The Painted Word

  The most influential cénacle centered upon Hans Hofmann, a German painter in his mid-fifties who simply ignored the drillmasters and ran his art school in Greenwich Village as a philosophical outpost for l’art pour l’art and abstract painting. Another cénacle met in the studio of a sculptor, Ibram Lassaw; this one included Ad Reinhardt and Josef Albers and eventually grew into an organization called American Abstract Artists. The Triple A seemed to be animated mainly by anger at le monde, and the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art particularly, for patronizing European abstract work (and, if one need edit, not theirs). Another circle of friends, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Milton Avery among them, was known as “the Ten.” Another gathered about John Graham and included de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and David Smith. Still another included Roberto Matta, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock, who was married to a member of the Hofmann cénacle, Lee Krasner, bringing us full circle.

  All these circles and coteries came together after the war as the cénacle des cénacles, the New York School, or Tenth Street School, creators of Abstract Expressionism. Most of these people had slogged their way through the Depression with great difficulty, and their mood tended toward bohemianism of the High Seriousness vein.

  Two of their main meeting places, the Subjects of the Artist School and The Club, were on East Eighth Street, and the other, the Cedar Tavern, was on University Place. But the galleries that showed their work, such as the Area and the Hilda Carmel, were on Tenth Street, and that was the name that caught on. Within le monde, “going down to Tenth Street” was like the Saturday pilgrimage “down to Soho” today. In any event, this cénacle was soon so big and so influential that the regular Friday night meetings at The Club became like town meetings for the entire New York art scene, attracting dealers, COLLECTORS, uptown curators like Alfred Barr, critics, and just about any other culturati who could wangle their way in.

  The Cedar Tavern, scene of the cénacle des cénacles and one of Cultureburg’s most prestigious boho cafés of all time, comparable to the Five Spot, the White Horse, and Max’s Kansas City. “Hi, Marko!”

  The great theorists to come out of this cénacle des cénacles were Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Both had been involved in the Lower Manhattan Left literary politics of the 1930s, then became more and more purely theorists, critics, aestheticians in the 1940s. More to the point, both had been friends of various abstract artists even during the Freeze. Greenberg had been a regular in the Hofmann cénacle—and it was essentially Hofmann’s ideas and Hofmann’s emphasis on purity purity purity that were about to sweep Cultureburg, via Greenberg. One secret of Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s astounding success, then, was that they were not like uptown critics—they were not mere critics: they spoke as the voice of bohemia … and naturally le monde listened.

  To describe this, the well-placed platform they spoke from, is not to downgrade the two men’s peculiar genius. Greenberg, in particular, radiated a sense of absolute authority. He was not a very prepossessing individual at first glance. He spoke in fits and starts one minute and drawls the next. But somehow one couldn’t help but pay attention. Likewise his prose style: he would veer from the most skull-crushing Gottingen Scholar tautologies, “essences” and “purities” and “opticalities” and “formal factors” and “logics of readjustment” and God knows what else … to cries of despair and outrage such as would have embarrassed Shelley. In a famous essay in Horizon in 1947 he said the entire future of art in America was in the hands of fifty brave but anonymous and beleaguered artists “south of 34th Street” who were about to be wiped out at any moment. By whom—by what? Why, by the “dull horror” of American life. “Their isolation is inconceivably crushing, unbroken, damning,” said Greenberg. “That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this situation is highly improbable. What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million?”

  Clement Greenberg

  Fifty against 140 million! Beautiful; he had out-hartleyed Marsden Hartley; Hartley’s scouting report on the enemy back in 1921 listed only 90 million. It was all sheer rhetoric, of course, the antibourgeois sing-along of bohemia, standard since the 1840s, as natural as breathing by now and quite marvelously devoid of any rational content—and yet Greenberg pulled it off with—well, not just with authority but with moral authority. When Greenberg spoke, it was as if not merely the future of Art were at stake but the very quality, the very possibility, of civilization in America. His fury seemed to come out of an implacable insistence on purity. He saw Modernism as heading toward a certain inevitable conclusion, through its own internal logic, just as Marxists saw Western society as heading irrevocably toward the dictatorship of the proletariat and an ensuing nirvana. In Greenberg’s eyes, the Freight Train of Art History had a specific destination. He called for “self-criticism” and “self-definition”—“self-definition with a vengeance,” he said. It was time to clear the tracks at last of all the remaining rubble of the pre-Modern way of painting. And just what was this destination? On this point Greenberg couldn’t have been clearer: Flatness.

