction

between tradition, rebellion and the individual talent. European modernism stimulated

them deeply, while their desire to retain the impact of personal experience recalled the

aims of American Scene painting. Pollock, Still, Smith and Franz Kline were all affected

by their native backgrounds in the rural West and in the steel- and coal-producing regions

respectively. In other cases Jewish or European origins contributed to an unusual gamut

of ethnic, intellectual and private sources of inspiration.

Between the wars New York offered some notable opportunities to assimilate

comparatively recent artistic developments. Its galleries included the Museum of Non-

objective Art, which housed the impressive Kandinsky collection, and the Museum of

Modern Art, which mounted exhibitions throughout the 1930s and 1940s covering many

aspects of 20th-century painting.

Much of the creative intellectual ferment of the time was focused in the theories of the

Russian émigré painter and writer John Graham who befriended Gorky, Pollock and

others. His book Systems and Dialectics of Art (1937) justified abstraction as distilling

the essence of reality and traced its roots to primitivism, the unconscious and the

painter’s empathy with the brushstroke. The younger American artists thus seem to have

become highly conscious of their historical position and dictates. Most felt that they had

to reconcile Cubist spatial organization with the poetic subject-matter of Surrealism and

realized that original art would then need to go beyond both.

The development of Arshile Gorky’s art from the late 1920s exemplified the cross-

currents in the matrix of Abstract Expressionism. He progressively assimilated the main

phases of modern European painting in order to explore his own identity until in The

Artist and his Mother (c. 1926–34; New York, Whitney) the private world of Gorky’s

Armenian origins merged with his contemporary stance as heir to the space and forms of

Synthetic Cubism, Picasso and Miró. This mood of transition is especially apparent in

technical paradoxes, such as the strange contrasts of carefully finished areas with

unresolved passages of paintwork that make this double portrait appear as if it were

suspended in a process of change. By the early 1940s this tendency (which can be traced

back to Paul Cézanne and to Futurism) provided new means of incorporating the tensions

of the artist’s immediate circumstances into the actual picture. De Kooning, for example,

deliberately allowed successive efforts to capture volume and contour to overtake the

stability of his figures, as in Queen of Hearts (c. 1943; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn); such

figures typify one aspect of early Abstract Expressionism in retreating into a dense,

ambiguous visual fabric.

At an early stage Pollock, Still and Mark Rothko established a similar polarity between

the figure (or other signs of existence) and external forces. The ‘realism’ of their early

landscapes, interiors and urban scenes undoubtedly reflected the emphasis on locale in

American Scene painting, but the expressive symbolism was prophetic. A sense of

isolation and gloom probably derived in part from the context of the Depression allied

with personal factors. They combined highly sensitive, romantic temperaments with left-

wing or radical views so that the social circumstances of the period naturally suggested

an approach to art that explored the human predicament. This had already been
anticipated by some literature of the 1920s and 1930s, notably the novels of William

Faulkner (1897–1962), that placed the self against an inimical environment;

contemporary American art, however, offered few successful precedents. On the

contrary, the weaknesses of depicting human themes literally had already surfaced in

Thomas Hart Benton’s anecdotal brand of Regionalism that Pollock, a former pupil of

Benton, later described as ‘something against which to react very strongly’. Despite the

wagons, cowboy and mules in Pollock’s Going West (c. 1934–5; Washington, DC, N.

Mus. Amer. A.), it remains more elemental than anything by Benton. A feeling of almost

cosmic tumult is countered by an overall vortex-like unity.

As Pollock’s work became more abstract during the 1930s it nonetheless retained an

underlying conflict between impulsive chaos and the need to impose some overall sense

of order. Yet the common problem of the 1930s was not just evolving a formal language

for what Rothko subsequently termed ‘pictures of the human figure—alone in a moment

of utter immobility’ (‘The Romantics were prompted’: Possibilities, 1, winter 1947–8, p.

84) and other contrasting psychological states; the controversy in the USA focused

instead upon the definition and priorities of an authentic avant-garde art.

Several future Abstract Expressionists were employed on the Works Progress

Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). Alongside the practical benefits of

financial support and official endorsement, the WPA/FAP allowed opportunities to

experiment with new techniques and to tackle the problems of working on a large scale. It

also acted as a catalyst for a more cohesive New York community. But the advocacy of

Social Realism on the project alerted many to its academic nature, which Gorky

summarized as ‘poor art for poor people’. From a visual rather than literary standpoint,
the humanitarian imagery of a leading Social Realist such as Ben Shahn seemed as barren

as the reactionary equivalents in Regionalism. David Smith’s Medals for Dishonor series

(15 plaster models, 1939; e.g. No. 9—Bombing Civilian Populations, ex-artist’s priv.

col., see G. McCoy, ed.: David Smith, New York, 1973) and the early paintings of Philip

Guston not only engaged anti-Fascist ideas but also revealed a legacy of the radicalism of

the 1930s that was never abandoned, despite largely unfounded claims that later the

movement was on the whole ‘de-politicized’. Smith and Guston, rather, subsequently

sought to show how their respective media could signify and not merely illustrate their

beliefs about freedom, aggression and constraint. Similarly, Pollock drew almost nothing

from the overt Socialism of the Mexican José Clemente Orozco’s murals but a great deal

from their capacity to embody human strife in the objective pictorial terms of rhythm and

surface pattern.

