Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical ExperienceAuthor(s): Edward M. LevineSource: Art Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 22-25Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775629 .Accessed: 29/01/2011 06:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical

Experience

Edward M. Levine

The growth of Conceptual Art in the sixties has been interpreted along with Pop Art as a further reaction

against the personalization of art that marked Abstract

Expressionism. The gesture, drip, and splatter of Action

Painting were seen as marks of the hand and conse-

quently of the personality of the artist. Harold Rosen-

berg's justly famous article, "American Action Painters," was used as the central starting point for any definition of this complex movement, applying an existential view-

point to the relationship between artist and canvas.' I have already suggested in a previous article that there was an alternative way of viewing the works of Guston, Pollock, and the other Action Painters.2 Now that Mini- mal Art has taken its place in the forefront of the art world it seems a proper time to look again at the Action Painters and review just what their position was in rela-

tionship to the development of art in this century, both to previous and subsequent art.

Previously, I attempted to show that the image of man against the world, which is part of the existential view of Abstract Expressionism, was belied both by the

experience and intent of Pollock's painting. Rather than the imposition of self over the transient sensations of the world, much of Action Painting can be viewed as a sur- render of the self and individuality. It is precisely this

concept that places the American movement within a

strong current of Twentieth Century painting.3 The ele- ment of depersonalization is most strongly seen in the work of Mondrian with its attempt to reconcile art to sci- ence, the discipline which attempts to eradicate all as-

pects of subjectivity and hence personality. Mondrian re- duced his canvas to the opposition of horizontals and ver- ticals in order to eliminate all forms that evoke individual

feelings or ideas. Having conceived of the essence of art as universal, he felt that only through the most unexpres- sive and objective elements could art induce the feeling of the universal and the fundamental laws of reality. In- stead of decrying modern technology with its massed pro- duced objects, Mondrian viewed it as an evolutionary de- velopment in the realization of the spiritual in life, just as he viewed his own art as a similar evolution of a Hege- lian Absolute. The work becomes, for him, a plastic ob-

EDWARD M. LEVINE, formerly at Temple Buell College in Denver, is now an Associate Professor of Art at Stanislaus State College, Turlock, California. He studied at Yale and is currently working on his dissertation at New York Uni-

versity. M

ject which manifests in visual terms the invisible, objec- tive laws of the universe much as a mathematical equa- tion does in science. It is through intuition that the artist achieves an insight into the universal and thus a unifica- tion with the universe. To achieve this insight he must

supress his personality in order to allow the intuition to function on the universal level. Thus the work of the new artists must be abstract, that is, objective and spiri- tual:

That which distinguishes him (the non-figurative art-

ist) from the figurative is the fact that in his creations he frees himself from particular impressions which he receives from outside and he breaks loose from the domination of the individual inclination within him.4

The work of art becomes, then, a supra-personal object reflecting a universal order, a microcosm of the uni- verse. Ultimately, the Dutch artist's aesthetic conceptions can be related to a mystical, theosophical view of the uni- verse. The juxtaposition of the technological, scientific, and the aesthetic with the mystical marks a new turning point in Twentieth Century artistic thinking whose man- ifestations can be seen in much of today's art.

The work of Kandinsky seems to stand at the oppo- site pole from that of Mondrian. The term expressionism seems to be apposite for his art which indeed strives for the creation of an emotional reaction in the observer just as it stems from an inner emotion of the artist. But this inner necessity that Kandinsky speaks of has three ele- ments: that of personality, that of the spirit of the age, and the third element, that of the pure and eternal art which is the objective element. Abstract art manifests, as in Mondrian, the spiritual laws of the universe, but these are derived through an exploration of the personality in which exists this spiritual, objective element. Throughout Kandinsky's theories we can find elements of the theo-

sophical and the mystical as we found in Mondrian's art,

except that the emphasis is placed on the expressive ele- ments of the work. But like the Dutch artist, it is not form but what lies behind the form, the spiritual, which is the

proper subject of art. To arrive at this content the artist must go a step beyond the individual personality, to a

supracosmic self; in order to achieve this step the artist must become a sort of medium through which the spirit operates.

I could not think up forms, and it repels me when I see such forms. All the forms which I ever use came "from themselves," they presented themselves complete before

my eyes, and it only remained to me to copy them, or

they created themselves while I was working, often sur-

prising me.5

Both Mondrian and Kandinsky stand closer to each other than to Picasso whose art represents the extreme effort to

stamp his personality on life and art as we witness in his transformation of the old masters such as Velazquez, Courbet, and Delacroix. In these transformations we see

22

manifested the desire to take what is traditional art and impose a totally new vision on it, as if to say to the viewer, "see how I can deform even the most sacred through my creativity, through my individuality." No ef- fort is made to postulate art in the higher, metaphysical realm but only to proclaim Picasso's own existential ge- nius. It is crucial in these pictures that art is held up to art rather than holding art up to nature; the truth that exists for Picasso is the truth he makes and not the crea- tion of some metaphysical absolute. For Picasso, and many of the Cubists, we are presented with the reality which is created by the mind of the artist and imposed on the world through his existential choices.