  The general theory went as follows: as the Cubists and other early Modernists had correctly realized, a painting was not a window through which one could peer into the distance. The three-dimensional effects were sheer illusion (et ergo ersatz). A painting was a flat surface with paint on it. Earlier abstract artists had understood the importance of flatness in the simple sense of painting in two dimensions, but they hadn’t known how to go beyond that. They still used paint in such a way that it divided neatly into lines, forms, contours, and colors, just as it had in pre-Modern days. What was needed was purity—a style in which lines, forms, contours, colors all became unified on the flat surface.

  This business of flatness became quite an issue; an obsession, one might say. The question of what an artist could or could not do without violating the principle of Flatness—“the integrity of the picture plane,” as it became known—inspired such subtle distinctions, such exquisitely miniaturized hypotheses, such stereotactic microelectrode needle-implant hostilities, such brilliant if ever-decreasing tighter-turning spirals of logic … that it compares admirably with the most famous of all questions that remain from the debates of the Scholastics: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

  Harold Rosenberg

  Most of the theory up to 1950 was Greenbergian in origin. Enter Rosenberg. Rosenberg came up with a higher synthesis, a theory that combined Greenberg’s formal purity with something that had been lacking in abstract art from the early Synthetic Cubist days and ever since: namely, the emotional wallop of the old realistic pre-Modern pictures. This was a question that had troubled Picasso throughout the 1930s. Any return to realism was out, of course, but Rosenberg had a solution: “Action Painting,” which became the single most famous phrase of the period (a fact that did not please Greenberg).

  “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act,” said Rosenberg. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” The vision that Rosenberg inspired caught the public imagination for a time (the actual public!) as well as that of more painters, professional and amateur, than one is likely to want to recall. It was of Action Painter … a Promethean artist gorged with emotion and overloaded with paint, hurling himself and his brushes at the canvas as if in hand-to-hand combat with Fate. There!… there!… there in those furious swipes of the brush on canvas, in those splatters of unchained id, one could see the artist’s emotion itself—still alive!—in the finished product. (And see? All the picture-plane integrity a reasonable man could ask for, and lines that are forms and forms that are colors and colors that are both.)

  It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up with them one day like tablets brought down from atop Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once called the two men). As tout le monde understood, t
hey were not only theories but… hot news, straight from the studios, from the scene. Rosenberg’s famous Action Painting piece in Art News did not mention a single new artist by name, but tout le monde knew that when he spoke of “one American painter after another” taking up the style, he was really talking about one American painter: his friend de Kooning … or perhaps de Kooning and his cénacle. Greenberg’s main man, as Everybody knew, was his friend Pollock.

  Greenberg didn’t discover Pollock or even create his reputation, as was said so often later on. Damnable Uptown did that. Pick me! Peggy Guggenheim picked Pollock. He was a nameless down-and-out boho Cubist. She was the niece of Solomon (Guggenheim Museum) Guggenheim and the center of the most chic Uptown art circle in New York in the 1940s, a circle featuring famous Modern artists from Europe (including her husband, Max Ernst) who were fleeing the war, Uptown intellectuals such as Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney of the Museum of Modern Art, and young boho protégés such as two members of Pollock’s cénacle, Baziotes and Robert Motherwell. In a single year, 1943, Peggy Guggenheim met Pollock through Baziotes and Motherwell, gave him a monthly stipend, got him moving in the direction of Surrealist “automatic writing” (she loved Surrealism), set him up on Fifty-seventh Street—Uptown Street of Dreams!—with his first show—in the most chic Modernist salon in the history of New York, her own Art of This Century Gallery, with its marvelous Surrealist Room, where the pictures were mounted on baseball bats—got Sweeney to write the catalogue introduction, in prose that ranged from merely rosy to deep purple dreams—and Barr inducted one of the paintings, The She Wolf, into the Museum of Modern Art’s Permanent Collection—and Motherwell wrote a rave for Partisan Review—and Greenberg wrote a super-rave for The Nation … and, well, Greenberg was rather late getting into the loop, if anything. The Consummation was complete and Pollock was a Success before the last painting was hung and the doors were opened and the first Manhattan was poured (remember Manhattans?) on opening night. To that extent Greenberg was just an ordinary reporter bringing you the latest news.

