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INTOLERANCE OF AMBIGUITY #0807/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Paintings: Landscape 2 | | Medium: | Acrylic and beeswax (with black gesso, oilstick, pencil and indian ink) on canvas panel | | Size (inches): | 20 x 16 | | Size (mm): | 508 x 406 | | Catalog #: | PA_0128 | | Description: | Signed, titled, date, copyright in magic ink on the reverse.
Barnett Newman’s life in 1948 -
Newman paints Onement I. He comes to view this painting as a major breakthrough, and the next two years are the most productive of his career.
In June, a painting by Newman is included in the group show Survey of the Season at the Betty Parsons Gallery.
Early in the fall, William Baziotes, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko establish a cooperative art school at 35 East Eighth Street. Newman suggests the name for the school, “Subjects of the Artist,” in order to emphasize the importance of subject matter in abstract art.
Newman’s essay “The Sublime Is Now” appears in the December issue of The Tiger’s Eye. In response to the question “What is sublime in art?” Newman writes: “I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.”
-www.barnettnewman.org/chronology.php
"Rebel Painters of the 1950s"
In the years following the end of World War II, a small group of American painters living in New York seized the spotlight of artistic innovation--which for the past century had focused primarily on Paris--and rose to preeminence in the national and international art world. "Rebel Painters of the 1950s" highlights those artists--among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still_who challenged the aesthetic establishment and created the style of painting known today as Abstract Expressionism. In addition to these individuals and other artists in their circle who comprised the first generation of the New York School, "Rebel Painters of the 1950s" also provides portraits of the critics and writers, notably Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Thomas Hess, who articulated the significance of this artistic movement, 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," and the "New York School" are phrases often used synonymously, although for most scholars and the public, Abstract Expressionism remains the most convenient and instantly recognizable umbrella under which to discuss the collective qualities of advanced American art at the midpoint of the twentieth century. Moreover, while the artists subsequently labeled Abstract Expressionists frequently resisted categorization and often stressed the philosophical and formal distinctions among themselves, there is nevertheless a consensus among scholars that Abstract Expressionism was a cohesive intellectual and artistic experience. It possessed a geographical center--New York; the individuals affiliated with it knew each other and frequently interacted; and, most important, they shared a common approach to making art, even though the appearance of their paintings varied widely, from the intensely gestural to the highly restrained.
Those associated with Abstract Expressionism were linked by their rejection of both social realism and geometric abstraction, two dominant strains in American art in the 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 of intangible ideas and experiences. For some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, the subject of art was autobiographical and emerged from the sheer act of making a painting. For others, among them Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, the motivation was a search for the sublime. Yet for all, as Mark Rothko eloquently postulated, "art was not about an experience, but was itself the experience." As with the poets of the period who challenged accepted literary standards to envelop their personal experiences within new formats, the painters of the 1950s created unique and distinctive images by merging their private states of imagination and feeling with innovative compositional structures.