Another alternative in the 1930s was the tradition of ‘pure’ abstraction, stemming from

Piet Mondrian and upheld by the American abstract artists group (AAA) to which Ad

Reinhardt belonged. Reinhardt’s eventual divergence from mainstream Abstract

Expressionism can be traced to this initial assumption that the liberating potential of non-

objective and specifically geometric art lay in its very independence from the social

sphere. A more moderate approach was adopted by the painters Hans Hofmann and

Milton Avery. Hofmann, born in Bavaria in 1880, provided a link with an earlier phase of

European modernism and, through his own school, which he founded in New York in

1934, taught the synthesis of Cubist structure (emphasizing the unity of the picture plane)

with the brilliant colours of Fauvism. Avery’s more lyrical approach suffused a simple,

flat handling of space with light and atmosphere. This inspired Rothko and Adolph
Gottlieb, with its Matisse-like balance between observation and the artist’s feelings.

Moreover, the growing popularity among an emergent New York avant-garde of theories

originated by Leon Trotsky tended to discourage strict orthodoxy by stressing the

autonomy of art over social and political restrictions. Out of this amalgam of diverse

sources and beginnings, Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s sought to integrate the

inner world of emotions with the realities of the picture-making process.

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The exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–7; New York, MOMA) heralded a

phase when Surrealism and its affinities changed the course of American painting.

Furthermore, the arrival of several leading European Surrealists including André Breton,

André Masson and Max Ernst in the USA after the outbreak of World War II allowed

stimulating personal contacts, Robert Motherwell being one of the first to benefit in this

way. This brought an international note to the art scene and reinforced a sense of

historical moment: the hegemony of the Ecole de Paris had shifted to New York. As the

war continued it also seemed that new subject-matter and accompanying techniques were

necessary to confront what was perceived as the tragic and chaotic zeitgeist. Surrealism

had partly satisfied such needs by unleashing the disruptive forces of the unconscious, but

its tendency towards pure fantasy now appeared irrelevant. In a statement made in 1943

in the New York Times (13 June, p. 9), Rothko and Gottlieb declared the new gravity of

intent: ‘There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject

is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.’
The pursuit of universal themes continued Surrealist artists’ fascination with the

omnipotent force of sexuality and explained much apparently Freudian imagery in

paintings of the earlier 1940s. Erotic motifs occur in Gorky’s The Liver is the Cock’s

Comb (1944; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.). Interpenetrating or phallic elements

characterized Smith’s sculptures at times, as well as the paintings of Pollock, Rothko,

Still and Theodoros Stamos; the living figure in Motherwell’s Pancho Villa Dead and

Alive (1943; New York, MOMA) is distinguished by his genitalia. Such inconography in

fact derived less from Freud than from a more universal symbolism invoking

regeneration, fertility and primitive impulses. These themes in twin stemmed from the

Abstract Expressionist’s overriding concern with subjectivity. To this end the Surrealist

use of biomorphism, a formal language of organic curves and similar motifs, was

variously exploited. For Gorky it evolved into a metamorphic realm where tendrils,

spikes and softer masses referred simultaneously to nature and to human anatomy.

Pollock’s version was less specific, and in Pasiphaë (1943; New York, Met.) it implied

womb-like enclosure versus whirling activity. Even de Kooning, the least sympathetic

towards Surrealism, reiterated organic contours in his claustrophobic canvases of the

mid-1940s as reminders of a strong yet cryptic eroticism. Thus biomorphism served to

bridge the figurative modes of the 1940s with a manifold path to abstraction.

Another catalyst in the 1940s was a preoccupation with the concept of myth, especially as

interpreted by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, whose writings had gradually

gained an American readership. According to Jung, myths gave universal form to basic

human truths and related to a profound level of experience that he identified as the

‘collective unconscious’. These theories helped several Abstract Expressionists attain

more reductive styles because myth, Jung claimed, had a dramatic simplicity expressed

through ‘archetypes’, that is, primal figures and symbols. Primitive art often dealt with

myth and became a secondary source at this stage, particularly in the aftermath of

exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ranging from prehistoric rock

pictures in Europe and Africa (1937) to American Indian art (1941). The totem was a

frequently used primitive motif, aptly fitted to personify the Jungian archetype in the

guise of a mysterious, upright entity. In Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret (1943; San

Francisco, CA, MOMA) sentinels at either side of the picture seem to guard a central

maze of lines and markings that suggests the chaotic recesses of the collective

unconscious. Similarly, Still, Smith and others turned the totem into a visual cipher

halfway between a figure and a non-representational emblem.

