AMERICAN-TYPE PAINTING. CLEMENT GREENBERG. 1955

Greenberg. C. ‘American-Type Painting’.  1955

The website http://www.theartstory.org/critics-greenberg-rosenberg.htm presents a comparison of two art critics: Harold Rosenberg (1906 – 1978), and Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994).  Both men provided essential contributions to Abstract Expressionism. 

The website describes ‘The American Action Painters’ of 1952 as one of Rosenberg’s key essays.  This essay is summarised in the blog entry of 22^nd September 2014. 

The website describes ‘American-Type Painting’ of 1955 as one of Greenberg’s key essays.  This is a summary of Greenberg’s essay ‘American-Type Painting.’

The website states that the essay was first published in ‘Partisan Review’ in 1955 and that ‘in some respects it was prompted by Greenberg’s desire to counter the increasing popularity of the ideas that Rosenberg launched in 1952 with ‘The American Action Painters’.

Greenberg. C. ‘American-Type Painting’.  1955

Many people who accept abstraction are offended by current abstract works. 

Evolution in art, literature and music may be described as a process of the isolation and detachment of ‘expendable conventions’.  This is an essential process for the survival of art in modern society.  In literature modernisation has stopped because it possessed fewer ‘expendable conventions’.  In music the ‘expendable conventions’ were isolated early and thus evolution has slowed.  In painting the ‘expendable conventions’ may still be attacked without threating painting’s viability as an art form: this attack particularly occurs in the United States of America.

Since about 1943 painters in New York have formed a school known as ‘abstract expressionists’ and ‘action painters’, and the style is known in London as ‘American-Type Painting’.

Abstract expressionism has been the first American style to provoke outrage and serious attention in the USA and abroad, and be acknowledged with approval by the avant garde in Paris.

The spontaneity of abstract expressionist paintings can be startling.  The good works are those that show the artist has adopted ‘a severer discipline than can be found elsewhere in contemporary painting’. 

The art of a preceding period must be absorbed if significant art is to be made in the future. 

Klee and Miro were understood in the USA in advance of Paris.  Matisse remained in the forefront in New York thanks to Avery and Hofmann but he was allowed to be forgotten elsewhere.  Other artists whose works remained prominent in New York prior to 1943 were Picasso, Leger, Mondrian and Kandinsky.  Thus, American artists were ‘fully abreast of their times’. 

Other factors that were seminal for American painters who came to the fore in New York in the mid-1940s were: the WPA Art Project in the late 1930s; the ‘sophisticated audience for adventurous art provided by the students of Hans Hofmann’; and the presence in the USA during the Second World War of European artists including Mondrian, Masson, Leger, Chagall, Ernst and Lipchitz.

Abstract expressionist painters have French painting as their starting point, and ‘German, Russian and Jewish expressionism’ as their inspiration.  Young painters who had shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in 1943 and 1944 were seeking to free themselves from Picasso’s ‘lines and curves’. 

Arshile Gorky

Gorky had learned from Miro so that he could part company from Picasso’s influence.  Kandinsky, Breton and Matta y Echaurren also gave inspiration to Gorky. 

Gorky, who died at the age of 48 in 1948, is ‘one of the greatest artists we have had in this country’.

Willem De Kooning

De Kooning was a mature artist by the time of his first show in 1948.  Like Gorky, de Kooning is principally a draughtsman.  De Kooning appears to be haunted still by Picasso in the early 1930s, in his ‘dragged off-white, greys and blacks’ …. ‘inserted in a shallow illusion of depth’.  And, like Picasso, de Kooning’s obsession with the human figure is an expression of his desire to show emotional intensity.  De Kooning tends towards uniting ‘modernism and tradition’.  He continues to be a Cubist and he continues to innovate.

Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann had his first show in 1944 when he was in his early sixties: this was just after he had begun to paint in an abstract style.   Hofmann is the most mature of the abstract expressionists.  His paintings tend towards dissonance; ‘like Klee, he works in a variety of manners without seeming to consolidate his art in any one of them’; he is ‘the remarkable phenomenon in the abstract expressionist ‘school’’. 

