Painting Beyond Pollock

Painting Beyond Pollock is the first publication to thoroughly survey

the canon of post-war Western painting. Featuring over 170 artists,

Morgan Falconer combines existing and new scholarship to explore

painting’s limits and possibilities, and why the medium continues to

play a crucial role in contemporary art today.

Painting, with its endless capacity for reinvention, continues to occupy a

privileged position in Western art. Since the mid-20th century, new practices

have pushed art into territories such as performance and installation, leading

some critics and artists to declare painting irrelevant or even finished. But

these developments have, in fact, driven painting to new heights of

innovation and interest, making these seventy years arguably the liveliest in

its history.

Morgan Falconer tells the story beginning with Jackson Pollock and the

Abstract Expressionists on both sides of the Atlantic, proceeds through post

war abstraction in France, social realism in East Germany, the end of

geometric abstraction in Europe, American post-painterly abstraction, the

handmade ready-mades of Rauschenberg and Johns, Pop's rise in Britain

and the US, painting's confrontations with photography in the 1960s and

beyond, the return of expressionism in the 1980s, new approaches to Pop in

the 1990s and 2000s, and the continued variety of some of the most recent

paintings to be made by a younger, 'post-medium' generation of artists.

Save 20% with coupon code: PB20PL

INTRODUCTIONTHINGS MUST BE

PULVERIZED – ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

WOUNDED PAINTING – INFORMEL IN EUROPE

AND BEYONDWITNESSES –

POST-WAR FIGURATIVE PAINTING AGAINST GESTURE –

GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION

POST-PAINTING PART I – AFTER POLLOCKANTI-TRADITION –

POP PAINTINGA TRANSCENDENTAL

HIGH ART – NEO-EXPRESSIONISM

AND ITS DISCONTENTSPOST-PAINTING PART II –

AFTER POPNEW FIGURES – POP ROMANTICS

4–9

152–205

10–45 206–261

46–81

262–307

308–337

338–375

82–119

120–151

4

The critic Peter Schjeldahl once casually remarked, in a short and enthusiastic review of John Currin’s work, that ‘if it’s too late in your life to stop liking painting, you’re sunk’.1 Debates over painting have occasionally split along generational lines, and the comment made me appreciate that, in some sense, they still do. Schjeldahl’s generation (he is, at the time of writing, aged seventy) tend to cherish painting dearly. They perhaps feel its tie to a venerable tradition stretching back to the Old Masters, and, in an era of pop culture and photography, feel that it represents an authentic resistance to the commercial mainstream. But to people in their thirties and forties, such as myself, painting’s grip isn’t so strong. That certainly isn’t to say that we oppose it: we’re not the young radicals who supported Minimalism in the early 1960s, eager to be done with sculpture as much as painting, believing that both were freighted with too much tradition. Neither are we indifferent to it: young painters continue to fill the galleries and to draw audiences. But the medium no longer exerts its magnetic powers of attraction and repulsion; no fissure divides painters and their supporters from photographers and theirs, as it did in the 1980s. If younger viewers love painting today, they often do so as much as they love any other medium; in fact, they’re happy to see painting taking its place in the practice of an artist who uses all kinds of media.

This change in attitude to painting seemed palpable to me merely in contemplating the idea of writing a recent history of the medium. Because not so long ago, many critics wouldn’t have thought it worthwhile. To look beyond what was thought to be the post-war apotheosis of the medium, in American art of the 1940s and 1950s, was to survey a miserable decline into endgames. In the 1960s, painting was pushed aside by sculpture and new media, and painters themselves critiqued its forms and traditions with a reductive severity; in the 1980s, the medium’s revival was met with controversy and scepticism. Since that time, however, painting has seen another resurgence, and painters are working in an ever greater plurality of styles. That in itself doesn’t provide a rationale for this book, since eclecticism can be less a sign of vigour than a symptom of a lack of core ideas focusing minds. What does provide it, is the fact that this eclecticism has excused the absence of a historical analysis: painters are apparently pursuing so many different strands to have emerged from modernism that the problem of interrogating them individually has been put aside, and each is taken to be equally worthwhile. We may live in what critic Rosalind Krauss calls the age of the post-medium condition, when artists feel less allegiance to a single medium, and so are perhaps less conscious of the history of the language they employ, yet a considerable part of our understanding of individual paintings derives from their relationship to other, and earlier, paintings, and we risking losing that and much else if we neglect this history.

