Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism (Library of America)
864
Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism (Library of America)
864eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In the quarter century after the end of World War II, a new generation of painters, sculptors, and photographers transformed the face of American art and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York. Signaled by the triumph of abstraction and the ascendancy of painters such as Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline, this revolution generated an exuberant and contentious body of writing without parallel in our cultural history. In the words of editor, art critic, and historian Jed Perl, “there has never been a period when the visual arts have been written about with more mongrel energy—with more unexpected mixtures of reportage, rhapsody, analysis, advocacy, editorializing, and philosophy.”
In this Library of America volume, Perl gathers for the first time the most vibrant contemporary accounts of this momentous period—by artists, critics, poets, gallery owners, and other observers—conveying the sweep and energy of a cultural scene dominated (in the poet James Schuyler’s words) by “the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.” Here are statements by the most significant artists, and major critical essays by Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Hilton Kramer, and other influential figures. Here too is an electrifying array of responses by poets and novelists, reflecting the free interplay between different art forms: John Ashbery on Andy Warhol; James Agee on Helen Levitt; James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney; Truman Capote on Richard Avedon; Tennessee Williams on Hans Hofmann; and Jack Kerouac on Robert Frank. The atmosphere of the time comes to vivid life in memoirs, diaries, and journalism by Peggy Guggenheim, Dwight Macdonald, Calvin Tomkins, and others. Lavishly illustrated with scores of black-and-white images and a 32-page color insert, this is a book that every art lover will treasure.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781598533675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Library of America |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2014 |
| Series: | Library of America Series |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 864 |
| Sales rank: | 742,980 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Art in America 1945â?"1970
Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism
By Jed Perl
The Library Of America
Copyright © 2014 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59853-367-5
CHAPTER 1
JACKSON POLLOCK
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) died on an August night on Long Island, a drunk driver on the way to a party who lost control of his car. He was already the defining figure in postwar American art, the man who "broke the ice," as his friend Willem de Kooning put it when friends gathered to remember him. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, struggled in New York in the 1930s, and came into his own in the mid-1940s, giving the improvisational techniques and mythic obsessions of the European Surrealists a bold, lyric attack that struck many as immediately American. He was moody, difficult, frequently abrasive, heavily dependent on the ministrations of his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, and a circle of supporters that included the critic Clement Greenberg and the collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim, whose monthly stipend gave Pollock a measure of freedom in the 1940s. By 1949, when Life magazine profiled Pollock, he was the prototype of the new American artist, a tough-talking, hard-drinking creative spirit; it has been said that the character of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire owed something to Pollock, whom Williams knew from summers in Provincetown. Although Krasner remembered her conversations about art with her husband as exhilarating, Pollock committed almost nothing to paper. The statement included here—published in the single issue of a little magazine, Possibilities—evokes the direct, unmediated painterly process that Pollock was developing as he dripped and flung paint onto canvas placed flat on the floor. His blunt, plainspoken prose—and his allusion to the Native American sand painting that he may have known in his youth—announce a desire to speak the language of the New World, without recourse to European theories or philosophies.
My Painting
MY painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West.
I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added.
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is a pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
1947
CHAPTER 2MARK ROTHKO
Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was ten when his Jewish family emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1913. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, attended Yale for two years, and by the 1930s was bringing a lyric gift to paintings of New Yorkers at the beach or on the subway. His most famous statement is a redefinition of romanticism, originally published in Possibilities in 1947. By then Rothko had been painting abstractly for a decade and had rejected what he regarded as obviously exotic subjects in favor of enigmatic totemic presences, by turns aerial or aquatic in spirit, invoked with thin washes of color and light, calligraphic strokes. Although Rothko had labored on a treatise on painting in 1941—it was only published posthumously, as The Painter's Reality—he ultimately believed his work was best experienced by the unfettered eye, without recourse to theory. The canvases composed of shimmering, soft-edged rectangles that he began to produce in the late 1940s and that are surely his greatest achievement invite a contemplative response. In the last two decades of his life, Rothko struggled to reconcile the mystical quietism of his art, a spirit that culminated in his work for the Rothko Chapel in Houston in the 1960s, with an art world eager to embrace him as a celebrity producing iconic images. By then the palette in his paintings had darkened considerably, as he struggled with heart problems and a failing marriage; he committed suicide in his studio.
The Romantics Were Prompted
The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange and unfamiliar is transcendental.
