Unit 6: Birth of the American Avant-Garde
Fig. 1: Matthew Diffee, Cartoon, The New Yorker
In this unit, students will look to the North American continent as the birthplace of new avant-garde movements. In the 1930s, figuration was the dominant mode of artists participating in Precisionist and Regionalist currents in the United States, and this was true of the Mexican Muralists too. By the 1940s abstractionism took off, particularly among the artists know as the New York School. The rival art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg voiced different interpretations of the significance of these developments.
1. Precisionism
The Precisionists were not a formal movement or school so much as a loose clique of artists who had a shared interest in American subjects. They can be said to be the first true native-born American Modernist movement. Their work demonstrated the influence of the American photographer Paul Strand, who—inspired at least in part by the Constructivist photographs of Alexander Rodchenko in Russia—chose unusual vantage points and croppings to produce images that bordered on pure abstraction. The Precisionists also synthesized ideas from Europe, particularly Cubism and Futurism, but also French Purism, another movement that recast Cubism, in this case, in terms of the “machine aesthetic.”
Fig. 2: Charles Demuth, …And the Home of the Brave (1931) (The Art Institute of Chicago)
The Precisionists—among them the watercolorist Charles Demuth, painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, and painter Joseph Stella—wished to celebrate the exciting possibilities of the Machine Age, and they did so from an American point of view. They particularly delighted in scenes of American urban life at a time when engineering marvels such as skyscrapers, suspension bridges, and enormous factories were rendering a brand-new landscape.
Their representations of the modern American experience are rather utopian, and none more so than Demuth’s treatments of the industrial landscape surrounding his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
His painting …And the Home of the Brave depicts a factory as a heroic and monumental structure equal to the classical monuments of Europe, such as the Parthenon. The title should sound familiar: it is the last line of the “Star Spangled Banner,” which was adopted as the national anthem the same year the painting was completed, in 1931.
Fig. 3: Charles Sheeler, Church Street El (1920) (Cleveland Museum of Art)
Charles Sheeler was from Pennsylvania, too. He was born in Philadelphia and moved to New York City in 1919, where he participated in the American art collector and critic Walter Arensberg’s circle—which included Alfred Stieglitz and Marcel Duchamp. After struggling as a painter in Paris in the early 1900s, Sheeler taught himself photography with a five-dollar Brownie camera. In the 1920s, he worked for the magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, and eventually coined the term Precisionism to describe the clean lines and clear shapes of his paintings and photography. He spent six weeks in 1927 photographing the River Rouge Plant, near Detroit, for the Ford Motor Company; the automobile factory complex became the basis for several of his important paintings. Indeed, like the other Purists, he’d found a classical monumentalism in the products of the Machine Age.
Sheeler celebrated the excitement of living in New York in paintings such as Church Street El. The scene is a bird’s-eye view of Broadway and Wall Street, with the Church Street-elevated train driving through the right-hand side of the composition. Sheeler based his composition on an image from the short movie Manhatta (1920), which he made together with the photographer Paul Strand. Additionally, the abstracted geometric forms that he used to describe the city owe something to Strand’s and Demuth’s photographs of industrial spaces.
Students, watch Manhatta (1920) below. https://youtu.be/kuuZS2phD10
Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta is one of the first avant-garde American films. It celebrates the metropolis through a series of unusually and carefully composed shots of the ultimate American metropolis: Manhattan. Like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (see Unit 4), the film tracks a day in the life of a contemporary city. This monumental and lyrical celebration of the urban scene has been compared to landscape painting and nature photography. The texts between scenes include excerpts from the writings of Walt Whitman. More than a simple documentary of contemporary life, each of the 65 shots that make up the film are meticulously composed—like the best paintings or photographs.
Looking closely, students will see a shot that directly quotes Sheeler’s Church Street El, and another is very similar to fellow Precisionist Joseph Stella’s paintings, which monumentalize the impressive towers of the Brooklyn Bridge.
2. Diego Rivera and the Mexican Muralists
The Detroit Industry fresco cycle is the work of one of the key artists know as the Mexican Muralists: Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Orozco. Their movement emerged after the conclusion of a 10-year civil war in Mexico that resulted in the founding of a progressive government led by President Álvaro Obregón, a former revolutionary. The new government supported a large public arts program, which resulted in a kind of Mexican renaissance in the visual arts.
