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Painting
What the Mind’s Eye Sees
Action painters were postwar exemplars of American individualism
Jason Edward Kaufman
The great leap of modern art in the
early decades of the last century was
the proposition that abstraction could
be the highest form of artistic expression. A
hundred years later, canvases marked only by
paint splashes, slashes, drips, and flows are
now counted among the canonical works of
Western art. The terms “gestural abstraction”
and “action painting” have been used to
describe the sort of abstractions that directly
reflect the action of an artist’s gestures in
applying paint.
An exhibition called Action Painting at
the Beyeler Museum outside Basel, Switzerland
(January 27 to May 12, 2008) has gathered
dozens of examples by artists who
worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Among
the Americans are Jackson Pollock, Clyfford
Still, and Helen Frankenthaler, alongside
Europeans Jean Fautrier and Pierre Soulages,
and European-born artists who worked in the
United States such as Willem de Kooning,
Arshile Gorky, and Hans Hofmann, among
many others. The Action Painting show is not
only an occasion to examine the historical
development of this mode of image making,
but also an opportunity to consider our experience
of the work anew. Take American
action painting, which coalesced into the
dominant school of gestural painting after
World War II. Are these once-radical works—
say, Pollock’s Number 7, 1951 (1951) and de
Kooning’s Valentine (1947), both in the
Museum of Modern Art—visually engaging
and deeply affecting today? Are they of lasting
value? At a time when a painting by Pollock
or de Kooning reportedly commands
$140 million in the private market—more
than any other individual works of art—the
question seems not only moot but verging on
the absurd. But setting aside collectors’
embrace of these abstract expressionist
works, and the critical respect for gestural
painting in general, do these paintings merit
their vaunted status?
The argument against abstraction was
rejected decades ago. Why dredge it up again?
Because the exercise is one that refreshes and
deepens our appreciation of modern art.
Moreover, despite the established position of
mid-20th-century action painters, their celebrated
works remain a mystery to most viewers.
The hackneyed charge “My kid could do
it” has been rebuffed routinely by experts, but
for the general public it remains a lingering
suspicion. Art has always been appreciated by
an elite group of cognoscenti versed in theories
that support the work. For other people,
many forms of art will never have significant
impact. But even among experts there remain
many doubters about abstraction. A celebrated
scholar of Italian Renaissance art,
when asked by a student if he intended to visit
the Morris Louis retrospective then at MoMA,
smiled and replied wearily, “Imagine, all those
shower curtains!”
This anecdote illustrates a broader truth:
action painting mystifies many more people
than one might expect. What do museum
visitors take away from their encounters with
} Jason Edward Kaufman is the New York–based
chief U.S. correspondent for The Art Newspaper. A
version of this essay appeared in the catalog of the
Beyeler exhibition.
Kaufman Live.qxp 2/27/2008 2:39 PM Page 113
it? Some may find beauty, power, torment, or
calm—just as they do in music. Abstract paintings
may remind them of aspects of nature or
of an inner mood or even of the collective
unconscious, an expression of the symbolic
forms that lie within all of us. I suspect, however,
that more typically they find the works
lightly engaging, inaccessible, or even risible.
That the works hang in a museum where they
are given the imprimatur of the intelligentsia
is cause for discomfort and self-doubt. Unlike
music, which unfolds over time, the experience
of abstract art must be actively created
by its audience. If the viewer does not extract
a meaningful experience from the work, he
bears some of the blame. Those who are
knowledgeable about art can draw on a range
of historical associations to add meaning to
the experience of an abstract work. But perhaps
gestural abstraction is just not intriguing
enough to activate the mind of the
general viewer.
An inquiry into the
value of action painting
necessarily gets at fundamental
questions about
the nature and purpose
of art, topics that the
American action painters
themselves considered
deeply. Indeed,
those artists, including
Pollock, de Kooning,
Gorky, Clyfford Still, and
their followers, have
been credited with having
broken new ground
in aesthetics, thereby
advancing the history of
art. Influenced by European
artists, many of
whom immigrated from
Fascist Europe to America
in the late 1930s and
1940s, the abstract expressionists
who were to
become gestural painters
in the United States
shared the surrealists’
fascination with the possibility
of automatic drawing as a way to reveal
the unconscious. But recognizing the futility
of eliminating the impact of consciousness,
they shifted their interest from the automatic
to the autographic, exploring the possibilities
of unique hand-painted gesture as a vehicle of
expression. Many of the abstract expressionists
remained interested in psychology, particularly
the work of Carl Jung, which postulated
the existence of archetypal images and types
embedded in a collective unconscious. They
continued to look inward, seeking to make
objective the vision of the mind’s eye, and
they fixed on the notion of the signature autographic
gesture as the carrier of their personal
feelings.
Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of
the Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a 1952
article in The New York Times Magazine that
many artists “feel that their painting is a stubborn,
difficult, even desperate effort to discover
the ‘self’ or ‘reality.’” He summarized
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T H E A M E R I C A N S C H O L A R
Jackson Pollock in 1950 with Lee Krasner, at work on One: Number 31, 1950
PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/HANS NAMUTH
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the ethos with the quip “I paint therefore I
am.” The abstractions that resulted jettisoned
overt representational imagery and became
fields of marks that the artists and supportive
critics deemed embodiments—sometimes
with symbolic or metaphorical resonance—of
ideas and states of mind. Pollock, in works
like Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949 (1949), laid
his canvas on the floor and dribbled swirls of
paint from his brush in overlapping skeins
that resemble neural networks and astronomic
seas. De Kooning, in works like Valentine,
painted gracefully swooping arcs and
interpenetrating shapes that retained allusions
to the topography of the body. Clyfford
Still, as in his January 1951 (1951), created
fields of somber black, midnight blue, red, or
ocher in which patches of other colors suggest
glimpses of hidden worlds. Franz Kline
brushed muscular black swaths on white backgrounds,
as in the Whitney Museum’s Dahlia
(1959). Morris Louis allowed gravity to pull
liquid color down the canvas in diagonal
bands, resulting in paintings like Omega IV
(1959/60). These works—all of which are in
the Beyeler exhibition—do not require the
same sort of looking as representational art.
They send the viewer inward in search of
meaning and, in doing so, they extend the
trajectory of the preceding five centuries of
Western art.
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset, in his brilliant 1925 essay “The Dehumanization
of Art,” posited that the shift in
focus from the observable world to the mind’s
eye was the inexorable course of art since the
Renaissance. After single-point perspective
unified the visual field, baroque art’s thrusting
space projected from the picture plane toward
the eye. The impressionists were less concerned
with describing the contours of objects
and the fullness of space than with the effect
of light as perceived by the retina. The symbolists
passed through the eye to portray
images of the imagination, an approach
extended later by the surrealists. Subjectivity
was further explored through color by the
post-impressionists and expressionists, and the
cubists devised a multi-perspectival means of
presenting objects as seen by the mind over
time. Modernism’s journey into the mind culminated
with various forms of nonobjective
abstraction that either reduced the outer
world to perceived patterns and essences or
abandoned it entirely by turning the gaze
directly inward and producing images of
visionary experience. In this sense, gestural
painting is one of modernism’s purest forms.
The aesthetician Rudolph Arnheim
believed that modernism’s reflexive search is
emblematic of an epistemological revolution.
In his essay “On Inspiration,” which appeared
in ARTnews in 1957, he wrote:
It took the Romantic movement to introduce
the decisive shift that so profoundly
affected our modern thinking—inspiration
is no longer considered to come from
the outside [scripture, the muses, standards
of beauty, etc.] but from the inside,
not from above but from below. . . . In
many ways, this development must please
the psychologists, who have contributed
to putting it on firmer ground. They
helped to redefine these fictitious external
forces as forces of the human mind
itself. They discovered that all human
activities, weighty as well as slight, take
place only partially in the limelight of
consciousness; and they recognized that
the gaps in the observable chain of causes
and effects are filled by complex thought
processes below the level of awareness.
Man’s creative accomplishments must be
attributed to causes inherent somewhere
in man himself.
Abstract expressionism’s leading champion,
the New York critic Clement Greenberg,
acknowledged the difficulty for the public in
appreciating these highly personal works. “The
pictures of some of these Americans startle
because they seem to rely on ungoverned
spontaneity and haphazard effects; or,” he said,
referring to color-field works by Mark Rothko
and Barnett Newman, “because, at the other
extreme, they present surfaces which appear to
be largely devoid of pictorial incident.” But the
abstract expressionist’s individualism was cast
by some commentators as an agent of political
change and seized by the government as an
example of freedom and democracy. In the
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aftermath of the Allied victory in World War II,
and with the European economy and culture
in disarray, America gained a hitherto
unprecedented prominence that the government
exploited. By the 1950s, the U.S. State
Department funded the export of exhibitions
to Europe as a cultural counterpart to the Marshall
Plan. MoMA’s international council,
which shared the government’s opposition to
totalitarianism, sent abstract expressionist
works by Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Still,
Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and
others to eight European cities in 1956. Gestural
abstraction was seen as the product of an
American society that enshrines the rights of
the individual.
A heavily illustrated article about Pollock
published in Life magazine in 1949 went a long
way to convincing the public that the new art
was to be taken seriously. It presented him as
an individualistic American on an artistic
quest. He and fellow abstract expressionists de
Kooning, Kline, and others were hailed as proponents
of personal and social freedom of a
kind not permitted by fascist and communist
totalitarian regimes. New York critic Harold
Rosenberg, who coined the term action painting,
considered the canvas an arena for individual
action; and the unfettered exercise of
freedom in that arena was, he maintained, a
moral imperative. The sculptor David Smith,
whose welded-metal drawings in space were in
some ways a three-dimensional equivalent to
gestural abstraction, maintained that “the freedom
of man’s mind to celebrate his own feeling
by a work of art parallels his social revolt
from bondage.”
