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WD_462/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 40.2 x 25.2 | | Size (mm): | 1020 x 640 | | Catalog #: | WD_0462 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Cedar Tavern -
The Cedar Tavern (or Cedar Street Tavern) was a bar and restaurant in New York City last at 82 University Place between 11th and 12th Streets. It was famous as a former hangout of many prominent Abstract Expressionist painters and beat writers. The establishment was located at 24 University Place in its heyday, but closed in April 1963 and reopened three blocks north in 1964 in a more upscale pub style.
The Cedar Tavern was opened in 1866 on Cedar Street.[1] In 1933 it moved to 55 West Eight Street, and in 1945 it moved to 24 University Place.[2] Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Michael Goldberg, and others of the New York School all patronized the bar in the 1950s when they lived in Greenwich Village. Historians consider it an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It was also popular with writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, and LeRoi Jones. Pollock was eventually banned from the establishment for kicking in the men's room door, as was Kerouac, who allegedly urinated in an ashtray.
In 1955 the Cedar Tavern was purchased by Sam Diliberto, a butcher, and his brother in law, John Bodnar, a window washer, from Joe Provenzano.[3] Robert Motherwell had a studio nearby in the early 50's, and he held a weekly salon for artists there. The Cedar was the closest place for them to have a drink afterwards. Pollock, DeKooning, Kline, Aristodemis Kaldis, Phillip Guston, Al Leslie and the others liked it for its cheap drinks and lack of tourists or middle-class squares. Univ. Place in those days was downmarket and dangerous because of the several welfare and single-room occupancy hotels in the area; muggings were common. Sam and John looked to the East Village around St. Mark's Pl. to reopen when the building was sold and demolished in 1963. After a year they bought the building at 82 Univ. Pl., which had been occupied by an antique store, and built the new bar in a more upscale pub style. By this time Pollock and Kline were gone, DeKooning was abstaining from alcohol, and the scene never revived.
In the 1960s Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs, David Amram, and occasionally Bob Dylan, were known to patronize the Cedar Tavern. D.A. Pennebaker, Dylan, and Bob Neuwirth met there to plan the shooting of Dont Look Back. [4]
The old site, where most of the significant events in the establishment's history occurred, is now a woman's clothing store.
Diliberto's sons Mike and Joe ran the place successfully for many years until the 2006, when they decided to develop the site into condominiums. In December 2006, the Cedar Tavern closed to allow for the construction of a seven-story addition to the building in which it is housed. Its owners had pledged to reopen in six months, but an opinion piece in the December 3, 2006 edition of The New York Times speculated that it may have closed for good. This proved presicient; in the wake of Joe Diliberto's death on Oct. 27, 2007, his brother Mike lost interest in reopening the establishment.[5]
References:
1. ^ Pastorek, Whitney. "My New York Haunt", New York Times, December 3, 2006.[1]
2. ^ Lieber, Edvard. Willem De Kooning: Reflections in the Studio, Abrams:2000, pg. 127.
3. ^ Jeff Klein, Best Bars of New York, 2006
4. ^ Spitz, Robert. Dylan: A Biography.
5. ^ The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Tavern
Action men -
The abstract expressionists tackled the big themes - life, death, history. But were they the haughty windbags they often seem? By Jonathan Jones
The Cedar Tavern near Union Square in New York City is a big disappointment. It was once the unofficial club of some of the greatest painters of the 20th century, the abstract expressionists. This was the place where they rowed, rioted and heckled each other. "I will tell you a story about de Kooning," Lee Krasner, the painter and widow of Jackson Pollock, reminisced once. "Jackson and he were standing at the Cedar bar, drinking. They started to argue and de Kooning punched him. There was a crowd around them and some of them started to egg Jackson on to hit de Kooning back..."
Trying to start a drunken brawl here today would be a thankless affair. The place is more like Cheers than an infamous artists' hangout. And there are not even old photographs of brooding painters to tell you what made the bar's name famous.