Adolph Gottlieb and Richard Motherwell

Adolph Gottlieb and Richard Motherwell are insufficiently recognised, though the quality of the oeuvre of each of them is uneven.  Motherwell’s large pictures done between 1947 and 1951 ‘are among the masterpieces of abstract expressionism’.  Gottlieb ‘has in his sober, pedestrian way become one of the surest craftsmen in contemporary painting’.  His ‘landscapes’ and ‘seascapes’ that were shown in 1953 are some of his best work, though his paintings of 1954 were ‘liked better by the public than anything he had shown before’.  Gottlieb still has potential. 

Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman

Mark Tobey showed the first examples of ‘all over’ design in New York in 1944.  Pollock had not seen these when he executed a number of ‘all over’ works in 1946.  Pollock’s subsequent works using skeins and blotches of paint surpass Tobey: the aim of Pollock was to achieve both surface and depth. 

Works by Pollock and Newman are considered by some to be the ‘reductio ad absurdum of abstract expressionism and modern art in general’. 

Of Pollock: ‘few of his fellow artists can yet tell the difference between his good work and his bad work’.  Greenberg implies that by 1954 Pollock was using colour for decorative purposes but was unsure what to say with it; his 1951 show by contrast remains ‘the peak of his achievement so far’, though it ‘was the (show) received most coldly of all’.

‘Consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts’

Gorky was the first abstract expressionist to work in black, white and greys: his ‘The Diary of a Seducer’ of 1945 is his masterpiece. 

Franz Kline was the first abstract expressionist to work exclusively in black and white: his first show was in 1951.  His canvasses are large. 

Largeness is inevitable in abstract expressionism: because the artist has rejected illusion of depth, a large picture plane is necessary for presenting a visual narrative. 

Apparent inspiration by oriental calligraphy in the works of both Tobey and Kline has led to suggestions of oriental influence on American abstract art, but there is no substance to this assertion. 

Instead, the emphasis on black and white in abstract expressionism arises from a fear of the techniques of pictorial art.  The illusion of visual depth in pictorial art is achieved as much by colour values as by perspective.  The use of black and white is a perpetuation of the use of value contrasts.   

Since around 1935 there has been a development in abstract expressionism which is unique to the USA and supremely significant: ‘consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts’.  Prior to the mid-1930s the work of Cezanne, the Cubists, Mondrian and Kandinsky continued in the value contrast ethos that had been inherited from the old masters, and the work of artists who had reduced contrast, such as Monet, Bonnard, Vuillard and Pissarro, was deprecated. 

Clyfford Still

The recent emergence of Clifford Still has coincided with a new appreciation of Monet’s late works.  Still’s first show was in 1944, and his second was in 1948.  Both shows were unattractive for various reasons: initially ‘slack, wilful silhouettes’, and latterly ‘a profound lack of sensitivity and discipline’.  It was only in 1953, upon seeing one of the artist’s 1948 works on its own, that pleasure was found by Greenberg in his art: this is ‘genuine originality in art’ and it can be ‘estranging and upsetting’.

The first European painter to reject ‘value painting’ was Turner.  Affinities between Turner and late Impressionism – particularly late Monet - and popular acceptance and desire for these works, suggests a ‘genuine underground change in European sensibility’.  Likewise, Still appears to chime with popular taste, but it is not known if he has been directly influenced by Turner and late Impressionism. 

Still’s idiosyncrasy and ease of achieving a new American idiom in art is likened to Whitman’s breaking of the hold of metre in poetry. 

Moreover, Still’s paintings evoke a homespun style of landscape painting that, whilst competent according to ‘academic correctness’, betrays an uninspired use of colour.  This often arises from a desire to capture the vividness of natural light, but, due to lack of insight, achieves only ‘a livid, dry, sour picture with a warm, brittle surface that intensifies the acid fire of the generally predominating reds, browns, greens and yellows’.  Barnett Newman described this phenomenon as ‘buckeye painting’. 

