"Rebel Painters of the 1950s"
In the years following the end of World War II, a small group of American painters livingin New York seized the spotlight of artistic innovation--which for the past century hadfocused primarily on Paris--and rose to preeminence in the national and international artworld. "Rebel Painters of the 1950s" highlights those artists--among them JacksonPollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, RobertMotherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still_whochallenged the aesthetic establishment and created the style of painting known today asAbstract Expressionism. In addition to these individuals and other artists in their circlewho comprised the first generation of the New York School, "Rebel Painters of the1950s" also provides portraits of the critics and writers, notably Clement Greenberg,Harold Rosenberg, and Thomas Hess, who articulated the significance of this artisticmovement, and the dealers, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, Charles Egan,Samuel Kootz, and Sidney Janis, who afforded patronage and public access to the work.
Like any historical phenomenon, Abstract Expressionism defies precise definition.Even the term itself is subject to debate. "Action painting," "American-type painting," andthe "New York School" are phrases often used synonymously, although for most scholarsand the public, Abstract Expressionism remains the most convenient and instantlyrecognizable umbrella under which to discuss the collective qualities of advancedAmerican art at the midpoint of the twentieth century. Moreover, while the artistssubsequently labeled Abstract Expressionists frequently resisted categorization and oftenstressed the philosophical and formal distinctions among themselves, there isnevertheless a consensus among scholars that Abstract Expressionism was a cohesiveintellectual and artistic experience. It possessed a geographical center--New York; theindividuals affiliated with it knew each other and frequently interacted; and, mostimportant, they shared a common approach to making art, even though the appearanceof their paintings varied widely, from the intensely gestural to the highly restrained.
Those associated with Abstract Expressionism were linked by their rejection ofboth social realism and geometric abstraction, two dominant strains in American art inthe 1930s, and by their interest in aspects of European-based Cubism and Surrealism.For them, art was no longer about copying forms in nature but was the expression ofintangible ideas and experiences. For some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, and Franz Kline, the subject of art was autobiographical and emerged from thesheer act of making a painting. For others, among them Barnett Newman and ClyffordStill, the motivation was a search for the sublime. Yet for all, as Mark Rothko eloquentlypostulated, "art was not about an experience, but was itself the experience." As with thepoets of the period who challenged accepted literary standards to envelop their personalexperiences within new formats, the painters of the 1950s created unique and distinctiveimages by merging their private states of imagination and feeling with innovativecompositional structures.
The social milieu in which Abstract Expressionism emerged had its roots in thefriendships formed in Depression-era New York. The intricate web of relationships thatdeveloped as each artist came to town suggests that New York functioned, for thoseinvolved in defining avant-garde American art, more like a small town than America'slargest city. For instance, Dutch-born Willem de Kooning, who moved to New York in1927, befriended Armenian-born Arshile Gorky in 1930-1931; Russian-born butAmerican-raised Mark Rothko in 1934; Philip Guston and Barnett Newman in 1937; andFranz Kline in 1939-1940. The experience of Wyoming-born Jackson Pollock, whoarrived in New York in 1930, although slower to coalesce, was not substantially different.His contacts with those who were crucial to the formation of the new Americanavant-garde accelerated in 1941, when he was introduced to Lee Krasner, whom hemarried in 1945. In 1942, she introduced him to de Kooning, her teacher Hans Hofmann,and her friend Harold Rosenberg. Pollock became acquainted with Californian-born,Stanford- and Harvard-educated Robert Motherwell through Chilean-born, European-bredRoberto Matta Echaurren (Motherwell and Matta had met on a trip to Mexico in thesummer of 1941), while Motherwell, who moved to New York in 1940, met Hofmann andde Kooning through Pollock. Adolph Gottlieb's friendship with Barnett Newman datesto 1922, while that with Mark Rothko began in 1929. Clyfford Still, in New York in 1945,entered the circle through his contact with Rothko, whom he first met in San Franciscoin 1943. Philip Guston and Pollock had known each other since high school in the late1920s in Los Angeles. A pivotal person in this matrix of friendship and ideas was alsoRussian-migr philosopher and painter John Graham, a charismatic promoter ofavant-garde concepts whom Gottlieb knew in the early 1920s, de Kooning met in 1929,and Pollock a decade later. Graham was a prime link between those who becameAbstract Expressionists and the European Surrealists, such as Matta, Max Ernst, YvesTanguy, Andr Masson, and Andr Breton, who were living in exile in America during thelate 1930s and early 1940s.