There is no abstract expressionist tourist industry. You won't find a Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Gorky, Still or Newman cafe, or encounter tour groups on the abstract expressionist trail. Sometimes it's as if the city's most significant art movement never existed - indeed it can even be hard to find the paintings. Manhattan museums have their Tate-style rehangs, and curators love to iconoclastically shove those big macho paintings in the cellar to make way for, say, a slide show by Nan Goldin.
The American art world has been trying to live down abstract expressionism for four decades now. Each generation in turn has defined itself against the patriarchs who made New York synonymous with modern painting in the 1940s and 50s. It was all very well for the young Andy Warhol to feel intimidated by "the painters who used to hang around the Cedar bar... hard-driving, two-fisted types who'd grab each other and say things like: 'I'll knock your fucking teeth out,' " but nearly half a century on, still to be whining about the authoritarian father figures of modern American art is pathetic. It's a symptom of decline, and a historical falsehood.
A mythified history of art since 1960 has it that everything we now recognise as contemporary began as a reaction against the abstract expressionists. They made big, severe, oh-so-serious paintings, the story goes, while their critical champion Clement Greenberg laid down the law with his creed of "opticality" and phallic "verticality". The modernism they preached was a pompous, emotive dramatisation of American spiritual freedom, ideally suited to the paranoid mentality of the cold war. Some historians will even tell you that Rothko and co were working for the government, their international prestige manipulated by CIA-instigated touring exhibitions. And then, from the middle of the 1950s, a younger generation of American artists came along with art that was playful, emotionally cool, ironic, starting with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, then Pop and minimalism, the two escape routes from the prison of modernist despair.
None of it is true. This abstract expressionist behemoth is a caricature of some of the most sensitive, unaggressive paintings that exist. There is nothing gentler, lighter, more moving than the fluent oversize strokes of a 1950s Willem de Kooning, nothing more honest and self-exposing than the sexuality - intense and paranoid, and therefore real - of his Woman paintings. And in de Kooning's Easter Monday, a wonderfully sensuous smearing of pinks, greys, whites in New York's Metropolitan Museum, what are those grey letters peeping through the paint? Newspaper clippings.
Abstract expressionism ain't so abstract. Made by hard-headed New Yorkers, it has a worldly, gritty, polemical robustness. Nor is it abstract in a religious way, in the way Mondrian, Malevich or Kandinsky are. Clement Greenberg's criticism is perhaps the best ever written on abstract art precisely because it contains no spiritual poesie, no inflated romantic proclamations. On the contrary, in his early writings Greenberg describes abstract art as a tactical move, one he doesn't advocate for all time but for the specific historical moment of the 1940s. "The imperative comes from history," he writes in his classic essay Towards a Newer Laocoon, published in 1940. The history he means is both social and aesthetic. When he wrote this, Greenberg was a Trotskyist.
Most of the artists about to emerge as abstract expressionists were on the breadline during the Depression, only surviving because of Roosevelt's Federal Artists' Project. The FDA went beyond welfare; it was intended to provided public artworks - murals, such as Arshile Gorky's sadly vanished decorations at Newark airport. The mural was a populist genre of public painting whose most famous practitioner in the 1930s was the Mexican Marxist Diego Rivera. The mural was a perfect art for New York, on a skyscraper scale.
Rivera's mural in the lobby of the Rockefeller Centre was erased because it centred on a portrait of Lenin, but you can still see 1930s murals in Manhattan - in the New York Public Library, in the gilded lobbies of Radio City Music Hall. It was the public art of the mural that gave birth to abstract expressionism.
In 1943 the collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim hired a young, unproven artist to paint a mural for her house. Pollock's painting, on a long canvas rather than the wall itself, is called simply Mural. It creates a boldly repetitive movement as of marching figures. It might be a mad dance, a preening strut. But what matters is your relationship to it. An abstract expressionist painting adopts a special kind of relationship with its viewer. "Viewer" is the wrong word, suggesting that the painting is a fixed object, a framed painting in the European Old Master manner - "easel paintings", Greenberg enjoyed calling them. "I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern painting is towards the wall picture or mural," declared Pollock in an unsuccessful grant application, apparently written with his friend Greenberg at his shoulder.