INTRODUCTION 1. Peter Schjeldahl, ‘New Classic’,

The New Yorker, 4 December 2006.

Jackson Pollock in

the studio working

on Number 1, 1949.

Photograph by

Martha Holmes

6 Introduction

With a reassertion, not a reassessment of the history of contemporary painting, in mind, the chronology presented here should be familiar to readers acquainted with recent debates in post-war painting. What I have sought to achieve is a synthesis of recent scholarship, and one that introduces new writing on some relatively lesser-known artists, such as Jean Fautrier and Blinky Palermo, who represent important correctives to older canons. It builds on the hard work of many brilliant critics and historians over many years. I owe thanks to them for enabling it (and, to some, probably a good deal more); I have tried to make those debts clear in the footnotes and I can only apologize if they do not go far enough.

Despite all this new work, it is disappointing that this history must still be largely one of white men. Women were first excluded from mainstream painting, and then, in reaction, chose to exclude themselves: everything from the culture of Abstract Expressionist social circles – their drinking and machismo – to the bullish rhetoric of the style itself worked to shut out women. In the 1960s, when Pop arrived, women became the fetishized focus of the male gaze and an emblem of commodification, rarely returning the gaze themselves. Meanwhile, many women artists began to work in new media rather than grapple with painterly rhetorics that were heavily gendered. Obviously, there are numerous lesser-known women painters from this period whose achievement warrants attention (those such as the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig have recently – and deservedly – received new scrutiny from critics and curators) and examining them often helps us to qualify our admiration for their better-known male counterparts. Overall, however, I have sought to identify the painters whose work is judged by a consensus of critics and historians to have made the most signification contribution, and sadly the majority of those are men.

The narrow racial and ethnic profile of my narrative also demands some explanation. One of the rationales for this book was the lack of a survey on painting that bridges gaps between periods and styles, and in writing it I have wanted to be as comprehensive as possible. Recent scholarship helps in this regard, since it has highlighted the significance of certain non-European artists and movements, and the growing vigour of the art market in economies such as those of Russia and China has also helped to bring more non-Western artists to the attention of audiences in Europe and North America. However, selectively plugging such material into the existing canon has serious problems: it lends the impression that only these non-Western artists warrant consideration, that only these measure up to the high standards of the West; it also encourages a facile picture of Western painting as a vigorously porous institution drawing on inspiration from outside to constantly renew itself, and, in the old colonial fashion, generously condescending to foreigners in the process; and above all, it tends gleefully to ignore the complexities of context and see similarities where few exist. We are said to be living in the era of the Global Contemporary, so far as art is concerned, and it’s true that the geography of art has opened up enormously, yet it still feels too soon to be able to account for this in a historical way, to elaborate new and worthwhile categories that can describe the landscape of the whole world’s painting.

Maria Lassnig

Woman Power, 1979

Oil on canvas

182 × 126 cm

(71 3/5 × 49 1/2 in)

8 Introduction

Consequently, I have carefully limited references to artists outside Europe and North America: perhaps by narrowing the perspective further, I can at least draw attention to that narrowness. For example, while it is crucial to include some coverage of Soviet Socialist Realism, since it had a crucial, if indirect, impact on art in the West, I decided to omit any coverage of the Chinese variant of the style. I have also omitted the Japanese Gutai movement of the late 1950s and 1960s: why include this and not the wealth of other interesting painting from Japan? And, still in reference to Japan, while I have excluded Yoshitomo Nara, I have reluctantly included Takashi Murakami. Nara is a good example of how accidents of taste and the marketplace work to promote artists to foreign audiences: his imagery of children and animals is styled in what is read in the West as typically Japanese. Not due to any fault on Nara’s part, his art adds little to the narrative of recent Western painting, except for pointing to how taste has broadened in certain ways. I include Murakami, but as I say, only reluctantly, and in large part due to his sheer prominence in the West. I will argue that his art forces us to acknowledge the historical and geographical specificity of the division between high and low art in the West, that high and low art are not universal categories. That’s a valuable lesson – a very valuable one – but it is surely one that we could derive from any number of non-Western artists; Murakami is no special case.