Still uses ‘buckeye effects’ in his paintings: ‘frayed dead leaf edges … the dark heat of his colour … a dry, crusty paint surface’.  This is a ‘conquest of high art’ and ‘its liberation from Kitsch’. 

Still ’shows abstract painting a way out of its own academicism’.

Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman & Mark Rothko

Artists stimulated by Still have been able to strike out on their own: this shows the importance of Still.  One such artist is Barnett Newman. 

Newman’s works are the ‘most direct attack upon the easel picture so far’.  He uses colour with rigour: it ‘functions as hue and nothing else’. 

Still also inspired Rothko, who is a ‘brilliant, original colourist’.  Like Newman, Rothko ‘soaks pigment into the canvas’: the paint is ‘not a covering layer in Still’s manner’. 

Rothko evokes Matisse ‘who held onto value contrasts in something of the same way’.  

Rothko’s big vertical pictures are ‘among the largest gems of abstract expressionism’.

The manner in which ‘colour breathes from the canvas’ of the works of Still, Newman and Rothko arises from the suppression of value contrasts and the warm hues that are employed.  The issue is to determine: ‘where the pictorial stops and decoration begins’. 

With the shrinking of the illusion of depth, the picture surface becomes tautened and sensitive: Cubism overcame this by working in rectangular shapes that are complementary to the shape of the painting. 

Rothko and Newman tend to prefer ‘rectilinear drawing’ and this makes them vulnerable to ‘the charge of being decorators’.  

It was Still who first enabled abstraction to escape the grip of value contrasts, and it was also Still who freed abstraction from ‘rectilinear drawing’.  By reducing value contrasts, Still reduced the threat of abstract shapes to the integrity of the picture surface.  Kandinsky and Pollock had ‘glimpsed this’, but no more than that.  This is why Still is such a popular painter.

Conclusion

Since the 1940s, the single uniting characteristic of the abstract expressionists has been their ambition to ‘break out of provinciality’: most have now achieved this.

PHILIP GUSTON IN ROSEN. A. 'IMAGINING JEWISH ART'

Philip Guston: Recasting the Past, or How to Make a Golem in Rosen. A. ‘Imagining Jewish Art’

This is a summary of Chapter 2 of Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’.  2009.  Legenda. 

The Introduction to Rosen's ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ was summarised in this blog on 22nd October 2014.

‘Philip Guston: Recasting the Past, or How to Make a Golem’

In the 1960s many of the New York School of Art came to the end of their life: Pollock, Kline, Reinhardt, Newman and Rothko all died between the years 1956 and 1970; none of these had lived for more than sixty six years.  One wonders whether any of these artists would have painted in styles other than abstract, had they lived longer. 

It is Philip Guston who actually moved from abstraction to figurative art between 1968 and his death in 1980.  At the time critics reacted to Guston’s espousal of figurative art as a traumatic surrender.  Recently Guston’s change of style has been seen as a triumph for the principle of the individual freedom of the artist.

Guston’s figurative work is in the style of ‘emphasis on the common and the ordinary’: this style by Guston influenced subsequent painters including Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades.  Retrospective exhibitions of Guston’s work in 1980 and 2003/4 influenced further artists. 

Jewish themes and meanings

Jewish themes and meanings in Guston’s work have not been fully examined to date.

At the time of Guston’s espousal of figurative art he is recorded as having spoken about his early life and his Jewish identity.  Guston’s parents – Leib and Rachel Goldstein - had fled pogroms in Odessa, Ukraine.  Philip Guston – the youngest of seven – was born in Montreal, Canada in 1913.  In 1919 the family moved to Los Angeles: Philip Guston’s father worked as a rubbish collector, and it is this kind of material that appears in Guston’s figurative works.  Lieb committed suicide in 1924: Philip found the body; this may be the origin of ropes that appear in Guston’s figurative works.  During Philip’s youth one of his brothers died from gangrene: this may be the origin of severed limbs that appear in Guston’s figurative works.