The paintings of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman feel as if they could go on for ever. This is not just about size - though the sheer scale of a painting such as Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, coming to Tate Modern, is crudely stunning, like a cinemascope epic, the Latin title making you think of Spartacus. These paintings are not framed, either literally or imaginatively. They confront you not as "works" but as facts, almost as other people. Rothko talked of his works as living, breathing presences.
They are not the only paintings that challenge you like this. Greenberg, in Towards a Newer Laocoon, mentions the enduring power of Rembrandt. In the Metropolitan Museum it takes about 15 minutes to get from the Rothkos to the Rembrandts. Rembrandt's portraits come at you out of the dark and connect you, uncannily, with their subjects, conveying, through a process of abstraction, the inner presence of a person. Rothko's paintings are presences in the same way. They are states of mind hovering before you. A Rothko lures you with lovely colour - orange, pink, red - into a space as strange and real as the chiaroscuro realm in which Aristotle contemplates a bust of Homer in the Met's greatest Rembrandt.
You encounter these paintings, they want to have a conversation - not relaxed small talk but discourse on the big questions. Some people's instinct - everyone's, when not in the mood - is to walk away. But this sense of being on your mettle, of being expected to respond and participate, to rise to the occasion, is what the most serious art has demanded since the Renaissance. The call of abstract expressionism is like that of history paintings - David's Oath of the Horatii or The Death of Marat. It's something we associate with public art. And that is because abstract expressionism is rooted in the political art of the Depression.
The novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote that in postwar America the Depression went inside; in the heart of affluence, in the bowels of empire, there was a cold iron knot, the memory of the 1930s. This is what the art of the abstract expressionists is like. They were too old to really enjoy the wealth and glamour of New York in the 1940s and 50s. Their emotional lives were formed in the garrets and on the picket lines of the 1930s. Some of their memories went even deeper into 20th-century anguish. As a child Arshile Gorky escaped, narrowly, from the Turkish genocide of Armenians; his mother starved to death. Rothko's family emigrated from an anti-semitic Russia.
Abstract expressionism is an art that faces up to history. It's so easy to see the Holocaust and Hiroshima in these paintings that it can seem pat - but it's there. Newman said he and his generation knew "the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. The terror has indeed become as real as life." Diego Rivera's murals belong now to a dead past of ideology, but abstract expressionism addresses a history that is tragic - without being closed or final. It does not tell us history is over or hopeless, but that it matters, that action matters. "Action painting" - an art that romanticises action.
And an art that sees itself in the biggest, most arrogant terms. When Rothko was planning murals for the Four Seasons restaurant, now in Tate Modern, he took a trip to Italy, to Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence, and to Pompeii, where he was deeply affected by the Villa of the Mysteries with its narrow corridors painted black and purple. He finally reached the sublime ancient Greek city of Paestum, which has haunted art ever since the temples were depicted by Piranesi. Some tourists asked him if he was going to paint the Temple of Neptune. "I have been painting Greek temples all my life without knowing it," said Rothko.
Couldn't he have made a joke or something? Instead he had to make exactly the kind of pompous, self-aggrandising speech that turns us off abstract expressionism. But when you sit in the Rothko room at Tate Modern surrounded by those low-feeling, end-of-consciousness, nocturnal paintings, the experience you can have, if you want, is of a kind that does indeed reach back to the earliest, most innocent art. When we get all ironic and postmodern about the abstract expressionists (as some people certainly will when the Barnett Newman exhibition opens), when we caricature them as lofty windbags, what we really want to laugh out of the picture is history. As Newman said, they knew "the terror to expect".
Wednesday September 11 2002.
© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited
-www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/sep/11/
artsfeatures.highereducation#article_continue
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