Action Figures

The fifties in paintings and words.

“Action/Abstraction,” at the Jewish Museum, is more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition, though it incorporates superb exhibits: classic paintings by the rival godheads of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and fine works by other members (notably Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still), important followers (Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler), and rebellious successors (Jasper Johns, Frank Stella) of American art’s greatest generation. Arshile Gorky’s prophetic “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (1944), from the Albright-Knox, in Buffalo, alone is worth the visit. It is a desperately vivacious, songful tumult, seemingly executed with bundled nerve ends. Ragged zones of hot color, like open wounds, interact with tight, buzzing linear glyphs—fragments of organic life—that bespeak the artist’s lingering debt to Surrealism, all in concert with intuitions of a new, expansive kind of pictorial space. Something epochal is afoot: a dovetailing of raw personal emotion and disinterested aesthetic experiment, Dionysus and Apollo. Those opposed qualities became the magnetic poles of Abstract Expressionism (which was named in 1946 by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates) and also the virtual battle stations of the movement’s great, mutually hostile critics, Harold Rosenberg (1906-78), who interpreted the new art rather exclusively in terms of existential drama, and Clement Greenberg (1909-94), who exalted formal invention as an end in itself. Rosenberg gravitated toward de Kooning, Greenberg toward Pollock. They squared off over Newman’s smooth expanses of color inflected with vertical bands or lines—spiritual hierophancy to Rosenberg, aesthetic engineering to Greenberg.


According to an essay by the art historian Irving Sandler in the show’s rewarding catalogue, the New York avant-garde art world of the nineteen-fifties consisted of about two hundred and fifty artists and a couple of dozen critics, curators, dealers, and collectors. Sandler was there, taking notes as a self-described “member of de Kooning’s coterie.” (Pollock—a truculent loner, living in the Springs, on Long Island, until his accidental death, in 1956—had no corresponding claque, but he was held in general awe.) The hamlet-sized population, concentrated in the blocks northeast of Washington Square, already outnumbered the scene of the previous decade, when all the major styles of Abstract Expressionism coalesced—in a blur of eureka moments, studio by studio—amid poverty and obscurity, irradiated by passion. (For example, Franz Kline, a middling Greenwich Village Expressionist, leaped to a mighty style of frozen gestures in black and white.) As usually happens, the theories that supposedly informed the creative breakthroughs—set forth in Rosenberg’s book “The Tradition of the New” (1959) and in Greenberg’s “Art and Culture” (1961)—were worked out after the fact. Also predictably, commercial success, popular imagination, and the reactive originalities of new artists wrenched the movement from the critics’ shepherding grasp. But the impact of Rosenberg and Greenberg in their heyday was as compelling as that of tribal shamans.

The term “avant-garde” meant something crucial to them. It preserved one essential concept of the Leninism that had intoxicated their generation of intellectuals in the thirties: the vanguard, whose alienated, conspiratorial, happy-few solidarity is an earnest of revolutionary rectitude. Greenberg carried over, as well, the belief in history as a predetermined unfolding, which he transposed from economics to aesthetics. In effect, he assigned the role of the bound-for-glory proletariat to the fundamental characteristics of artistic mediums—thus his incessant celebration of “flatness” in painting, banishing the opiates of representational illusion. Rosenberg’s polemic was rangier. His Action-painting doctrine—if so nebulous a formulation, advanced in a famous essay in 1952, can be called that—enlisted Sartre’s existentialism in the cause of exemplary artist-heroes for whom painting had become “an arena in which to act. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” He could sure sling the lingo, writing that the Action painter “begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents.” (Rosenberg was esteemed by Parisian intellectuals, including de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty; Greenberg, contemptuous of recent French art, wasn’t.) Rosenberg disdained to clarify how to square an exciting “event” with the residual fact of something—a relic? detritus?—that is hung on the wall to be enjoyed. You got it or you didn’t. But then visual acuity was not his forte. It was Greenberg’s, to a fault. When Greenberg looked, everything in the universe except optical fact fell away.

Regarding the social function of art, both critics might be rated militantly apolitical, insisting on the artist’s immunity to worldly reckonings. That attitude happened to echo the slant of internationally competitive American ideology in the Cold War. An irony of the critics’ tacit patriotism is that both were disgusted by American culture generally, which Greenberg characterized, in a seminal essay in 1939, as an empire of kitsch, not merely valueless in itself but practically as dangerous to authentic values as Nazi or Soviet tyranny. Rosenberg was more urbane, but he couldn’t mention anything in popular culture, even approvingly, without a drizzle of condescension. They were Old World humanists in their bones. In the early sixties, the definitively American triumphs of frolicsome Pop art and puritanical minimalism—the last great modern movements—horrified them. Greenberg lumped them as “novelty art”; Rosenberg decided that “taste has ceased to exist.” Rosenberg continued to track the art world, bemusedly but elegantly, in The New Yorker. Greenberg—having championed a lackadaisical movement, color-field painting, that was tailored to fit his biases—largely withdrew, though his retrospective prestige as the definer of modernism has never dimmed in academic art history and criticism. Rosenberg has been out of intellectual fashion for so long that his dashing eloquence may come as a glad shock, to many, on the present occasion.

“I’m gonna ask Harold a question. Am I an Action painter?” de Kooning playfully challenges Rosenberg in a filmed conversation, from 1959, at a table of what appears to be members of de Kooning’s coterie. (The critic had sowed doubt about who was or wasn’t Action by naming no artists in his 1952 essay—in contrast to Greenberg’s habit of pegging names up and down, like those of horses on a tout sheet.) Sycophantic laughter is heard. Unruffled, Rosenberg responds with Zen-like indirection, quoting a sarcastic slight to his idea from an anonymous British painter—“Is it possible to paint a slow Action painting?”—and his own squelching riposte: “An Action painting takes the artist’s whole life. Do you want to be slower than that?” His audience murmurs appreciatively, though surely aware that the initial question has been evaded. The exchange affords a glimpse of a time in New York when ideas constituted, indeed, a gladiatorial “arena in which to act”—in a sense of individual, spontaneous performance that channelled history in the making. ♦