In the mid-1930s the surname Guston was adopted by Philip in preference to his family name: this may have been an attempt at distance from the traumas of youth but it may also have been to impress the parents of his fiancée.  In retrospect, Philip Guston bitterly regretted his rejection of his Jewish surname, particularly so after details of the Holocaust were published after 1945.  Guston did not consciously seek to present himself as a Gentile, but having established himself as Philip Guston the artist, he could not re-name himself. 

To make a Golem

In the 1970s Guston explicitly explored his Jewish identity, and he declared that he was attempting to ‘make a Golem’. 

Psalm 139:16 is the only reference to ‘golem’ in Scripture; in the Talmud Adam is described as ‘golem’ before he is animated by the breath of God.  The sense is that golem means ‘amorphous, unformed matter’. 

The Medieval Kabbalistic tradition gave methods for making golems from earth and water: this was a ‘ritual representing an act of creation’ which gave insight into God’s creative power, and thus ecstasy. 

By the 15^th Century a legend of a Golem had evolved: the creation of a man-like creature that had destructive powers, the best-known having emerged in Prague.  Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (the ‘Maharel of Prague’) had made a being and had animated it by placing into its mouth a parchment on which was written the name of God.  The Golem was servant to its master, who controlled it by removing the parchment on the Sabbath: on one occasion when this was not done the Golem grew in size and wreaked havoc, potentially threatening the destruction of the world.  The Maharel of Prague managed to remove the parchment, the Golem returned to mud, and its remains were placed in an attic in Prague where, according to legend, they remain.

Rosen asserts that it is Rabbi Loew’s ‘autonomous clay creation’ that inspired Guston.  In 1965 Guston published an essay – ‘Faith, Hope, Impossibility’ – in which he asserted his faith that it is ‘possible to make a living thing’: ‘to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day’. 

Rosen argues that Guston’s ‘wager on making a living thing’ out of paint is a ‘Faith located within Impossibility’.   The dirt from which Guston works is ‘the accumulation of art history’.

Rosen explores the path by which Guston arrives at figurative work in the late 1960s: ‘Guston’s late dilemma’.

Guston’s late dilemma

Guston’s paintings from his teenage years had derived from the Renaissance works that he knew from textbooks.  Giotto, Mantegna and Pierro della Francesca particularly inspired him, and he would return to these later in life.

In the late 1940s Guston moved from his figurative style to abstraction.  After touring Italy to view the Renaissance works he had previously only known by reproductions, Guston began working in the early 1950s in a fully abstract style: he was associated with the Abstract Expressionists.

Rosen traces the course of Guston’s abstract period through the ‘delicate cadmium red cross-hatchings’ of his ‘Zone’ of 1953-4, through the ‘lumpy duodenal shapes’ of ‘Fable 1’ of 1956-7, to Guston’s ‘dark paintings’ of the early 1960s which begin to show the ‘emergence of a new, tactile language of things’, such as his ‘The Light’ of 1964 and his ‘New Place’ of 1964. 

In 1960 Guston had commented that the notion that abstraction is pure and autonomous is wrong because painting, by its nature, is ‘impure’, and its impurities ‘force painting’s continuity’.  Rosen asserts that this statement by Guston was a provocation to the prevalent abstractionist aesthetic that had been defined by Greenberg’s essay of 1955: ‘American-Type Painting’, in which the artist should be engaged in a ‘process of self-purification’.  Guston feared that, rather than achieving purity and perfection, the process commended by Greenberg would lead to art ‘without any essence at all’.

In 1966 the Jewish Museum in New York City exhibited a collection of Guston’s ‘dark paintings’: this confirmed in Guston his desire to ‘go on and deal with concrete objects’. 

But the next two years were a time of crisis for Guston.  On the one hand Guston was producing ‘pure drawings’: simple black brushstrokes on paper at the conjunction of abstraction and the depiction of objects.  On the other hand, in 1967 Guston produced a drawing (‘Prague’) of a barred window that evoked imprisonment and the golem legend. 

It is in the latter genre, which Guston called his ‘object drawings’, that Guston’s golems would appear.  Guston’s ‘pure drawings’ were gradually supplanted by his evolution of his ‘object drawings’, which were Guston’s re-establishment of his ‘faith in the figurative tradition’ – ‘solid forms in an imagined space’. Guston then came to develop his own ‘visual alphabet’ which provided the content of his works: books, buildings shoes etc. 

