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.