The social milieu in which Abstract Expressionism emerged had its roots in the friendships formed in Depression-era New York. The intricate web of relationships that developed as each artist came to town suggests that New York functioned, for those involved in defining avant-garde American art, more like a small town than America's largest city. For instance, Dutch-born Willem de Kooning, who moved to New York in 1927, befriended Armenian-born Arshile Gorky in 1930-1931; Russian-born but American-raised Mark Rothko in 1934; Philip Guston and Barnett Newman in 1937; and Franz Kline in 1939-1940. The experience of Wyoming-born Jackson Pollock, who arrived 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 American avant-garde accelerated in 1941, when he was introduced to Lee Krasner, whom he married 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-bred Roberto Matta Echaurren (Motherwell and Matta had met on a trip to Mexico in the summer of 1941), while Motherwell, who moved to New York in 1940, met Hofmann and de Kooning through Pollock. Adolph Gottlieb's friendship with Barnett Newman dates to 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 Francisco in 1943. Philip Guston and Pollock had known each other since high school in the late 1920s in Los Angeles. A pivotal person in this matrix of friendship and ideas was also Russian-‚migr‚ philosopher and painter John Graham, a charismatic promoter of avant-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 became Abstract Expressionists and the European Surrealists, such as Matta, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Andr‚ Masson, and Andr‚ Breton, who were living in exile in America during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The friendships and camaraderie among the Abstract Expressionists were reinforced by the proximity of their various studios. In the 1940s, the Hans Hofmann school was at 52 West Eighth Street, while Pollock maintained a studio at 46 East Eighth Street. De Kooning's studio was on West Twenty-second Street, Kline's was on West Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and the more peripatetic Mark Rothko was at one time located on Twenty-eighth Street near Fifth Avenue. Philip Guston joined the crowd in 1950, first with a studio on Thirteenth Street (shared with Bradley Walker Tomlin) and then with one at 51 West Tenth Street. Among the exceptions 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 informal gathering places for the artists living downtown. The most notorious of these was the Cedar Street Tavern on University Place near West Eighth Street. The desire to maintain professional contact, as well as to proselytize, led Motherwell, Rothko, and William Baziotes (together with sculptor David Hare) to establish the Subjects of the Artist school in 1948 at 35 East Eighth Street. While short-lived, it nevertheless provided the impetus for Studio 35 (in the same location), where, before it closed in 1950, de Kooning, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko, and critic Harold Rosenberg lectured on art. The continuing need among the Abstract Expressionists for a place to talk about art also led in 1949 to the founding of the Club, which met in a rented loft at 39 East Eighth Street. Kline, de Kooning, and Reinhardt were among the initial members, who ultimately included Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, and Rosenberg, among others. Not limited to a discussion of painting, the Club also featured presentations by the leading New 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 further when, in May 1950, eighteen artists signed a letter protesting the conservative jury for a forthcoming exhibition of contemporary American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The evolution of Abstract Expressionism is akin to a bell curve. It began with a small cluster of random and seemingly insignificant events during the early 1940s, then grew to a crescendo of more coherent, concerted activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its demise was marked by both perceptible and imperceptible incidents, not the least of which was Jackson Pollock's death in 1956. In addition to the friendships formed in New York in the 1930s and 1940s and the interaction with the various European artists and writers living in America--which were crucial to the intellectual and stylistic development of Abstract Expressionism--group solidarity and a degree of public and professional visibility were achieved when several of these artists began to exhibit their work 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 de Kooning, Kline, Rothko, and Still appeared in subsequent years. A careful reader of the New York Times might have noticed a letter written in June 1943, with the assistance of Newman but signed by Gottlieb and Rothko, championing a new kind of art, or heard an October radio broadcast reiterating this point of view. These bellwethers were reinforced among the intelligentsia with reviews of advanced art by critic Clement Greenberg, first in Partisan Review and then in The Nation.
By the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism possessed a significant matrix of intellectual ideas, a coherent body of mature work by numerous artists, venues for public display, and meaningful critical reviews. Ironically, however, the peak years of Abstract Expressionism began shortly after Peggy Guggenheim closed her gallery in 1947. But her departure from the American art scene also served to open the way for a new generation of dealers, among them Betty Parsons, Charles Egan, Samuel Kootz, and subsequently Sidney Janis, to lay claim both to her stable of artists and to her reputation for presenting avant-garde art. Tragically, this also coincided with the suicide of Arshile Gorky in July 1948. The termination of Gorky's career led many identified with Abstract Expressionism to see the work in his last exhibition, held at the Julien Levy Gallery in February 1948, as an indication of how far each of them, in his own way, had come toward 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 by the growing number of publications that highlighted the work of these artists. The end of this decade saw the emergence of little magazines, such as Possibilities I and The Tiger's Eye, which contained statements by the Abstract Expressionists and illustrations of their work. In 1948 Thomas Hess was appointed editor of Art News, and under his direction, this magazine, widely read by a broad group of art professionals and interested amateurs, featured numerous articles on the Abstract Expressionists. Life magazine's August 8, 1949, article on Pollock spawned the notion that artists of this generation made interesting copy, and throughout the early 1950s, the popular press, including Life, Time, Look, and Vogue, increasingly featured the artists affiliated with Abstract Expressionism. Although by the early 1950s most of the Abstract Expressionists had developed their signature styles, Harold Rosenberg's December 1952 essay "The Action Painters," in Art News, nevertheless dispensed additional credibility, for it provided the artists and their patrons the verbal framework with which to articulate the philosophical underpinnings and significance of this new style.