‘Paw’ of 1968 is an early example: its animalistic left hand, apparently drawing a line ‘the wrong way’ announced that Guston’s second career as a figurative artist would be ‘clumsy, backwards, even bestial’. 

Guston went on to cherish the quality of awkwardness.  Inspired by Isaac Babel’s address to the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he sought to ‘paint badly’ so as to, as Corbett put it, ‘negotiate a path between the imperatives of non-representational art on the one hand, and the tradition of illusionistic painting on the other’.  Babel had said that writers in the Communist state had been given everything by the party and the government ‘but have deprived us of one privilege: that of writing badly’.

Rosen observes that Guston was seeking to escape from two illusions: the fantasy of his own artistic past which no longer had any meaning for him, and the fantasy of art’s path of the distant past that he could not allow himself to believe.  Thus he adopted the methods that he admired in Renaissance painters, and he did so ‘badly’.

Rosen asserts that, while Guston’s late period works did not come to life in the manner of paintings that pre-dated this time, by ‘breaking down the enchantments of illusionistic space’ - by yielding to the urge to use ‘the stuff – the matter’ of paint, and to use it badly - Guston achieved a reality in the objects that he depicted that brought them to life as if they were a Golem.

And in his last years, as he adopted this method, he engaged in dialogue with the Renaissance masters.

Rosen goes on to consider two works by Guston: ‘Deluge II’ of 1975 which he compares with Paolo Uccello’s ‘The Great Flood’ of c1447, and ‘Green Rug’ of 1976 which he compares with Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Flagellation’ of c1455.  Guston re-imagines and re-constitutes both works from the Fifteenth Century so that they have a new tangible life as deposits of paint – as golems - which emerge towards the viewer, rather than there being a rational illusion of aerial perspective.

Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello’s ‘The Great Flood’ concerns the narrative in Genesis Chapters 6 to 9. 

Guston seems to have embraced the Flood as a metaphor for his fear of the end of the practice of painting.  Guston painted as if he was re-starting from the remains of an all-destroying deluge: he produced, emerging from the flood, objects muddy from his memory, and memories of other paintings including Paolo Uccello’s ‘The Great Flood’, and mud is the stuff from which a golem is made. 

In his Deluge II Guston dispenses with the depiction of the Ark and focusses on the detritus of the flood.  Red is the dominant colour: the colour of blood and of earth. 

Piero della Francesca

Guston became convinced that, despite the apparent perfection of Piero della Francesca’s carefully balanced paintings, there was anxiety and impossibility within.  Rosen observes that Guston projected on Piero his own unresolved doubts about ‘illusionistic painting’. 

Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Flagellation’ was particularly seen by Guston as disturbing, its two distinct halves setting up unresolved tensions. 

Rosen asserts that Guston’s ‘Green Rug’ best achieved the painter’s homage to ‘The Flagellation’: both sides of the painting have elements that make the painted space claustrophobic; the floor and far wall echo the colours of these elements in ‘The Flagellation’ but again, Guston makes them agents of unease; and at the vertical centre of the painting an enigmatic form divides and disrupts.  The enigmatic feet and shoes that occupy the centre of the painting may be the remains of the people who stand in ‘The Flagellation’; or they may be Guston’s memories of severed and lifeless limbs; and it is known that Guston was preoccupied with the Shoah at the time that he produced ‘Green Rug’. 

Rosen states that as Chagall worked with the crucifixion as an image to speak of the Holocaust, Guston used iconography from ‘The Flagellation’.  And in the same way that the figures in ‘The Flagellation’ invite the viewer to respond to the Passion of Christ, so Guston may be making the same challenge about responsibility for the Holocaust, particularly in view of the whip that rests at the side of ‘Green Rug’. 

Rosen concludes that in ‘Green Rug’ Guston is violently manipulating the art of the past to achieve a new and less finished form for the modern world– a golem.

Conclusion

Rosen reviews the ‘Jewish concerns and themes’ in Guston. 