The friendships and camaraderie among the Abstract Expressionists werereinforced by the proximity of their various studios. In the 1940s, the Hans Hofmannschool was at 52 West Eighth Street, while Pollock maintained a studio at 46 East EighthStreet. De Kooning's studio was on West Twenty-second Street, Kline's was on WestFourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and the more peripatetic MarkRothko was at one time located on Twenty-eighth Street near Fifth Avenue. PhilipGuston joined the crowd in 1950, first with a studio on Thirteenth Street (shared withBradley Walker Tomlin) and then with one at 51 West Tenth Street. Among theexceptions to those with downtown studios were Robert Motherwell, who lived uptown,and Adolph Gottlieb, who had moved to Brooklyn.
In addition, various neighborhood bars and cheap restaurants provided informalgathering places for the artists living downtown. The most notorious of these was theCedar Street Tavern on University Place near West Eighth Street. The desire to maintainprofessional contact, as well as to proselytize, led Motherwell, Rothko, and WilliamBaziotes (together with sculptor David Hare) to establish the Subjects of the Artist schoolin 1948 at 35 East Eighth Street. While short-lived, it nevertheless provided the impetusfor Studio 35 (in the same location), where, before it closed in 1950, de Kooning,Gottlieb, Motherwell, Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko, and critic Harold Rosenberg lecturedon art. The continuing need among the Abstract Expressionists for a place to talk aboutart also led in 1949 to the founding of the Club, which met in a rented loft at 39 EastEighth Street. Kline, de Kooning, and Reinhardt were among the initial members, whoultimately included Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, and Rosenberg, among others. Notlimited to a discussion of painting, the Club also featured presentations by the leadingNew York poets of the day, such as Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler.The sense of shared interests among the Abstract Expressionists was fortified furtherwhen, in May 1950, eighteen artists signed a letter protesting the conservative jury fora forthcoming exhibition of contemporary American art at the Metropolitan Museum ofArt.
The evolution of Abstract Expressionism is akin to a bell curve. It began with asmall cluster of random and seemingly insignificant events during the early 1940s, thengrew to a crescendo of more coherent, concerted activities in the late 1940s and early1950s. Its demise was marked by both perceptible and imperceptible incidents, not theleast of which was Jackson Pollock's death in 1956. In addition to the friendships formedin New York in the 1930s and 1940s and the interaction with the various Europeanartists and writers living in America--which were crucial to the intellectual and stylisticdevelopment of Abstract Expressionism--group solidarity and a degree of public andprofessional visibility were achieved when several of these artists began to exhibit theirwork at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery at 30 West Fifty-seventh Street.Pollock first exhibited there in 1943, as did Baziotes and Motherwell; paintings by deKooning, Kline, Rothko, and Still appeared in subsequent years. A careful reader of theNew York Times might have noticed a letter written in June 1943, with the assistanceof Newman but signed by Gottlieb and Rothko, championing a new kind of art, or heardan October radio broadcast reiterating this point of view. These bellwethers werereinforced among the intelligentsia with reviews of advanced art by critic ClementGreenberg, first in Partisan Review and then in The Nation.
By the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism possessed a significant matrix ofintellectual ideas, a coherent body of mature work by numerous artists, venues for publicdisplay, and meaningful critical reviews. Ironically, however, the peak years of AbstractExpressionism began shortly after Peggy Guggenheim closed her gallery in 1947. Buther departure from the American art scene also served to open the way for a newgeneration of dealers, among them Betty Parsons, Charles Egan, Samuel Kootz, andsubsequently Sidney Janis, to lay claim both to her stable of artists and to her reputationfor presenting avant-garde art. Tragically, this also coincided with the suicide of ArshileGorky in July 1948. The termination of Gorky's career led many identified with AbstractExpressionism to see the work in his last exhibition, held at the Julien Levy Gallery inFebruary 1948, as an indication of how far each of them, in his own way, had cometoward abstraction as a vehicle for the expression of the self and of intangible ideas.
