Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
celebrated an imaginary America of productive farms, muscular workers, and
singing, gambling “darkies,” as “overlaid with lies.” But Pollock was by no
means an innovator in painting abstractly in New York in the later 1940s. The
1936 exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” that Alfred Barr organized at the
Museum of Modern Art presented an organized review of art that artists had
been responding to in this city and elsewhere for more than two decades. 6 1936
also saw the formation of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), an artists’ group
that mounted regular exhibitions and campaigned in favor of abstraction. By the
mid-1930s, the issue of abstraction in relation to representation was hotly
debated, in political, general cultural, and purely artistic terms.
I have already cited Greenberg’s essay on the avant-garde; to take another
example, John Graham, artist and friend of Pollock (whom he was one of the
first to promote), wrote in his 1937 book System and Dialectics of Art that “academico-impressionist
art methods regardless of the subject matter only lull the
masses gently to sleep, . . . abstract art with its revolutionary methods stirs their
imagination (negatively at first so as to gather speed) to thinking and consequently
to action.” 7 In Art Front, the monthly publication of activist artists
grouped in the leftist Artists’ Union and Artists’ Committee of Action, Clarence
Weinstock criticized the work shown in the 1935 Whitney Museum exhibition
“Abstract Painting in America” for the “absence of meaning” to which purist
abstraction is doomed by its limitation to issues of form. The modern artist
should see “that the conflicts of classes of society, insofar as they are embodied in
individuals, are as much a part of his . . . aesthetic experience as . . . two planes,
grey and yellow, intersecting at a precise angle.” Abstract painting cannot deal
resolutely with such subject-matter because, confining itself to relations between
forms, it is “at the mercy of whatever physical associations the spectator has in
mind.” 8 In reply, Stuart Davis insisted that while abstraction is not in general the
expression of class consciousness, it is “the result of a revolutionary struggle relative
to . . . bourgeois academic conditions . . . In the materialism of abstract art
in general, is implicit a negation of many ideals dear to the bourgeois heart.” 9
Pollock’s innovation, as is often said, lay in using abstraction for the formulation
of intense emotional content, as opposed (for example) to the impersonal
purity that geometrical abstractionists claimed for their goal. Before 1947 Pollock,
influenced by French and Mexican styles, as well as by his teacher Benton,
indicated content by way of various kinds of deformed representation, employing
a vocabulary of signs drawing on the primitivism and archaism current in his
artistic circle. But the tendencies toward abstraction operative in New York had
6 For an overview of this history, see Eric de Chassey, La Peinture efficace. Une histoire de l’abstraction
aux États-Unis (1911–1960) (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).
7 Marcia E. Allentuck (ed.), John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1971), p. 137.
8 Clarence Weinstock, “Contradictions in abstractions,” Art Front 1:5 (April 1935), p. 7.
9 Stuart Davis, “A medium of 2 dimensions,” Art Front 1:6 (May 1935), p. 6.
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