The concept of the golem lets Guston engage with the past.  Guston could not believe in past artistic illusions: this may have been part of a broken Jewish faith for Guston.  Guston was also preoccupied with his own parental roots in Odessa, but he could not recreate any of these lost realms.   

In the tradition, a golem was a means of drawing closer to God.  For Guston there was neither irony nor piety in his pursuit of ‘making a golem’: he was simply providing forms of paint within the Jewish tradition that would capture the ‘breakdown of tradition’ and leave ‘something to hold on to’.

JEAN LAMB'S 'STATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST'

Jean Lamb’s ‘Stations of the Holocaust’

This is a summary of the article in Church Times of 13^th March 2015 which is a review by Pat Ashworth of the fourteen reliefs that comprise ‘Stations of the Holocaust’ which are currently exhibited in Coventry Cathedral until 3^rd April (Good Friday).

‘Stations of the Holocaust’

The Stations comprise fourteen reliefs which were carved in elm wood between 1999 and 2012: they have now been cast in plaster. 

The Stations illustrate Christ’s road to the cross and present a parallel narrative of life and death in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.  An example of the titles of the Stations is: ‘Jesus takes up his cross: the Jews are made to cart off their dead’. 

The illustrations of Christ and his journey are relatively large: the illustrations of the Holocaust are smaller.  There are ‘terrible cameos’ of ‘gas lorries, the gas chambers, the bloodied death pits…. The snaking railway line is a recurrent motif’.  In one Station, one of the hands of Christ lies above the ghetto as if wanting to protect its inhabitants who are held at gunpoint. 

Jean Lamb is a Church of England priest: her ancestry is German and gentile. 

Sister Mary Michael CHC has written a meditation for each Station based on the Psalms.

In the exhibition catalogue Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg ‘ponders with honesty and some pain on how difficult a work which tells the Jewish story in the context of the Stations of the Cross might be for Jews to contemplate’.  He concludes that ‘while the suffering of one can express the sufferings of many, there can never be an equation with the unquantifiable horrors experienced by any group which has been subject to genocide’. 

SARAH ROSE. 'STILLNESS AND MOVEMENT IN WORKS OF ART'

Sarah Rose.  ‘Stillness and movement in works of art’. 

This is a brief summary of the essay by Sarah Rose: ‘Stillness and movement in works of art’. 

The essay was published in connection with the establishment of The Sarah Rose Collection at Borough Road Gallery, at the London South Bank University in 2012.

The artists in the collection are David Bomberg, Dennis Creffield, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead, Miles Richmond and Thomas Holden.

Sarah Rose: ‘Stillness and movement in works of art’.

Sarah Rose describes how she came to gather the works in the collection.  Sarah Rose is the daughter of a Ukrainian mother and a Latvian father: she grew up in the world of art galleries and art publications. Sarah Rose and her husband met the artist Cliff Holden when they came to England in the early 1950s.  Cliff Holden founded the Borough Group of artists who had studied with David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic – later London South Bank University.  Sarah Rose’s collection began in the early 1950s.  In his lifetime Bomberg was neglected as an artist. 

In the 1920s there was a sudden break with established conventions in painting in which ‘unselfconscious depiction of the world’ gave way to ‘art turning in on itself’, and in which there was a rapid emergence of new and individualistic styles.  In contrast, Bomberg valued continuation of tradition.  The artists in the collection are those who worked together in the traditional way to achieve ‘a new idiom’.   The collection is intended to focus on Bomberg.

Bomberg valued the artists of the Florentine Renaissance, as well as Rembrandt, Goya, El Greco, Velasquez, Van Gogh, Turner, Delacroix and Cezanne.

Unlike the media of human sport and performance, in which the event does not exist after the period of its enactment, painting maintains the involvement of the spectator over a protracted period of time.  Despite the static nature of a painting, it is ‘movement’ that characterises greatness in paintings.  Sarah Rose asks how may we ‘use the ability to move one’s visual focus when viewing works of art, what kinds of works reward such viewing, and what are the consequences?’