The acknowledged leaders among the painters identified with Abstract Expressionism were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. While the two professed friendship, they remained lifelong rivals. Initially Pollock, because of his one-man shows beginning in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, received the greater public and critical attention. Clement Greenberg was an early supporter, and in an April 1945 essay in The Nation, he declared Pollock "the strongest painter of his generation, and perhaps the greatest . . . since Mir¢." In August 1949 Life magazine adapted this phrase for its caption heading its Pollock story. While Life's article was a mixture of adulation and irony, it nevertheless catapulted Pollock into the realm of public awareness, unlike any other artist of his generation. Indeed, Pollock bridged the gap between high art and popular culture, providing the model of stardom that has remained central to the American art world for the past half-century.
De Kooning began participating in group exhibitions as early as 1942, but his first solo show, at Charles Egan's gallery, did not occur until April 1948. Although critic Harold Rosenberg ultimately became de Kooning's great champion, initially it was Greenberg 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." De Kooning's important series of paintings of women in the early 1950s enhanced his distinction among his artistic peers and furthered his visibility in the popular press, but it was not until after Pollock's death that his role as the foremost artist of this generation was assured. When de Kooning opened his show at the Sidney Janis Gallery on May 5, 1959, Time confirmed his celebrity status, reporting that a line had formed by 8:15 a.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 accident ended Jackson Pollock's life. While the remaining Abstract Expressionists continued to paint, exhibit frequently, and receive favorable critical attention (not to mention increasing prices for their work), in retrospect it is apparent that by the mid-to-late 1950s, their aesthetic leadership, albeit not their public popularity, was on the wane. By that time, a new generation of artists was beginning to emerge, one that would seek its artistic identity outside the philosophical and stylistic premises of Abstract Expressionism.
But even as the artists of the following generation struggled to create their own history, 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 to prominence, they still capture the imagination of American artists, art historians, and the public. 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 artists and their lives have taken on mythic status. Thus while advanced art in the latter half of the twentieth century has appeared in numerous guises, much of it antithetical to Abstract Expressionism, it has nevertheless been made by artists who have sought to emulate the adventurousness and aesthetic risk-taking that made the Abstract Expressionists the leaders, in their time, of the international avant-garde.
Carolyn Kinder Carr
Deputy Director, National Portrait Gallery
Curator of the Exhibition
-www.npg.si.edu/exh/rebels/painters.htm
Greenwich Village and the Arts
New York City's Greenwich Village—bordered roughly by Fourteenth Street on the north, by the Hudson River on the west, by Broadway on the east, and by Houston Street on the south—has long been a fertile spawning ground for the arts. New York University and its art galleries have played key roles in this illustrious history. Art arrived in the Village in 1832, the year Samuel F. B. Morse, the first professor of painting and sculpture in America, took up his post at the fledgling NYU campus. Three years later he acquired studio space for himself and his students in the newly-built neo-Gothic University Building (demolished in 1894 to make way for the present Silver Center, home of the Grey Art Gallery). Better-known today as the inventor of the telegraph, Morse was also a founder and the first president of the National Academy of Design, then the most important professional artists' organization in America, which sponsored an art school and organized frequent public exhibitions of work by its members.
By the 1850s the Village was a lively art colony, attracting many art schools, private galleries, and clubs, as well as artists' studios. Chief among them was the National Academy, whose headquarters were then located in Village, first at No. 663 Broadway near Bleecker, then at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street. From 1852 to 1857 the Century Association, an elite private club catering to New York's leading painters, sculptors, architects, and writers, was housed at No. 46 East Eighth Street (formerly No. 24 Clinton Place). In 1857 the Tenth Street Studio Building, which has been described as "the catalyst most responsible for transforming Greenwich Village into a hub for the visual arts," was erected at No. 15 (later No. 51), near Sixth Avenue. Commissioned by the builder James Boorman Johnston (the son of John Johnston, a wealthy merchant who was among the founders of NYU), it was the first purpose-built artists' quarters in America. Among its early tenants were many Hudson River School painters and members of the National Academy, including Frederic Church, John La Farge, and Albert Bierstadt. Three years later Cooper Union, "dedicated to the advancement of science and art," opened its doors on Astor Place, at the western edge of the East Village.