The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artist to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for the true liberation. Freed from a false sense of security and community, the artist can abandon his plastic bankbook, just as he has abandoned other forms of security. Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.
I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.
Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. It is at the moment of completion that in a flash of recognition, they are seen to have the quantity and function which was intended. Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur.
The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the cubist program. The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
On shapes:
They are unique elements in a unique situation.
They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.
They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world.
They have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.
The presentation of this drama in the familiar world was never possible, unless everyday acts belonged to a ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm.
Even the archaic artist, who had an uncanny virtuosity found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demi-gods. The difference is that, since the archaic artist was living in a more practical society than ours, the urgency for transcendent experience was understood, and given official status. As a consequence, the human figure and other elements from the familiar world could be combined with, or participate as a whole in the enactment of the excess which characterize this improbable hierarchy. With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.
Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama: art's most profound moments express this frustration. When they were abandoned as untenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy. For me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human figure—alone in a moment of utter mobility.
But the solitary figure could not raise its limbs in a single gesture that might indicate its concern with the fact of mortality and an insatiable appetite for ubiquitous experience in face of this fact. Nor could the solitude be overcome. It could gather on beaches and streets and in parks only through coincidence, and, with its companions, form a tableau vivant of human incommunicability.
I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breaching and stretching one's arms again.
winter 1947–48
Two Statements from The Tiger's Eye
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!
1947
* * *
The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from [which] one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.
1949
CHAPTER 3BARNETT NEWMAN
No American painter has argued more strenuously for art's peremptory power than Barnett Newman (1905–1970). In essays first published in the late 1940s in The Tiger's Eye—a short-lived, adventuresome magazine that also featured work by Pollock, Rothko, and Still—Newman made the case for an art grounded in pure, elemental sensation. Newman relished the role of the contrarian; it came naturally to a native New Yorker who was convinced, like so many New Yorkers, that to be controversial was to feel alive. While Newman took pride in his familiarity with the philosophical traditions, he also delighted in dismissing nearly all the great philosophers, declaring at one point that "aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds." And at a time when expressionist paint handling was the rage, he worked with solid planes of smoothly applied color, only occasionally interrupted by the vertical bands he called "zips." He aimed for something "real" and "concrete," and was emboldened by his studies of Native American art, singling out for praise the totem poles of the Northwest and the burial mounds of the Midwest. His paintings, which had met with a good deal of skepticism in the paint-happy 1950s, were eventually embraced by a younger generation of artists who were looking for a way beyond the perfervid emotions of Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.
The First Man Was an Artist
A scientist has just caught the tail of another metaphor. Out of the Chinese dragon's teeth, piled high in harvest on the shelves of Shanghai's drugstores and deep in the Java mud, a half million years old, he has constructed Meganthropus palaeo-javanicus, "man the great," the giant, who, the paleontologists now tell us, was our human ancestor. And for many, he has become more real than Cyclops, than the Giant of the Beanstalk. Those unconvinced by the poetic dream, who reject the child's fable, are now sure of a truth found today, 500,000 years old. Shall we artists quarrel with those who need to wait for the weights of scientific proof to believe in poetry? Or shall we let them enjoy their high adventure laid out in mud and in drugstore teeth? For truth is for them at last the Truth.
Quarrel we must, for there is the implication in this paleontological find of another attempt to claim possession of the poetic gesture: that the scientist rather than the artist discovered the Giant. It is not enough for the artist to announce with arrogance his invincible position: that the job of the artist is not to discover truth, but to fashion it, that the artist's work was done long ago. This position, superior as it may be, separates the artist from everyone else, declares his role against that of all. The quarrel here must include a critique of paleontology, an examination of the new sciences.
In the last sixty years, we have seen mushroom a vast cloud of "sciences" in the fields of cultures, history, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics, aesthetics, in an ambitious attempt to claim the nonmaterial world. Why the invasion? Is it out of fear that its materialistic interpretation of physical phenomena, its narrow realm of physics and chemistry, may give science a minor historical position if, in the larger attempt to resolve the metaphysical mysteries, the physical world may take only a small place? Has science, in its attempt to dominate all realms of thought, been driven willy-nilly to act politically so that, by denying any place to the metaphysical world, it could give its own base of operations a sense of security? Like any state or church, science found the drive to conquer necessary to protect the security of its own state of physics. To accomplish this expansion, the scientist abandoned the revolutionary scientific act for a theological way of life.