The great potential of the abstract sign soon became clear: it embodied a kind of terse

pictorial shorthand, provocative in itself or, rather like individual script, imbued with the

physical impetus of its creator. In 1941 Gottlieb began a series known collectively as

Pictographs (e.g. Voyager’s Return, 1946; New York, MOMA). Enigmatic details,

including body parts and geometric motifs, were set within a rough gridwork that recalled

an archaic sign system or petroglyph. By 1947 Rothko, Stamos and others had created

sparse schematic images marked by a shallow, post-Cubist space, and defined in the

Ideographic Picture exhibition, organized by Barnett Newman for the Betty Parsons

Gallery, New York, in 1947, as ‘a symbol or character painted, written or inscribed

representing ideas’.

Newman’s own works of this period reflected the theory that abstraction could convey

awesome meanings. Their breakthrough was analogous to that in Aaron Siskind’s

contemporary photographs, such as Iron Work I (1947; see C. Chiarenza: Aaron Siskind:

Pleasures and Terrors, Boston, 1982), which gained impact from a calculated ambiguity.

Their syntax of vertical elements, quivering edges and voids retained the dramatic aura

associated with figuration but no longer conformed to either a biomorphic style or to the

geometry of Mondrian. Rothko’s paintings also progressed in a similar direction already

anticipated in 1943 when he wrote, ‘We favor the simple expression of the complex

thought’ (letter to the New York Times Art Editor, Edward Alden, 7 June 1943), which

was to be achieved through the ‘large shape’ that could impose its monumentality upon

the viewer.

This reduction to essentials had widespread consequences during the 1940s. It shifted

attention away from relatively graphic symbolism towards the capacities of colour and

space to acquire an absolute intensity, not bound to describe events and forms within the

picture but free to embody extremes of light and darkness, enclosure, liberation and so

on. The dynamics of the act of painting assumed a central role. Gorky’s use of very fluid

washes of pigment in 1942, under the influence of the Chilean Surrealist Matta

(Echaurren), foreshadowed both tendencies. The resultant veils, billows and liquid runs

of colour created an unusually complex space, as in Water of the Flowery Mill (1944;

New York, Met.) that changed from one area to another with the same spontaneity that

had previously been limited to Gorky’s organic shapes.

Still, Gottlieb, Stamos and Richard Pousette-Dart pursued a different course in the 1940s

by stressing tangible paint layers with heavy or unconventional textures. These methods

altered their works from the traditional concept of a discrete easel picture to more

palpable images whose presence confronted the actual world of the spectator. Dimensions
grew in order to accentuate psychological and physical rapport with the viewer.

Inevitably, the search for heightened immediacy, for a charged relationship between

surface and viewer, meant that a number of artists would regard the painting as an

incarnation of the process—the energy, tensions and gestures—that had created it.

The Surrealist technique Automatism again unlocked possibilities for incorporating

immediacy with a vivid record of manual activity, and the impulses behind it, into the

final work. Automatism had supposedly allowed Surrealists like Miró and Masson to

paint without full conscious control and so essentially stimulated the discovery of

unorthodox forms. In contrast, Abstract Expressionism elevated Automatist procedures

into a means of reorganizing the entire composition. Hofmann was among the first to

pour and drip paint in the early 1940s in order to achieve increased liveliness, but Pollock

took the technique to revolutionary limits. By the mid-1940s he painted with such

urgency that the remnants of figures and other symbolic details were almost dismembered

and lost within the great arcs and whorls formed by his sweeping gestures, for example

There were Seven in Eight (1945; New York, MOMA). A climax came in 1947 when the

restrictions of brushes and the upright format of the easel picture were abandoned as

Pollock took to working directly on the floor, dripping paint either straight from the can

or with the aid of an implement such as a stick or a trowel. Consequently, in works of this

period an astonishing labyrinth of paint traces expand, oscillate and hurtle back upon

themselves resembling, as the artist described it, ‘energy and motion made visible’.

Pollock had reconciled two long-standing though divergent impulses, an obsession with

chaotic force and the desire for order, into the vibrant unity of a field, for example

Number 2, 1949 (Utica, NY, Munson–Williams–Proctor Inst.).

This synthesis was unique at the time, but Abstract Expressionist painting in the late

1940s generally approached a threshold where restlessness and flux predominated. The

composition dissolved into a seething field of fragments dispersed with almost equal

intensity throughout the picture, hence the term ‘all-over’ was sometimes used to

describe this tendency. A type of space evolved that was dense and unstable beyond even

that of Analytical Cubism, as in de Kooning’s Painting (1948; New York, MOMA). This

probably owed something to the doubt-ridden anxieties of the post-war years and perhaps

the pressures of fast-moving urban life. It certainly also stemmed from the consequences

of Automatism, which took even less overtly Abstract Expressionist painters like

Reinhardt and Tobey to the stage where a teeming, calligraphic field of brushstrokes

predominated. By the end of the decade the need to reassert meaningful content in

unprecedented ways had again become imperative.