With increased economic prosperity after the Civil War, the American art scene burgeoned. One of the most important private picture galleries in the Village belonged to Robert Boorman Johnston's brother, John Taylor Johnston. In 1870 he and a group of friends met there to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Johnson as its first president. After opening briefly in temporary quarters, the museum was transferred in 1873 to No. 126 West 14th Street, where it remained until 1879, when it moved to its present home uptown. Meanwhile, in 1877, across the street from the Studio Building, local artists formed the Tile Club, an informal association of artists, architects, and musicians who met on a regular basis at No. 58-1/2 West Tenth Street (a small cottage in the garden behind the structure that now houses NYU's Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs); among the Tilers were the painters Winslow Homer, Edwin Austin Abbey, and John Twachtman; the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; and the architect Stanford White. In addition to painting on ceramic tiles, the Tilers hosted convivial suppers and sponsored occasional sketching jaunts into the countryside.
Numerous artists rented studios in NYU buildings during the postbellum years: tenants of the old University Building (on the future site of the Silver Center, the Grey Art Gallery's home) included Homer, Eastman Johnson, and George Inness. In 1872 Homer moved to the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he was later joined by William Merritt Chase, who appropriated the skylit central court as his private domain and filled it with opulent fabrics, objets d'art, and bric-a-brac that did double duty as the setting for many of his paintings and as a backdrop for art classes, sales, and exhibitions, as well as for meetings of the Society of American Artists, the Art Club, and the Society of American Painters in Pastel.
Around the turn of the century, many of the older buildings along Washington Square South were converted into inexpensive rooming houses or demolished to make way for the tenements that accommodated the large influx of Italian, German, and Irish immigrants into the neighborhood. With their proximity to the art scene, low rents, ethnic diversity, and picturesque surroundings, these residences attracted a new generation of struggling young artists. The Village soon developed its present-day reputation as a bohemian enclave, tolerant of political radicalism and social nonconformity, and as a nurturing milieu for numerous little magazines, avant-garde art galleries, literary and artistic salons, and experimental theaters. In the pages of the leftist The Masses magazine, whose offices were located at No. 91 Greenwich Avenue, appeared drawings by John Sloan, Robert Henri, William Glackens, and George Bellows; the elegant Dial, edited at No. 152 West 13th Street, reproduced works by European modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Henri Matisse.
In 1907 the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, one of the city's wealthiest heiresses, took a studio at No. 19 (now No. 17-1/2) MacDougal Alley and began to collect works by contemporary American artists. Especially drawn to modern-life subjects, she concentrated her attention on the work of the Ash Can School, which comprised Henri, Sloan, Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn; in 1908 they joined with three lyrical painters, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur B. Davies, and exhibited together as The Eight. Whitney soon became one of the foremost champions of contemporary American art, enlarging her focus to include works by Bellows, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and many others. In 1912 she broke through the rear wall of her workrooms into No. 8 West Eighth Street, which she dubbed the Whitney Studio and where she soon began to present exhibitions. Six years later, in a brownstone at No. 147 West Fourth Street, off Washington Square, she established the Whitney Studio Club as a gathering place for artists, furnishing it with a reference library, a billiard table, and a sketching studio. In 1931 the Whitney Studio annexed two neighboring row houses on Eighth Street and was renamed the Whitney Museum of American Art, which remained in the Village until its move uptown in 1954. The Whitney's former Eighth Street space is now occupied by the New York Studio School.