I began writing this book with the intention of producing a history of contemporary painting, to trace its roots. And after considering inclusions and exclusions, and how to structure the narrative, there were still questions over where to begin the history, questions that in some measure turn on that hopelessly vague, but still somehow helpful word, ‘contemporary’. The period we identify as having shaped the concerns of contemporary art is one that begins in the 1960s, but it’s clear that painting’s themes have deep roots in the post-war period – deeper, arguably, than those of sculpture. The book’s title refers to Jackson Pollock because so many artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s identified his work as a rupture with the past: he was said to have destroyed painting – and yet also to have given birth to a host of new directions (though not all of them in the realm of painting). But to begin the story with Pollock without showing the conditions from which his new approach arose, would have produced a strained and distorted history, and more of a tale of heroics than

is warranted. And so I have begun after the Second World War, since although that moment has its own strong connections to earlier times, artists throughout Europe and the United States felt it as a rupture, as a time that called for something very new; they also had doubts that painting could offer an appropriate response to such terrible times, and those are doubts that are characteristic of the whole period we survey.

Finally, in regards to debates about more recent painting, it’s notable that there have been few if any contributions from paintings’ old opponents, from those avant-gardes that rejected the medium in the 1960s and beyond. Either their old animosity has evaporated, or they don’t think it worth voicing opposition; perhaps they feel that the arguments made long ago still hold good and do not need to be restated. That silence has been filled by boosterish writing that typically chides those old critics. If painting is dead, why does it seem to be so alive, they ask? How can something so versatile and adaptable ever die? Or – more meekly – why can’t painting claim a place alongside all the other contemporary media without having to justify itself ? I’ll tackle those questions later on, but I won’t answer them with the usual replies. Instead – and here’s where I’m happy to say this history will be different from much recent criticism – I will often reply with lessons learned from painting’s opponents. There should be no apology for this, because these opponents have been precisely those who have rejected the usual platitudes about the medium’s versatility and immortality, and offered in its place some of the most incisive analyses of painting’s characteristics and limits. We shouldn’t be afraid of that kind of discussion, since it was familiar to painting’s greatest supporters in the 1950s and 1960s: they stated again and again what they took to be the nature of the medium, what it could and couldn’t do; painting’s critics have only added a corrective. And so I will not start off with a rousing claim that painting will go on and on. Painting will undoubtedly be with us for decades to come. After that, who knows? Thankfully, it isn’t the historian’s job to prophesy.

Jean Fautrier

Hostage No.17, 1945

oil, ink and pastel on paper

mounted on canvas

27 × 22 cm

(10 2/3 × 8 2/3 in)

10

Willem de Kooning

in his 4th Avenue

studio with drawings

related to Woman I in the background, 1950. Photograph

by Rudy Burckhardt

1. Barnett Newman, ‘Jackson Pollock:

An Artist’s Symposium’, Art News, vol. 66, no. 2, April 1967, reprinted in

John P. O’Neill, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (New

York: Knopf, 1990), pp.191–92.

2. Dore Ashton, À rebours. La rebelión informalista, 1939–1968 (Madrid: Museo

Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía,

1999), p.24.

3. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American

Action Painters’ (1952), reprinted in

Ellen Landau, ed., Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique

(New Haven, CT and London: Yale

University Press, 2005), pp.189–97.

4. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract

Painting’, in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected Papers, vol. 2

(New York: George Braziller, 1978).

pp.213–36

THINGS MUST BE PULVERIZED

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

‘In 1940’, Barnett Newman once recalled, ‘some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope – to find that painting did not really exist’.1 Traditions had been ruptured and there was a crisis, deep-rooted doubts. We’ll come across those doubts again and again as this survey unfolds: in the period since the Second World War, painting has been repeatedly challenged, and today, many artists would conclude that there isn’t much to add to Newman’s thoughts – that painting, as a meaningful tradition, as a repertoire of usable forms and conventions, no longer exists. Back in 1940, however, Newman could still take that moment of pessimistic awakening as a challenge to fight on, for as he went on to say, that ‘awakening had the exultation of a revolution … It was that naked revolutionary moment that made painters out of painters.’2 Newman wasn’t the only one to exult in the challenge to painting: the critic Harold Rosenberg remembered the dawn of Abstract Expressionism with similar fondness and excitement: ‘The big moment came when it was decided to paint … Just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from Value – political, aesthetic, moral.’3