  De Kooning in his studio in mid-Action: the bull—or the matador—as you like it—pulls back and takes a few snorts of reflection before the next collision with Fate

  But Greenberg did something more than discover Pollock or establish him. He used Pollock’s certified success to put over Flatness as the theory—the theoretical breakthrough of Einstein-scale authority—of the entire new wave of the Tenth Street cénacle des cénacles.

  Jackson Pollock’s The She Wolf (1943), the painting the Museum of Modern Art bought as its part in Pollock’s Consummation. The style is halfway between Pollock’s early Picasso-Cubist style and the completely abstract “drip” style for which Pollock is best known. That thick, fuliginous flatness got me in its spell…

  “Pollock’s strength,” he would say, “lies in the emphatic surfaces of his pictures, which it is his concern to maintain and intensify in all that thick, fuliginous flatness which began—but only began—to be the strong point of late Cubism.” And all through bohemia the melody played … That thick, fuliginous flatness got me in its spell… “It is the tension inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the surface,” Greenberg would say, “that produces the strength of his art” … That constructed, re-created flatness that you weave so well… “his concentration on surface texture and tactile qualities” … Those famous paint-flings on that picture plane …

  Ah, the music was playing! And Clement Greenberg was the composer! Other artists were picking up on his theories and Rosenberg’s, sometimes by reading them in the journals—Partisan Review, The Nation, Horizon—but more often in conversation. With The Club going down on Eighth Street the artists of bohemia were now meeting all the time, every day, and talking up a storm. They outtalked any ten canasta clubs from Oceanside and Cedarhurst.

  Greenberg was no slouch at conversation himself, despite his jerky windups and his not very elegant deliveries. Somehow the rough edges went perfectly with the moral conviction that seemed to radiate from his eyeballs. A forty-one-year-old Washington, D.C., artist named Morris Louis came to New York in 1953 to try to get a line on what was going on in this new wave, and he had some long talks with Greenberg, and the whole experience changed his life. He went back to Washington and began thinking. Flatness, the man had said … (You bet he had) … The spark flew, and Louis saw the future with great clarity. The very use of thick oil paint itself had been a crime against flatness, a violation of the integrity of the picture plane, all these years … But of course! Even in the hands of Picasso, ordinary paint was likely to build up as much as a millimeter or two above mean canvas level! And as for the new Picasso—i.e., Pollock—my God, get out a ruler!

  Morris Louis, Third Element, 1962. No painter ever took the Word more literally; with the possible exception of Frank Stella

  So Louis used unprimed canvas and thinned out his paint until it soaked right into the canvas when he brushed it on. He could put a painting on the floor and lie on top of the canvas and cock his eye sideways like a robin and look along the surface of the canvas—and he had done it! Nothing existed above or below the picture plane, except for a few ultra-microscopic wisps of cotton fray, and what reasonable person could count that against him … No, everything now existed precisely in the picture plane and nowhere else. The paint was the picture plane, and the picture plane was the paint. Did I hear the word flat?—well, try to out-flat this, you young Gotham rascals! Thus was born an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism known as the Washington School. A man from Mars or Chester, Pa., incidentally, would have looked at a Morris Louis painting and seen rows of rather watery-looking stripes.

  But the Washington School or the Tenth Street School was no place for creatures from out of state unless they’d had their coats pulled, unless they’d been briefed on the theories. In no time these theories of flatness, of abstractness, of pure form and pure color, of expressive brushwork (“action”) seemed no longer mere theories but axioms, part of the given, as basic as the Four Humors had once seemed in any consideration of human health. Not to know about these things was not to have the Word.