In an extremely interesting article, "The Abstract Sublime," Robert Rosenblum elucidates the formal con- nections and the aesthetic experiences of some of the work of the Abstract Expressionists and the romantic painters of the previous century. He centers his argument around the concept of the sublime and the boundlessness of aesthetic experiences in the works of the Romantics and the moderns such as Still, Pollock, and Newman. Further, he sees the Abstract Expressionists as denying the Cubist revolution for more than just aesthetic rea- sons:

Yet it should not be overlooked that this denial of the Cubist tradition is not only determined by formal needs, but also by emotional ones that, in the anxieties of the atomic age, suddenly seem to correspond with a Romantic tradition of the irrational and the awesome as well as with a romantic vocabulary of boundless en- ergies and limitless spaces.6

Rosenblum's insight is important to an understanding of Abstract Expressionism for two reasons; first, because he sees it as a continuation of tradition which marks a crisis in man's relationship with the universe and secondly, be- cause he notes the break with the Cubist aesthetic. Many critics have pointed out this formal break but they failed to note that Action Painting is more in tune with a meta- physical view of the universe rather than with an existen- tial outlook which is so close to the art of Picasso. But what Rosenblum fails to note is that this relationship to the sublime not only pertains to a sense of nature's limit- lessness but to a cosmic consciousness and a conflict re- volving around the concept of the self.

Robert Motherwell's writings only partially confirm this romantic view of the post-1945 movement because he also sees his art and that of his contemporaries as ". . . one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify one- self through union."7 Rather than seeking a development of genius and the glorification of this concept which marked some of earlier romantic thinking, Motherwell views his art and the artistic creativity as having a differ- ent function from the existentialist view of self and cre- ativity which is a constant effort through choice to define oneself and one's personality. Art is not, for him, the ex-

pression of Angst nor an existential nausea but a tran- scendence of this condition and a reunification with the cosmos through a reunification of the ego. It is only when this reunification takes place that the sublime is achieved.

Painting becomes sublime when the artist transcends his personal anguish, when he projects in the midst of a shrieking world an expression of living and its end that is silent and ordered. That is exposed to expres- sionism.8

The American artist states very lucidly the difference be- tween his art and that of the earlier German movement. This difference is crucial to an understanding of the ulti- mately religious nature of the art following the war, which is not a psychological exploration of the uncon- scious conflicts such as one finds in Munch or Kirchner, but an effort to transcend the personal towards the supra- personal. Here Surrealism played a large part in the de- velopment of Motherwell's art as with the other Action Painters, but the Americans have gone beyond Surreal- ism; in the exploration of the unconscious, in their con- cern with the formal elements and in their attempt to annihilate the personality. Motherwell's series, as in Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 54, with its conflict between the ovals and the rectangular bars, between the or- ganic and the inorganic and between enclosure and open- ness can be interpreted as a metaphor not only of the art- ist's personal reactions to a political event but for the cos- mic drama of the self and its relationship to the universe, "between life and death, and their interrelationship."

If we define Expressionism in its historic sense, then the personalization of emotion and expression are the foundations of its aesthetic and the movement can properly be viewed as existentialist; but the tenets of Ab- stract Expressionism have very slight connections to this interpretation. Pollock's historic statement about the re- lationship of painter to canvas, as I have previously shown, does not speak in terms of personal expression but of collaboration which is precisely the way in which Motherwell talks of his own interactions with the painting:

A picture is a collaboration between artist and canvas. "Bad" painting is when the artist enforces his will without regard for the sensibilities of the canvas... .9

From this it is easy to ascertain why Motherwell viewed his art as opposed to Expressionism and ultimately, why for almost all the Action Painters, the word Expression- ism becomes a misnomer. A review of the writings of Worringer, one of the theoreticians of the original Ex- pressionist movement, will show that he viewed abstrac- tion as an escape from the world of flux and the entrance into a world of permanence represented by the work of art. Although he interpreted abstraction as a kind of ro-

23

mantic escapism from the flux and uncertainty of the nat- ural world in order to find repose, he does not see abstrac- tion as a projection of individual emotions but as a re- flection of an overall psychic need which is precisely how Motherwell defines the art of his time. Abstract art in its final analysis is transcendental. Romanticism of the Nine- teenth Century, Expressionism and the Action Painters all spring from common sources, as Professor Rosenblum pointed out, but they do not have common ends. If the latter two movements are quests for personal identity, the modern movement is a search for universal identity. Whereas the Romantics, such as Rousseau, saw the self in conflict with the world and attempted to deify the self in order not to face the eradication of personality, the American artists attempted to find a resolution of this conflict through a unification with the universe. It is im- portant, however, to distinguish between the two sides of Romanticism, the escapist and the mystical-the latter with a sense of the sublime that saw the resolution of this conflict in terms of eternal union. It is from this side that Motherwell's aesthetic can be linked to the landscape painting of Friedrich rather than to the works of Dela- croix or the stories of Poe.