What was it about the medium of painting that seemed to promise so much possibility at mid-century, even while its traditions appeared to be closing down? Could it have been the qualities of paint itself ? Lovers of the medium often hymn the sensuousness of oil paint – they thrill to talk of colour and form, or the sheer pungency of it – but they don’t always acknowledge the fact that this sensuousness is fundamental to what attracts us to the medium. It answers a craving in us for a certain free and joyous expression of our whole selves – psychic and sexual. Painting, you might say, offers the chance for sensuous play: it frees us to express, to channel our physical and intellectual selves in ways that ordinary everyday pressures do not. It also offers a domain for expression of self, outside of the pressures and demands of ideology. The gap between painting and these everyday pressures is important, and we will see a recognition of that in aspects of Abstract Expressionism. Confronted with a world in which daily life was increasingly administered, in which work-time was regimented and leisure-time not much less so, painterly abstraction supplied a refusal, an escape into a world of free aesthetic play seemingly without rules. Meyer Schapiro, an art historian, critic, and contemporary of the New York School, believed that this was an integral part of the value of work: that the Abstract Expressionist’s work was hand-made – that it revelled in this – was vital in a culture increasingly cluttered with machines. As he put it, ‘The painting symbolizes an individual who realizes freedom and deep engagement of the self within the work.’4 And it was the deeply personal significance that painting held that encouraged its accentuation through expressive handling. Schapiro called it ‘the aspect of the freely made’.

12 Things Must Be Pulverized – Abstract Expressionism

For those who rejected the legacy of Cubism, Europe offered another alternative: Surrealism. Rather than celebrating rationalism and progress, Surrealism spoke of the irrational and unknown. It was experimental, avant-garde and it gave impetus to the search for the new and unorthodox. It may have turned its back on many aspects of the modern tradition that Americans admired – aspects, indeed, of Cubism – but it had attracted such talents as Picasso and Miró and so Surrealism began to attract the attention of young Americans. Those who passed through the workshop of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros were familiar with Surrealist notions such as chance and automatism. And there were an ample number of other opportunities to become acquainted with the movement. Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, brought an important collection of Surrealist art to the city. Julien Levy’s gallery also became a lively venue for the style. And, as war spread across Europe, New York was inundated with artists, many of whom were prominent Surrealists: André Breton, the movement’s leader, as well as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, André Masson, Roberto Matta and Yves Tanguy.

Interest in the style encouraged a number of Americans to explore the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They also dabbled in automatism, the practice by which the French group hoped to channel the unconscious.10 At its outset, the Surrealist movement was essentially literary, so its automatism took written forms, issuing in fractured stream-of-consciousness narratives, but when Breton welcomed painters into his circle, he found analogues for automatism in the forms and techniques of artists such as Miró and Masson. Automatism could then be understood as a facet of painterly style and technique; rather than line being a means to faithfully describe forms, it could be an approach to gesture. Like a needle

scratching out a pressure-reading, it could translate deeply buried forces.

One painter who epitomized the attitudes of many Americans to European art, and to the Surrealist movement, was Arshile Gorky (1904–48). He had arrived in the United States in 1920, and claimed to be variously Russian and Georgian; he was the cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky, he said. He had trained in Tbilisi and Paris. None of this was true. In fact, his name was Vosdanig Manoug Adoian and he was Armenian. And just as he liked to try on identities, so he tried on the styles of various European masters, at different times faithfully emulating Cézanne, Picasso, Miró, Matisse and Léger. A now famous anecdote recounted by the critic Harold Rosenberg tells of Gorky and his peers viewing some important Picasso paintings that had newly arrived in New York in 1937. They discovered that their hero had begun to let his paint run in rivulets below depicted forms. One of Gorky’s friends is said to have remarked, ‘Just when you’ve gotten Picasso’s clean edge, he starts to run over.’ Gorky replied, ‘If he drips, I drip.’11 Originality seems to have mattered less to Gorky than mastery; or, as Irving Sandler suggests, he realized that it would be too easy for him to settle on his own idiosyncratic twist on these styles, and instead he held out for a higher goal and a truer originality.12

Realizing that ‘aspect of the freely made’ would become one of the primary goals of the Abstract Expressionists, but around 1940, the moment of pessimism that Newman remembered, that goal must have seemed far off. Writing a year later, in a letter to the New York Times, the soon-to-be dealer Samuel M. Kootz complained, ‘I have not seen one painter veer from his established course. I have not seen one attempt to experiment, to realize a new method of painting.’5 Part of the problem was that American artists remained so dependent on the example of Europeans. The critic Clement Greenberg, in his own reflections on the period, noted that the influence of French art in particular was all-pervasive.6 Paris, he commented, was ‘the only place that really mattered’. Picasso stood forth as the most intimidating figure, but plenty more were held in high esteem. The Abstract Expressionists ‘all started from French painting’, Greenberg recalled on another occasion, ‘got their fundamental sense of style from it … Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art.’7 New York’s painters would pore over that new French work in the city’s galleries, in the Museum of Modern Art and the newly opened Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).8 For coverage of the fresh developments, they would scour the pages of Cahiers d’Art. And, back in their studios, they would try to master every new aspect of the latest French trends.

