"Convergence" (1952) by Jackson PollackAction/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976
The Jewish Museum
May 4 - Sept. 21, 2008
In "The Painted Word," Tom Wolfe's 1975 reactionary screed against postwar art, he famously predicts that the disproportionate influence of art critics is such that someday a museum will exhibit prominent examples of their "protean passages" annotated by small reproductions of art.
Thirty-some years later, this has come to pass in a show about the influence of two of Wolfe's reviled "Kings of Cultureburg" — Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, whose influential writings helped define Abstract Expressionism. But, it turns out, this isn't a bad thing at all.
Wisely "Action/Abstraction," the Jewish Museum's instructive time capsule of an exhibit, is organized around an impressive ensemble of works from many of the heavyweights of the era — including top-notch works by Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky and others.
While its possible to see better collections of these works on permanent display at the MoMA or the Met, the show's context helps reanimate them by putting them in their time period. This is accomplished by tastefully interspersed items, including magazine articles, letters, film clips and stills of various seminal exhibitions, charting the style's rise both in the U.S. and abroad. And information on individual works and facets of the critics response allows us experience the works anew.
And by looking at the works through the critics' eyes, we can also better understand their divergent philosophies (action vs. abstraction), and decide which we like best, or if we like either.
Pretending we're Greenberg looking at Pollack's "Convergence," a stunning large splatter canvas from 1952, we see a bold spray of orange and yellow as a celebration of physicality paint and the flatness of the painting. Then, trying on Rosenberg's hat, we witness a defiant document of the Pollack's practice, conjuring the artist in action, dripping and slinging in existential struggle against society.
Their over-sized outlooks match the audacity of the artwork. But do the critics' words hold their own?
On the whole, the answer is no. The show is decidedly non-reverential, even downright critical of the two critics, who are shown to be bigoted, self-contradictory, pompous and overly rigid. One section of the show highlights works by artists in their “blind spots” — women and African-Americans — with the work Lee Krasner (better known then as Pollack's wife) and Norman Lewis. We’re also shown how Greenberg, even with his absolutist pronouncements about the way art should be, defends his favorites even when they don’t hone true to his orthodoxy -- as with Pollack when he returned to figurative painting in’48, and David Smith, when he used paint in one of his sculptures. And both critics engage in heated debates with artists about the meanings of their art.
In what might be the most interesting part of the exhibit, we’re shown how the two critics try to adapt to the changing aesthetics of the 50s and 60s. Greenberg raised the flag of what came to be known as the color field painters — artists like Helen Frankenthaler (her "Mountain and Sea" at above) and Morris Lewis who stain their canvases, thereby upping the flatness ante. Rosenberg was named critic at the New Yorker, where he championed a diverse group of work that he lumped under the rubrick of “anxious objects.” While this included the “hand-painted pop” of Claes Oldenburg and the work of Jasper Johns, neither critic was ever comfortable with Pop Art and everything that followed.
The show’s finale presents us with a sad irony. While the work of Frank Stella and other minimalists could be called the epitome or embodiment of Greenberg’s philosophy of flatness, we’re told that the critic was indifferent. Likewise with the participatory “actions” of Allan Kaprow and other performative artists, who for Rosenberg crossed some invisible line about what was and wasn’t art.
It’s tempting to wonder what the two critics would think of the show. One imagines that they both would have hated it — ironically, for giving space to their words. Because, despite their shared radical sympathies, they both espoused an aesthetic outlook that was ahistorical and apolitical, prizing art on its own terms. Nevertheless, "Action/Abstraction" makes a good case that their writings were actually very much a product of their time. And in hindsight, we see that Abstract Expressionism was not the ultimate in art, but rather one of the last salvos of modernism.
It's also curious what the two ‘Bergs would think of being shown in the Jewish Musuem? While it's observant enough to close their gift shop on Saturday, the museum downplays the role of their religious background, suggesting that the assimilated critics themselves felt it unimportant. (Although Greenberg is quoted as saying there is a particularly “Jewish bias towards the abstract.” )
In the end, maybe Tom Wolfe was only half wrong. The word may have won, but not the writings of these two critics.
