Abstract Expressionism Hits the Bull’s Eye

 

 

 

 

This is the Tate website glossary’s definition: “Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s, often characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity.”

Wikipedia helpfully adds: “The movement’s name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.”

The movement – if it was a movement – was christened in 1946 by the critic Robert Coates, applying it for the first time to American art, though Wikipedia points out that the same term was used in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, in connection with German expressionism, and that Alfred Barr used it in 1929, applying it to work by Kandinsky. There’s seldom been much disagreement about what is meant by “abstract” (though a great painter such as Howard Hodgkin still has the adjective misapplied to him), and the conundrum, such as it is, rests on the application of the noun “expressionism.” We no longer have any problem appreciating that emotion can be expressed in non-representational art, but it doesn’t take too much historical imagination to see why Americans brought up on a pictorial diet of Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell, or even Edward Hopper, might find it difficult at first to feel the rage or ecstasy in a Pollock or Rothko painting.

So many years have passed since its heyday that we are no longer much hung up on the defining properties of Abstract Expressionism or, happily, on the question of which artists qualify as Abstract Expressionists. Moreover, the passage of time means that there is even some degree of agreement about quality – so we pretty much agree which artists ought to be included in an AE show, and which of their works are their best ones.

Perhaps that is why the current show at the Royal Academy is such a major event. The Financial Time’s fine critic, Jackie Wullschlager, goes so far as to say that it is “the most pleasurable, provocative exhibition of American art in Britain this century.” And it is almost true that, apart from a couple of Jackson Pollock works, which are impossible to move from the walls on which they permanently reside, the RA exhibition omits few of the glories of AE.

In the courtyard of the RA you see some attention-grabbing sculptures by David Smith, a generous clue about what’s to come. The show hangs in one of the world’s great exhibition spaces, the main galleries of the Royal Academy, and when you walk into the first room, with its riveting group of self-portraits surrounded by Arshile Gorky paintings (including three great ones loaned by MoMA), and then walk into the next room of vast Pollock canvases, you know you are having an unrepeatable experience. Indeed, Pollock’s 20-foot “Mural,” painted on the floor of Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment, faces his last great work, “Blue Poles” (which twinkles with glass shards incorporated from turkey basters, I believe), that has been loaned by the National Gallery of Australia. The installation is cunning. If you stand midway between these two trophy Pollocks, at a right angle you see through the doorway to another gallery, on the wall of which hangs “The Eye is the First Circle” 1960 by his widow, Lee Krasner. It is an homage to “Mural,” but the startling colours of the Pollock are muted in the Krasner, to the point where it seems to be painted in in rich shades of brown and black – and the story is that it signals her acceptance of her alcoholic husband’s untimely death in a car crash.

(I was excited to see the half-dozen Krasners in this show, especially her telling self-portrait 1931-33, before she knew Pollock. I am writing this in the room where she sat when visiting us, on the occasion of a show at what was then called Museum of Modern Art Oxford, in the 1970s, when its director was the young Nick Serota.)

Another brilliant hang is placing the assembly of Rothkos in the rotunda – they are a bit closer to each other than the collection in the dedicated room at the Tate, but the wall panels say this closer hanging was actually sanctioned by the artist. The pictures include some bright ones with violet and orange hues, so the experience of seeing them all together is excitingly different from the prayerful hush of the Tate.

The major spaces are given to these painters, with a sculpture by David Smith in the middle of most of the rooms, and to Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning (a spectacular gallery), Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. Less prominent figures such as Adolph Gottlieb are not neglected, and Robert Motherwell makes quite a good showing. One glaring error, I think, is the inclusion of only a single picture by Helen Frankenthaler. “Europa” 1957, in which large areas of the canvas are stained with the paint, in more or less the opposite of Pollock’s technique, is such a knockout that you’d have thought the curators, David Anfam and Edith Devaney, would have begged or borrowed as many Frankenthalers as they could.

The colour reproductions in the heavyweight catalogue are not perfect, and David Anfam’s turgid but informative prose, is compensated for by Jeremy Lewison’s essay, which deals with the question of the CIA financing the dissemination of American culture via Abstract Expressionism. (It was, after all, the time when the CIA was subsidising Encounter magazine, and toying with Left-ish organisations of all kinds. I myself had a cheque in the early 60s from one of the CIA-front foundations. Of course I only learned this years later – and it was only the repayment of a small loan I had made to a cooperative bookstore. But anyone even tangentially involved with the arts in 1960s America probably had a similar experience.)

There can only be minor carping about this landmark show, which will be remembered in history books as the exhibition that brought to London some of the greatest works by some of the greatest painters (and one great sculptor) of the 20^th century. In February it moves to the Guggenheim, Bilbao. I’d love to see what it looks like there.

 

At the RA, London until 2 January 2017