Movement in nature affects us all the time.  The nervous system of an adult responds positively to movement in specific kinds of activity that are more rewarding in this respect than everyday movement in life.  These specific activities include: ‘watching a sporting event and engaging with the moving arts’. 

A similar effect arises from seeing a painting because ‘every stroke is a record of a movement’.  Thus, our eyes move with the movements of the making of the painting and this gives us relaxation, rest and pleasure.  Our bodily response will confirm to us if a painting displays the quality of movement that satisfies natural law.  A good painting is one to which the words of Plato may be ascribed: ‘To nothing which is irrational can I give the name of art’.

Thus the viewer feels a work of art as well as seeing it.

Sarah Rose asserts that the difference between Bomberg and the Expressionists may be described by reference to the argument that she has set out.  Bomberg’s paintings are not made in response to ‘an urgent need to communicate’: his works are instead ‘ineloquent, mute, static, reminding one more of the tradition that produced him, of Cezanne, Goya or Pierro della Francesca, than of Munch, Ensor, Nolde or Soutine’.   The stillness of the image in one of Bomberg’s works ‘compliments the bodily stillness that results from the satisfying vitality in the virtual movement of the structure’.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Richard Diebenkorn

This is a summary of the article by Olivia Lang about Richard Diebenkorn entitled ‘Lovely imperfection’ which was published in The Guardian newspaper dated 28 February 2015.

A retrospective exhibition ‘Richard Diebenkorn’ will be held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 14 March 2015 to 7 June 2015. 

Richard Diebenkorn

Diebenkorn was ‘one of the greatest and most doggedly independent American painters of the 20^th century’.  He is ‘practically unknown in the UK’.  He was ‘both a figurative and an abstract painter’; he ‘captured tension beneath the calm’.

A photograph taken in 1959 shows Diebenkorn in his studio in Berkeley, California.  At this time Diebenkorn was moving from abstract expressionism to becoming a figurative painter.  In the mid 1960s he returned to abstraction. 

Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922, and soon moved to San Francisco.  He drew from a young age, inspired by postcards of the Bayeux Tapestry: in adult life he valued the three horizontal bands within the tapestry which together provide parallel narratives and he drew on this concept in his abstract works.

In 1943 he joined the Marine Corps.  Whilst stationed in Virginia during training, Diebenkorn took advantage of the opportunity to visit museums: he was impressed by the Impressionists and by Cezanne, Bonnard and Matisse.

In 1945 Diebenkorn was assigned to cartographic work.  He was frustrated that the printing equipment that was provided was inadequate: ‘blots and bubbles’ too frequently impaired the maps.  This seems to have inspired Diebenkorn in his later use of an aerial view for landscapes and the inclusion of ‘errors and mistakes’. 

In the early 1950s Diebenkorn studied for an MA at the University of New Mexico, whilst living with his wife and children in Albuquerque.  His paintings at this time show the New Mexico landscape ‘without quite reconciling into concrete forms’.

The dominant abstract painters at this time were based on the east coast of the USA: de Kooning was Diebenkorn’s favourite; figurative painting had been firmly rejected.

When Diebenkorn moved from abstraction to figurative work from 1954 onwards, his figurative paintings retained his ‘extraordinarily expressive way of handling paint’.  At this time Diebenkorn was living in Berkeley, California: his works are ‘distinctly Californian’ and evocative of Hopper’s early paintings.  Like Hopper, Diebenkorn agonised over the process of realising the artist’s original vision on the canvas.  Diebenkorn was particularly concerned about ‘easy perfection’: he wanted the finished figurative work to show the struggle by which it was achieved; traces of pentimenti were to be left in situ as evidence of this.  In Diebenkorn’s figurative work there are large areas which Diebenkorn referred to as ‘crudities’: relics of the tentative, accidental and imperfect method of achieving the finished work.

When Diebenkorn moved to Santa Monica in 1966 he abandoned figurative painting and returned to abstraction, despite the fact that abstraction at this time was being supplanted by Pop Art which was took a figurative approach.  Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series of paintings began to be produced at this time, and he continued to paint in this series until he died in 1993.