The pantheism of the Romantic painters is, of course, not present in Abstract Expressionism. Rosen- blum compares this condition to the "paint-pantheism" of the American artist in order to distinguish between the two movements, but this contrast, although it has merit, overlooks the profound connections between the two in terms of the concepts of renunciation of the ego and of the artist as mediator and collaborator in the cre- ative act. Shelley renders the experience of this collabora- tion in Mont Blanc.

... and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange to muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind. Which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around;

The poet does not simply assume an active role in the creation of the poem and the poetic images; the creative act results from an interchange between himself and the universe, just as for Pollock and Motherwell the paint- ing is a result of a collaboration or interchange with the canvas. For such Romantics as Wordsworth and Keats, the imagination is not a personalized faculty but it has its origins in a suprapersonal realm. This is especially true for Keats who saw the imagination as an unconscious force acting without the poet's choice or deliberation. For the poet the imagination is an integrative force as opposed to analytic reason and, if it is to be efficacious in the creative act of poetry, the poet must suppress his own personal emotion and, in fact, his whole personality. The poet-artist must be without any identity or character; he

must become neutral, and thus he no longer expresses anything, rather things are expressed through him. The poem is created through an inner contact or sympathy just as the painting is created by Pollock who talks of making "contact." For the poet and the painters Mother- well and Pollock, a "bad" work results when there is a loss of collaboration through the imposition of the per- sonal emotion of volition onto the work. To experience a work of Pollock's is to literally lose oneself in the rhythms, to forget all sense of ego. He uses line not to cre- ate form but to obviate any experience of form and hence an individualized entity.

Pollock's sense of surrender to the canvas may be seen as a metaphor for the obliteration of the ego and its release into a cosmic experience. It is just such an experi- ence that Keats talks about in Ode to a Nightingale with its dialectic between empirical reality and the release of the self through poetry which is juxtaposed with the im- age of the nightingale and death; not the literal death but the metaphorical death of the self with its conse- quent release into the cosmic eternity which is symbol- ized by the bird. It is empirical reality, the bell, which brings him back to "my sole self" to the individual ego and the personality which is mired in the transient world of everyday reality.

An experience of a painting by Rothko, with its pul- sating, high-keyed color speaks, perhaps, most directly of what Rosenblum called the "Abstract Sublime." The to- tal extinction of movement results in an experience of quietude into which the observer can feel himself ab- sorbed as the colors are absorbed into the canvas. All sense of conflict or individualized emotions is lost in a pervasive, contemplative experience of light. In contrast to the effect of Turner's color, we sense no conflict or pa- roxysm of emotion but instead the kind of experience de- scribed by Keats in the Ode when he engages and im- merses himself in the poetic experience. Paradoxically, the rhythms of Pollock's line ultimately lead to a similar sense of infinitude, a loss of personal orientation, as in Rothko there is a sense of stasis resulting from his use of color. One can read Pollock's paintings as either webs of lines defining a finite space or, alternatively, as opening up into an infinity of space which is suggested by the bare canvas. Thus we have a paradox between the fron- tality of the image and the feeling moving into depth. As Rosalind Krauss points out, assertion of frontality and flatness are not in opposition but the one can, in fact, call attention to the other.10 This happens in the work of Kandinsky and Malevich both of whom stressed "trans- parent depth" as opposed to the Cubists who emphasized the literal picture surface, especially in collage. In the work of Rothko this feeling of transparency is suggested by the atmospheric color and the floating rectangles which at once exist in a frontal position while at the same time they create the feeling of deep space. Hence the visual experiences of both Rothko and Pollock relate

24

very strongly to the pictorial tradition which contem- plates art from a mystical, transcendental point of view. A world is thus created in the work of both artists in which the individual loses himself either to color or movement. This is the experience which is opposed to the transience of the everyday world that had little mean- ing for Keats nor for the Abstract Expressionists. It led them to search for a more permanent reality through the loss of the self than is achieved either through "the view- less wings of poesy" or the activity of painting.