The public recognition of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s was aided bythe growing number of publications that highlighted the work of these artists. The endof this decade saw the emergence of little magazines, such as Possibilities I and TheTiger's Eye, which contained statements by the Abstract Expressionists and illustrationsof their work. In 1948 Thomas Hess was appointed editor of Art News, and under hisdirection, this magazine, widely read by a broad group of art professionals and interestedamateurs, featured numerous articles on the Abstract Expressionists. Life magazine'sAugust 8, 1949, article on Pollock spawned the notion that artists of this generationmade interesting copy, and throughout the early 1950s, the popular press, including Life,Time, Look, and Vogue, increasingly featured the artists affiliated with AbstractExpressionism. Although by the early 1950s most of the Abstract Expressionists haddeveloped their signature styles, Harold Rosenberg's December 1952 essay "The ActionPainters," in Art News, nevertheless dispensed additional credibility, for it provided theartists and their patrons the verbal framework with which to articulate the philosophicalunderpinnings and significance of this new style.
The acknowledged leaders among the painters identified with AbstractExpressionism were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. While the two professedfriendship, they remained lifelong rivals. Initially Pollock, because of his one-man showsbeginning in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, received thegreater public and critical attention. Clement Greenberg was an early supporter, and inan April 1945 essay in The Nation, he declared Pollock "the strongest painter of hisgeneration, and perhaps the greatest . . . since Mir¢." In August 1949 Life magazineadapted this phrase for its caption heading its Pollock story. While Life's article was amixture of adulation and irony, it nevertheless catapulted Pollock into the realm of publicawareness, unlike any other artist of his generation. Indeed, Pollock bridged the gapbetween high art and popular culture, providing the model of stardom that has remainedcentral to the American art world for the past half-century.
De Kooning began participating in group exhibitions as early as 1942, but his firstsolo show, at Charles Egan's gallery, did not occur until April 1948. Although criticHarold Rosenberg ultimately became de Kooning's great champion, initially it wasGreenberg who laid the foundation for de Kooning's critical acceptance and success.Greeting the show at the Egan Gallery with a rave review, he declared in The Nation that"de Kooning was one of the four or five most important painters in the country." DeKooning's important series of paintings of women in the early 1950s enhanced hisdistinction among his artistic peers and furthered his visibility in the popular press, butit was not until after Pollock's death that his role as the foremost artist of this generationwas assured. When de Kooning opened his show at the Sidney Janis Gallery on May5, 1959, Time confirmed his celebrity status, reporting that a line had formed by 8:15a.m. and that by noon nineteen of the twenty-two works on view had been sold.
Abstract Expressionism was at its heyday when, in 1956, an automobile accidentended Jackson Pollock's life. While the remaining Abstract Expressionists continued topaint, exhibit frequently, and receive favorable critical attention (not to mention increasingprices for their work), in retrospect it is apparent that by the mid-to-late 1950s, theiraesthetic leadership, albeit not their public popularity, was on the wane. By that time, anew generation of artists was beginning to emerge, one that would seek its artisticidentity outside the philosophical and stylistic premises of Abstract Expressionism.
But even as the artists of the following generation struggled to create their ownhistory, the Abstract Expressionists continued to play a role in their artistic psyche.Today, as well, nearly half a century after the Abstract Expressionists first rose toprominence, they still capture the imagination of American artists, art historians, and thepublic. The Abstract Expressionists remain important not only for the art they created,but also for the manner in which they created it. They have become archetypal artistsand their lives have taken on mythic status. Thus while advanced art in the latter half ofthe twentieth century has appeared in numerous guises, much of it antithetical toAbstract Expressionism, it has nevertheless been made by artists who have sought toemulate the adventurousness and aesthetic risk-taking that made the AbstractExpressionists the leaders, in their time, of the international avant-garde.
Carolyn Kinder Carr
Deputy Director, National Portrait Gallery
Curator of the Exhibition
- "Rebel Painters of the 1950s" Essay by Carolyn Kinder Carr
- Checklist of the Exhibition
- Selected Checklist with Digital Images