While American painters were attempting to find routes away from the Social Realism of the 1930s, this studious attention to France seemed worthwhile, but wasn’t it making the nation’s art merely a slavish derivation? Kootz’s letter suggested as much, and his words chimed with those who felt that the very styles that Americans tended to admire most were also the most exhausted. The leading forum for American modernists in the late 1930s was the American Abstract Artists group, and a significant proportion of its members were devoted to post-Cubist styles and geometric abstraction, approaches that some felt were now shop-worn, having degenerated into little more than a fussy concern with the niceties of composition – balance and harmony. Moreover, there was a sunny optimism running through parts of those traditions, hope for the possibilities of technological and social progress that seemed inappropriate in the face of the second global war in only half a century.9 The task now, surely, was to supercede those styles and create an art more befitting the times. It was a large task, but it could be liberating to feel, as Newman clearly did, that many of the styles of the first half of the century were now defunct. Painters had to begin anew.

5. Quoted in Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger,

1970), p.32.

6. Clement Greenberg, ‘The Late

Thirties in New York’ (1957), in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1989).

7. Clement Greenberg, ‘“American-

Type” Painting’ (1955), in John O’Brian,

ed., The Collected Essays and Criticism,

vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1993), p.219.

8. The Museum of Modern Art opened in

1929 and hosted a series of important

surveys of European trends, and 1939

saw the opening of the Museum of Non-

Objective Painting. The Whitney Museum

of American Art opened in 1931, and

Albert E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art

showcased an important collection of

French art between 1927 and 1943.

The opening of Hans Hofmann’s art

school also offered the opportunity to

learn from an artist who had matured at

the centre of the Parisian avant-garde in

the early years of the century, and who

was closely acquainted with Cubism and

Fauvism. So by the end of the decade,

New York’s artists were highly informed

about European trends. They could

discuss the latest developments with some

authority and they could emulate them

with sophistication.

9. ‘Cubism’, wrote Clement Greenberg,

‘[emerged] from a complex of attitudes

that embodied the optimism, boldness,

and self-confidence of the highest

stage of industrial capitalism’. Clement

Greenberg, ‘The Decline of Cubism’,

in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood,

ed., Art in Theory, 1900–1990 (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992).

MYTH-MAKING

10. Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, p.62.

11. Ibid., p.47.

12. Ibid., pp.48–50. Sandler points to

Stuart Davis as an example of what Gorky

sought to avoid, an idiosyncratic, American

twist on Synthetic Cubism.

Painting Beyond Pollock

Painting Beyond Pollock is the first publication to thoroughly survey

the canon of post-war Western painting. Featuring over 170 artists,

Morgan Falconer combines existing and new scholarship to explore

painting’s limits and possibilities, and why the medium continues to

play a crucial role in contemporary art today.

Painting, with its endless capacity for reinvention, continues to occupy a

privileged position in Western art. Since the mid-20th century, new practices

have pushed art into territories such as performance and installation, leading

some critics and artists to declare painting irrelevant or even finished. But

these developments have, in fact, driven painting to new heights of

innovation and interest, making these seventy years arguably the liveliest in

its history.

Morgan Falconer tells the story beginning with Jackson Pollock and the

Abstract Expressionists on both sides of the Atlantic, proceeds through post

war abstraction in France, social realism in East Germany, the end of

geometric abstraction in Europe, American post-painterly abstraction, the

handmade ready-mades of Rauschenberg and Johns, Pop's rise in Britain

and the US, painting's confrontations with photography in the 1960s and

beyond, the return of expressionism in the 1980s, new approaches to Pop in

the 1990s and 2000s, and the continued variety of some of the most recent

paintings to be made by a younger, 'post-medium' generation of artists.

Save 20% with coupon code: PB20PL