But whereas the act of gestural painting
could be construed as political, the works
themselves are devoid of political content. For
Greenberg they were the forefront of the
avant-garde, an aesthetic assessment he based
on Marxist-inspired notions of historical evolution.
Having noted how the illusion of
depth of field diminished from impressionism
to cubism and other forms of abstraction,
he concluded that painting was headed
toward complete flatness. In his 1955 essay
“‘American-Type’ Painting,” he explained this
as a historical necessity that results from each
medium shedding its extrinsic properties. “It
seems to be a law of modernism—thus one
that applies to almost all art that remains truly
alive in our time—that the conventions not
essential to the viability of a medium be discarded
as soon as they are recognized.” Modernist
painting’s essence consists of “flatness
and the delineation of flatness,” he later
wrote, implicitly urging painters to eliminate
representation, illusion, and stage-like depth
of field as the proper province of literature
and theater. He declared that New York
artists, including Pollock, Kline, Still, Rothko,
and Newman, who emerged during and after
the war, were leaders in reducing pictorial art
to its formal basics. Greenberg wrote that
“their works constitute the first manifestation
of American art to draw a standing protest at
home as well as serious attention from
Europe, where, though deplored more often
than praised, they have already influenced an
important part of the avant-garde.”
Once action painting had been accepted as
a viable mode of art making, its practitioners
were no longer regarded as revolutionaries.
History has relegated the second-generation
abstract expressionists—Motherwell, Morris
Louis, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell—to secondary
status, and many others are considered
insignificant academic followers. And
the art historian Meyer Schapiro has observed
that even the work of first-rank abstract
expressionists devolved into repetition. Their
efforts to create a “freely made . . . ordered
world of its own kind” resulted in a concern
for good composition and the development of
a signature style. Their expressive spontaneity
was reduced to a repeatable trademark.
Artists immediately assailed the abstract
expressionist myth: Robert Rauschenberg
erased a de Kooning drawing in 1953, symbolically
negating the integrity and power of
the artist’s touch. Four years later he duplicated
his own AbEx-style painting Factum I
with Factum II—questioning the authenticity of
the spontaneous mark as a vehicle for unique
feeling. Jasper Johns also punctured abstract
expressionist spontaneity by rendering its gestural
brushwork in rigid encaustic. He mocked
the machismo of abstract expressionist brood-
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ing pathos in deadpan works such as Painting
with Two Balls, a painterly canvas stretched
apart in the middle to create a space into
which he inserted two little balls. Frank Stella
replaced the unpredictability of abstract
expressionism by painting rigid geometric
compositions that anticipated minimalism,
and Lynda Benglis poured fluorescent pigments
onto the floor where they solidified in
colorful “frozen gestures.”
Johns demoted the de rigueur autograph
gesture to a means of depicting flags, maps,
and numerals, and Rauschenberg substituted
photographic images gleaned from the media
for gestural brushwork. Their return to recognizable
subject matter presaged the pop
artists’ wholesale embrace of the world of
mass-produced images and products. The language
of art shifted from individualist selfexpression
to a field in which commonly
encountered images were recombined and
explored—a mode of aesthetic inquiry of
greater relevancy and urgency in our mediadrenched
society. Andy Warhol completely
abandoned the personal and symbolically
gave himself over to mass-produced imagery
and mechanical reproduction, establishing a
critical antipode to gestural abstraction. In
the pluralistic mix of styles today, in which
artists borrow and repurpose imagery and
modes of art-making from the past, the relative
values of abstraction and figuration, the
personal and the commonly shared, the handmade
and the mass-produced, are no longer
hotly debated.
In retrospect, the American action painters’
dream of inventing personal means to
express their inner world has profound
poignancy. Each individual’s body, mind, and
set of experiences are unique and inaccessible
to others. But imagine if we could begin to
know the texture and pace of another’s
thoughts and sensations. When artists seek to
relieve the essential solitude of existence they
serve art’s highest function. The action
painters mastered what they held to be unique
forms of self-expression, but their languages
remain little understood by contemporary
audiences. Critics such as Greenberg and
Rosenberg helped to explain the artists’ intent
by situating the work within formalist or social
theories, but we are left with the raw encounter
with the work of art, which even today is not
well understood.
What is clear is that gestural painting can
be interpreted in various ways and relies on
reflection for meaning to emerge. But
abstract art is not a mirror behind which the
artist remains concealed and in which the
spectator contemplates only himself. The
work of art affects the nature of the viewer’s
response, but the secrets of the psychological
and perceptual transfer of emotion and
meaning remain to be unlocked. Can scientists
develop a neurological map for how certain
formal elements affect thoughts and
moods? How can colors, textures, shapes, and
gestures convey emotions and ideas? Is one
spectator’s response consistent with another’s,
and to what degree does any response correspond
with the artist’s intention? These questions
are part of the legacy that the action
painters have bequeathed. v
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Lynda Benglis
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