Nearby, in an apartment on the second floor of No. 23 Fifth Avenue, beginning in 1913, Mabel Dodge hosted weekly salons for neighborhood intellectuals. Her guests debated the controversial topics of the day: socialism, workers' rights, sexuality, free love, and psychoanalysis; the artists among them included Sloan, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley. That same year, both Dodge and Whitney were among the sponsors of the infamous Armory Show, which took place on Lexington Avenue thirteen blocks north of the Village, and whose organizers also included members of The Eight. In addition to contemporary American art, the Armory Show included paintings and sculptures by avant-garde European artists such as Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, and Seurat, as well as Marcel Duchamp's dynamic cubist composition, Nude Descending a Staircase. The impact of this massive compilation of international modernism—more than 1,300 works were shown—exploded like a bomb in the midst of the New York art world, which would never be the same.
The first museum in the U.S. devoted exclusively to modern art opened at NYU in 1927, when A. E. Gallatin, a prominent art collector and great-grandson of a founder of NYU, established the Gallery of Living Art in the Main Building, in the space now occupied by the Grey Art Gallery. There, in a converted study hall, Gallatin exhibited works by Picasso, Braque, Mirò, Léger, and other European modernists, as well as by artists associated with the American Abstract Artists group. Removed in 1943 as a wartime measure, the Gallatin collection was eventually donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and became the nucleus of their department of twentieth-century art.
After the Second World War, the Village served as the hub of the Beat Movement, which congregated in its coffeehouses, jazz clubs, and poetry readings. In 1948 a group of artists began to meet at No. 35 East Eighth Street (they later moved down the block to No. 39) for a weekly series of lectures, panel discussions, and conversations that became known as The Club. Members included most of the painters who came to be known as Abstract Expressionists, including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. The same artists also frequented a more informal hangout, the Cedar Tavern, a seedy bar at No. 24 University Place between Eighth and Ninth Streets. Many of the Abstract Expressionists lived in the East Village, in and around Tenth Street, where galleries sprang up to market their work. From the later 1950s the Judson Church on Washington Square South hosted avant-garde concerts as well as exhibitions by Pop artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine. Allan Kaprow presented New York's first "Happening" at the church in 1958.
Early in the 1960s artists began abandoning the East Village and moving into the neglected commercial lofts of the cast-iron district south of Houston Street, known as SoHo, where large, airy spaces suitable for studios were available at low rents. There they formed political organizations such as the Art Workers Coalition; attracted commercial galleries, including Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, Mary Boone, and Holly Solomon; and formed alternative spaces such as 112 Greene, the Kitchen, Artists Space, the Clocktower, the Alternative Museum, and Franklin Furnace. In 1974 Abbey Weed Grey established the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center at NYU, and in 1978 it opened its doors in the Main Building at 100 Washington Square East, just a few blocks above the northern border of SoHo. Over the past two decades, SoHo's dynamic art scene has attracted numerous other non-profit galleries and museums, such as the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Drawing Center, the Museum for African Art, and the Guggenheim SoHo.
Around 1980, as SoHo became increasingly commercialized and rents increased, young artists gravitated to the East Village. In tiny storefronts in dilapidated tenements, new galleries opened to show their art, which was often inspired by the street life around them, with its advertising billboards and graffiti. But with the plunge of the stock market in the late 1980s and the consequent decline in the art market, East Village galleries either closed or moved to SoHo. Although recently many major SoHo galleries have relocated to Chelsea in search of lower rents, larger spaces, and a less-commercialized atmosphere, SoHo remains a major part of New York's contemporary art world, continuing the story that began in neighboring Greenwich Village more than a century and a half ago.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Beard, Rick, and Leslie Berlowitz, eds. Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press for the Museum of the City of New York, 1993.
Berman, Avis. Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
Blaugrund, Annette. The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists. Southampton, N.Y.: Parrish Art Museum, 1997.
Cantor, Mindy, ed. Around the Square, 1830–1890: Essays on Life, Letters, and Architecture in Greenwich Village. New York: New York University Press, 1982.
Miller, Terry. Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way. New York: Crown Publishers, 1990.
-www.nyu.edu/greyart/information/Greenwich_Village/
body_greenwich_village.html
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