Many of these artists were Marxist and believed that art belonged on public walls rather than in private galleries. Rivera, in particular, found his medium in large-scale frescoes created for public spaces. He discovered this tradition after an extended study trip to Italy in 1920, during which he looked closely at the immense frescoes of the High Renaissance. This format fit Rivera’s political goals too, which were expressed in a manifesto he coauthored with Leon Trotsky (coleader, alongside Lenin, of the Russian revolution) and the Surrealist leader André Breton. The three met in Mexico City in 1938. In Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, they mutually denounced totalitarianism (Stalinism and Fascism) and rejected controls on artistic expression: “In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds . . . and we repeat our deliberate intentions of standing by the formula, complete freedom for art.” [1] In addition, they argued that artists and writers should strive to promote international revolution in the face of totalitarian movements.
After the publication in the United States of a monograph on Rivera’s frescoes, he and the other muralists began to receive commissions for large-scale public murals in that country. At times, Rivera’s politics landed him in trouble with his U.S. patrons. Famously, when industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. invited Rivera to create a mural for Rockefeller Center in 1932, the result was Man at the Crossroads, which included a portrait of Lenin and another rather unflattering one of his patron. Because the work was painted in fresco, it could not be moved, so in 1934 Rockefeller had it destroyed with chisels and hammers.
Fig. 5: Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (1932 – 1933) (Detroit Institute of Arts)
Still, Rivera had a number of successes north of the border. In 1933, after 11 months of work, he completed a 27-panel fresco for the Detroit Institute of Arts. The work celebrates local industry, particularly the workers of the Ford River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan, where he’d spent months sketching and photographing the process of manufacturing cars. He even dealt with the pharmaceutical industry—he’d also spent time at the Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical plant in Detroit to conduct more research for his commission.
While the Detroit murals celebrate the manufacturing process by representing the union of the movements of the works with the actions of machines, he allegorized this concept through references to the ancient myths of his own country. One of the huge pressing machines depicted in the mural symbolizes the story of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, the mother of the gods as well as the moon, sun, and stars—everything that makes the world go round, so to speak.
3. Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School
While there were a number of American progressive art movements that embraced Modernist practices by the 1930s, a Regionalist trend largely turned its back on European practices and embraced the “American Scene.” The leader of this trend was the American painter T. H. Benton. He often asserted an outlook of American exceptionalism, sometimes bordering on chauvinism: “A windmill, a junk heap, and a Rotarian have more meaning to me than Notre Dame or the Parthenon,” he so declared. [2] He was a muralist, and the success of his early work became the impetus for the Works Progress Administration mural programs of the later 1930s.
Benton taught for a while at the Art Students League in New York, where Jackson Pollock was his student in 1929. Benton came to feel out of place in the New York art world as abstraction began to emerge as the dominant trend there. Contemporary critics saw this new trend as “un-American”—too European. The tide began to change in 1936 when Alfred Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, organized an exhibition called Cubism and Abstract Art. That same year the American Abstract Artists (AAA) organization was founded, and they propagated a method of easel painting that drew upon the ideas of Hans Hofmann and Piet Mondrian, European modernists living in exile in New York.
In their “Editorial Statement” of 1938, they defended abstraction from “largely unsympathetic and biased criticism.” The AAA paved the way for the emergence of the New York School, or Abstract Expressionism (the terms are essentially synonymous), and the victory of this abstract trend after the end of World War II.
3.1 Action Painting
Fig. 6: Hans Hofmann (Not Pictured) and Jackson Pollock at Work on One: Number 31, 1950 with Lee Krasner in the Background, 1950 (SCAD Digital Image Database)
Jackson Pollock eventually emerged as the best known figure in the New York School (particularly in the public’s mind), especially after a 1949 four-page spread appeared in LIFE magazine that asked in the title of the article, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”
By that time, Pollock was experimenting with his so-called “drip painting” technique. Inspired by the monumentality of his teacher Benton’s murals, Pollock began to paint on increasingly large canvases, which he famously placed on the floor. (His early interest in Navajo sand painting reinforced this idea.) Pollock said he wanted his pictures “to function between the easel and the mural.” [3]
One important take on Pollock’s work was that it was the culmination of Modernist painting practice. In his very influential essay of 1960, “Modernist Painting,” the critic Clement Greenberg argued that an increasing level of self-criticism marked the trajectory of 20th-century art. For Greenberg—himself extremely influential—a painting should not attempt to present any information other than that which could be contained within the medium (texture, color, scale, etc.): “It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered pure, and in its purity find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well of its independence . . .” [4]
In another essay, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” he made the point that “every work of art must have content, but that subject matter is something the artist does not have in mind when he is actually at work.” [5] Subject matter means narrative or representation, but content refers to the actual means of painting. From the point of view of what is now called Greenbergian criticism, the value of medium of painting is measured by its aesthetic “purity.”