  The Word—but exactly. A curious change was taking place at the very core of the business of being a painter. Early Modernism had been a reaction to nineteenth-century realism, an abstraction of it, a diagram of it, to borrow John Berger’s phrase, just as a blueprint is a diagram of a house. But this Abstract Expressionism of the Tenth Street School was a reaction to earlier Modernism itself, to Cubism chiefly. It was an abstraction of an abstraction, a blueprint of the blueprint, a diagram of the diagram—and a diagram of a diagram is metaphysics. Anyone who tries making a diagram of a diagram will see why. Metaphysics can be dazzling!—as dazzling as the Scholastics and their wing commands of Angels and Departed Souls. But somehow the ethereal little dears are inapprehensible without words. In short, the new order of things in the art world was: first you get the Word, and then you can see.

  The artists themselves didn’t seem to have the faintest notion of how primary Theory was becoming. I wonder if the theorists themselves did. All of them, artists and theorists, were talking as if their conscious aim was to create a totally immediate art, lucid, stripped of all the dreadful baggage of history, an art fully revealed, honest, as honest as the flat-out integral picture plane. “Aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds,” said Barnett Newman in a much-repeated mot. And yet Newman himself happened to be one of the most incessant theoreticians on Eighth Street, and his work showed it. He spent the last twenty-two years of his life studying the problems (if any) of dealing with big areas of color divided by stripes … on a flat picture plane.

  Nobody was immune to theory any longer. Pollock would say things like “Cézanne didn’t create theories. They’re after the fact.” He was only whistling “Dixie.” The fact was that theories—Greenberg’s—about Pollock—were beginning to affect Pollock. Greenberg hadn’t created Pollock’s reputation, but he was its curator, c
ustodian, brass polisher, and repairman, and he was terrific at it. With each new article Greenberg edged Pollock’s status a little higher, from “among the strongest” American abstract artists ever to “the strongest painter of his generation” in America to “the most powerful painter in contemporary America” to a neck-and-neck competition with John Marin (John Marin!) for the title of “the greatest American painter of the twentieth century.” To the few remaining dissidents, Uptown or Downtown, who still pulled long faces and said Pollock’s work looked terribly “muddy” or “chaotic” or simply “ugly,” Greenberg had a marvelous comeback: but of course!—“all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” Well… yes! That’s… right! In an age of avant-gardism, when practically everybody in Cultureburg could remember some new ism which he “hadn’t gotten” at first, this Greenberg dictum seemed to be a pivotal insight of Modernism, the golden aperçu. To COLLECTORS, curators, and even some dealers, new work that looked genuinely ugly … began to take on a strange new glow …

  Barnett Newman

  In any event, if Greenberg was right about Pollock’s status in the world of art—and Pollock wasn’t arguing—then he must also be right about the theories. So Pollock started pushing his work in the direction the theories went. Onward! Flatter! More fuliginous! More “over-all evenness”! But fewer gaping holes! (Greenberg thought Pollock sometimes left “gaping holes” in the otherwise “integrated plane.”) Greenberg took to going by Pollock’s studio and giving on-the-spot critiques.

  Soon Pollock was having a generally hard time figuring out where the boundary was between Himself—old Jack—and his Reputation or whether there was any. Pollock was the classic case of the artist hopelessly stuck between the Boho Dance and the Consummation. Pollock had internalized the usual antibourgeois bohemian values in huge gulps during the days of the Depression, when he was a boho on the dole and doing odd jobs such as hand-painting neckties (during that short-lived men’s fashion). The Consummation came so fast—in that one year, 1943—Pollock never could manage the double-tracking. He got forever stuck halfway. Here was the archetypical Pollock gesture: one night he arrives drunk at Peggy Guggenheim’s house during a party for a lot of swell people. So he takes off his clothes in another room and comes walking into the living room stark naked and urinates in the fireplace. On the other hand, neither that night nor thereafter did he give up coming to Peggy Guggenheim’s house, where all those swell people were. He would insist on going to the old Stork Club or to 21 without a necktie to prove he could get in anyway thanks to “my reputation”—and if he did, he would make sure he got drunk enough and rude enough to get thrown out. They had to accept him Uptown, but he couldn’t stand liking it.