The domination of science over the mind of modern man has been accomplished by the simple tactic of ignoring the prime scientific quest: the concern with its original question, what? When it was found that the use of this question to explore all knowledge was utopian, the scientist switched from an insistence on it to a roving position of using any question. It was easy for him to do so because he could thrive on the grip mathematical discipline had, as a romantic symbol of purity and perfection, on the mind of man. So intense is the reverence for this symbol, scientific method, that it has become the new theology. And the mechanics of this theology, so brilliant is the rhythm of its logic-rite, its identification of truth with proof, that it has overwhelmed the original ecstasy of scientific quest, scientific inquiry.
For there is a difference between method and inquiry. Scientific inquiry, from its beginnings, has perpetually asked a single and specific question, what? What is the rainbow, what is an atom, what a star? In the pursuit of this question, the physical sciences have built a realm of thought that has validity because the question is basic for the attainment of descriptive knowledge and permits a proper integration between its quest, the question what constantly maintained, and its tool, mathematics or logic, for the discovery of its answer. Scientific method, however, is free of the question. It can function on any question, or, as in mathematics, without a question. But the choice of quest, the kind of question, is the basis of the scientific act. That is why it is so pathetic to watch the scientist, so proud of his critical acumen, delude himself by the splendor of the ritual of method, which, concerned only with its own relentless ceremonial dance, casts its spell not only over the lay observer but also over the participating scientist, with its incessant drumbeat of proof.
Original man, what does it matter who he was, giant or pygmy? What was he? That is the question for a science of paleontology that would have meaning for us today. For if we knew what original man was, we could declare what today's man is not. Paleontology, by building a sentimental science around the question who (who was your great-grandfather?), cannot be excused for substituting this question for the real one, because, according to the articles of faith that make up scientific method, there is not, nor can there ever be, sufficient proof for positive answer. After all, paleontology, like the other nonmaterial sciences, has entered a realm where the only questions worth discussing are the questions that cannot be proved. We cannot excuse the abdication of its primal scientific responsibility because paleontology substituted the sentimental question who for the scientific what. Who cares who he was? What was the first man, was he a hunter, a toolmaker, a farmer, a worker, a priest, or a politician? Undoubtedly the first man was an artist.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Art in America 1945â?"1970 by Jed Perl. Copyright © 2014 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.. Excerpted by permission of The Library Of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Introduction by Jed Perl,
Jackson Pollock,
Mark Rothko,
Barnett Newman,
Peggy Guggenheim,
Henry Miller,
James Agee,
Charles Burchfield,
Robert M. Coates,
Willem de Kooning,
Edwin Denby,
Parker Tyler,
Lincoln Kirstein,
Tennessee Williams,
Anton Myrer,
Hans Hofmann,
Clement Greenberg,
Clyfford Still,
Dwight Ripley,
Robert Motherwell,
Weldon Kees,
Mark Tobey,
Kenneth Rexroth,
William Carlos Williams,
Marianne Moore,
Dwight Macdonald,
Harold Rosenberg,
Mary McCarthy,
Jack Tworkov,
Irving Sandler,
Fielding Dawson,
William Gaddis,
Jack Kerouac,
Truman Capote,
Aaron Siskind,
Randall Jarrell,
John Graham,
Alfred Russell,
Joseph Cornell,
Alexander Calder,
Ben Shahn,
Isamu Noguchi,
Anni Albers,
David Smith,
Howard Nemerov,
Louise Bourgeois,
Philip Guston,
Morton Feldman,
Ad Reinhardt,
Robert Creeley,
Elaine de Kooning,
Meyer Schapiro,
Marcel Duchamp,
Grace Hartigan,
Frank O'Hara,
Larry Rivers,
James Schuyler,
Calvin Tomkins,
May Swenson,
Allan Kaprow,
Susan Sontag,
James Baldwin,
Philip Leider,
Kate Steinitz,
Jess,
Robert Duncan,
H. C. Westermann,
Robert Rosenblum,
Sidney Tillim,
John Cage,
Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Leo Steinberg,
Andy Warhol,
Claes Oldenburg,
Gene R. Swenson,
John Bernard Myers,
Fairfield Porter,
Hilton Kramer,
Ralph Ellison,
Louis Finkelstein,
Thomas B. Hess,
Barbara Rose,
Donald Judd,
Rosalind Krauss,
Robert Smithson,
Michael Fried,
John Ashbery,
Sources and Acknowledgments,
Index,