3.2 Color Field
Fig. 7: Philip Johnson’s Rothko Chapel, 1965 – 1966 (Menil Collection)
A rival to Greenberg, the critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952 to describe Pollock’s approach: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was going on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” [6]
Rosenberg distinguished action painting from another aspect of Abstract Expressionism, the color field painting of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, among others. In these paintings, color is the dominant motif while the distinction between the field and ground is entirely erased. Color field emerged as an alternative trend to the gestural work of action painting. Rothko and Newman pioneered this current, and Greenberg emerged as their biggest champion.
Before Pollock rocketed to fame, many of the early figures of the New York School were European immigrants or refugees: Arshile Gorky was an Armenian whose family fled the Turkish genocide of 1915; Willem de Kooning arrived in 1926 seeking to escape a bleak family background in Holland; and Rothko immigrated with his Russian-Jewish family in 1913, where they were reunited with his father and two older brothers. Rothko grew up in Oregon and from 1921 to 1923 attended Yale University on a scholarship, but he left in his third year in order to join the Art Students League. [7]
Fig. 8: Mark Rothko Untitled (South Wall Painting, Rothko Chapel) (1965 – 1966) (Menil Collection)
Rothko gave up figural painting in the 1940s, saying that he wished to express basic human emotions—that “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” He added, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom . . . and if you . . . are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.” [8]
Later in his career, Rothko deepened his palette to maroon, black, and olive green, which he believed conveyed a sense of tragedy better, or more immediately, than his bright paintings of the 1950s. During this period, he received a commission from philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil to paint 14 large panels, nearly uniform in color—deep black and red brown. (They were designed to fit in an octagonal building designed by Philip Johnson.)
Fig. 9: Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (with the Rothko Chapel) (1963 – 1967) (Menil Collection)
The critic Greenberg was a great advocate of color field painting; as he saw it, this was the final deathblow to the representational tradition in Western art, particularly in painting. The Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman is largely known as a color field painter for his “zip” paintings—huge fields of color with a vertical band of a different color, referred to as “zips.” Still, he also worked in a form of sculpture that echoed Greenberg’s advocacy of absoluteness in art.
His Broken Obelisk was designed for no particular site, though it is seen here in front of the entrance to the Rothko Chapel (today, another version sits in the courtyard of MoMA). Since it commemorates no specific person or event, some see Broken Obelisk as a universal monument to all humanity.
From the 1930s to the 1940s, the American art world shifted from various figurative movements to, increasingly, pure abstraction. Critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg served as “taste makers” who helped to support and define these changes. Abstract Expressionism maintained certain personal and mythic qualities—as this gestural form of painting was perceived as essentially expressive of the individual artists—while color field was seen as striving to shed paintings of these mythic elements in the form of a more pure painting.
Citations
[1] Andre Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky, “Towards a Free and Revolutionary Art”, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900 – 2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 448.
[2] David R. Pichaske, “Dave Etter: Fishing for Our Lost American Souls,” Journal of Modern Literature 23, no. 3/4 (Summer 2000): 393 –427.
[3] Jackson Pollock, “ Application for Guggenheim Fellowship,” in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Jasmine Moorhead (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 17.
[3] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900 – 2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
[5] Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900 – 2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
[6] “Mark Rothko 1903-1970,” Tate, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mark-rothko-1875, (accessed July 20, 2015).
[7] Harold Rosenberg, from “The American Action Painters,” in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900 – 2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
[8] The Museum of Modern Art, Notes for “No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black),” http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78485
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