In Romanticism and in modern abstract art, then, we are dealing with a type of mysticism.

One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's ap- pearance is her nakedness, and art stripped bare. How many rejections on the part of her artists! Whole worlds-the world of objects, the world of power and propaganda, the world of anecdotes, the world of fe- tishes and ancestor worship .... What new kind of mystique is this, one might ask. For make no mistake, abstract art is a form of mysticism.1"

It is here we see Action Painting joined to the philo- sophic current of which Mondrian and Kandinsky con- tributed so much and of which Romanticism is the ulti- mate source in modern art history. Romanticism is at the beginnings of the cult of individuality but also it in- cludes, as we have seen, the idea that the creation of art results when the ego is suppressed; a cult of the faceless creator, where individuality gives way to the universial- ity, where the artist becomes medium or interpreter and the cosmic laws are made manifest in the work of art, where union is achieved between man and his universe. Through the artistic activity, the abstract art of the Ac- tion Painters with its concern for myth and mythic con- sciousness can now be seen to fit into a long tradition in Western art as a new attempt to define man and his rela- tionships to his world and the concern for self becomes an entirely different concept than that expressed by Rousseau, lying closer to Keats and the earlier abstrac- tionists:

This concept of the self is not a new cult of personal- ity. It is not the nervous energy or motor activity of the artist which counts. Art isn't therapy. The hand that falters because the artist is depressed or slashes because the artist feels anger is not necessarily making a work of art..... We need to admit here a basic dogma of religion-that the true self is selfless-for without this guiding concept Action Painting is a sport and contem- plative painting a form of onanism.12

If Action Painters have disregarded the existential world, it is because they searched for a higher ontological mean- ing and if they partially accepted a Sartrian view of life they did not accept his metaphysic of nothingness and the isolation or glorification of the self. They turned to-

ward a more primitive concept of art and consciousness in order to oppose the valuelessness they felt around them. Their art was ethical as much as aesthetic and their mysticism, although far from the Platonism of Shel- ley or the Hegelianism of Mondrian, represents a signifi- cant attempt to redefine these earlier religious impulses.

If we now look at Minimal Art from the above view- point, the impersonality of the literalists can be seen as an extention of the impulses within Abstract Expression- ism but stripped of any metaphysical tendency. The Con- ceptual Artists' insistence on the phenomenological basis of art and perception, their deprecation of the "myth of depth" and humanistic values can now be clearly seen as a final acceptance of the Sartrian sense of life and the ul- timate valuelessness of the universe. The conceptualism of today's art is not a renunciation of the self, but para- doxically a new glorification of the mind and cult of per- sonality in which the work is less important than the art- ist himself and the intricacies of his creativity. Signifi- cantly, many of these artists have read Wittgenstein who perhaps most succinctly expressed their contemporary view of life:

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it hap- pens. In it there is not value-and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of no value, it must lie out- side all happenings and being so. For all happening and being so is accidental.13

Nothing could be further from the metaphysic of Ab- stract Expressionism with its passionate search for value and meaning in the universe and its desire to find mystic unification.

1 Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News, December, 1951, pp. 22-23. 2 "Mythic Overtones in the Work of Jackson Pollock," Art Journal, Summer, 1967. 3 Peter Fingesten, in "Spirituality, Mysticism and Non-Objective Art," ART JOURNAL, Fall, 1961, links Pollock to the mystical tradition of Mondrian and Kandinsky and non-objective art. 4Piet Mondrian, "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art," Modern Artists on Art, ed. by Robert Herbert (New Jersey, 1964), p. 130. j Wassily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences," Modern Artists on Art, p. 32.

Robert Rosenblum, "The Abstract Sublime," reprinted by Henry Geld- zahler, in New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (New York, 1969) p. 358, Originally in Art News, February, 1961. 7 Robert Motherwell, Catalogue to the exhibition of his zworks at the Museum of Modern Art, 1965, p. 45. 8 Robert Motherwell, p. 40. 9 Robert Motherw7ell, p. 54. 10 Rosalind E. Krauss, "On Frontality," Art Forum, May, 1958. 1 Robert Motherwell, p. 45. 12 John Ferren, "Epitaph for the Avant-Garde," Arts, November, 1958. In his article, Harold Rosenberg also felt that Action Painting was an "essen- tially religious movement" but that the painter's "conversation was secular toward self-recognition. Rosenberg felt that the movement looked to move away from any concept of value except the self and its definition and empha- sized the deification of the act of painting-what Rosenbluim defined as "paint-theism." Neither of them emphasized the importance of content which was an important element for artists such as Rothko and Gottlieb nor did these writers sense, as Ferren did, the metaphysical nature of the mlovement. 13 Ludwig TWittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922), p. 183.

25