Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

the dynamic, the open and the unfinished in their artwork. The pioneeringabstract expressionists more or less selectively combined what were seenat the time as the two major developments in modern art, cubism and surrealism.In particular, they extended the “automatic” drawing techniquesof nonrepresentational surrealism as a way to try to bypass the artist’s consciousmind and reveal more archetypal or “mythic” content. “True art is anadventure into an unknown world,” wrote painters Mark Rothko, AdolphGottlieb, and Barnett Newman in a 1943 letter to The New York Times.The new approach launched by these artists in the mid-1940s wascharacterized by critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952:At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one Americanpainter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than asa space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or “express” anobject, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not apicture but an event.As explained by Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro,Robert Motherwell, and other prominent critics of the period, the mostimportant aspect of the new American painting was the activity of selfexploration—theopportunity given by painting to realize a more genuineself-knowledge as a result of the difficult, open-ended challenges of findingeach correct painterly gesture to add to previous gestures on the canvas.Although the emotion and meaning expressed were more important for thegesture painters than formal qualities of line, color, and design, they refusedto preconceive particular meanings or styles, believing that a significantresolution would grow out of their total involvement in the act of painting.Viewing the painting as a spontaneous improvisation (similar to thejazz music most of these artists listened to), the gesture painters favored thebroad brush stroke that seemed direct and honest, rather than artificial andthought out. They employed a variety of devices as signs of the artist’s activepresence: the stroke, the brush, the calligraphic mark, the splatter, thedrip, and even the pour—as well as a general emphasis on the qualities ofthe paint itself as substance and the surface of the canvas as texture.Focused solely on the “performance arena” of the canvas and immersedin the unpremeditated process of painting, the artist remained alertto possibilities of a new coherence as “events” accumulated on the paintingsurface—sometimes over months or even years. Painter Robert Motherwelldescribed this way of working in 1947: “I begin a painting with a series of124