Katie Hill
AL 192, Section 2
Professor Little
Fall 2002
In 1943, Mark Rothko said, “There is no
such thing as a good painting about nothing…the subject is crucial and only
that subject matter is valid which is timeless and tragic” (Hopkins 7). During
the Depression, President Roosevelt’s New Deal section called the Federal Art
Project gave artists like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko work
and encouraged them to paint like the Soviet Socialist Realists (Hopkins 6).
Little did the world know, this project was giving birth to the first great
post-war art movement, Abstract Expressionism. The post-war, avant-garde
Abstract Expression artists Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko
invented new styles of painting, created color-field art*, and invited viewers into their world to see
a deep meaning beyond the obvious.
Throughout the Depression, artists like
Thomas Hart Benton were doing a style called regionalism, which was narrative
art that had an upbeat style and dramatic form (Doss 1). Benton’s friend,
Jackson Pollock, emerged during the 1940’s as a post-war abstractionist. Like
Pollock, many artists did not associate themselves under the title of Abstract
Expressionist, though they had similar styles. Each of their works were intensely
personalized and expressed great emotion. Most of them did agree, however, that
their art portrayed the “spiritual dissatisfaction of modern society” (Cox 3).
They also believed the realism of past art movements lacked the emotion to
describe the crisis of the present-day world (Cox 3). They combined parts of
Modern art movements like Surrealism, Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction but
didn’t use one exclusively. Clement Greenberg, an art critic, referred to
Abstract Expressionists in 1945 as “flattening-out, abstracting and purifying
the process of cubism” (Cox 3). For the first time in art, the canvas became a
space to perform in more than create. Artists were able to express an incident
with colors (Parmesani 50).
An official at the Museum of Modern Art
named Alfred H. Barr, Jr. urged the group of avant-garde artists to give
themselves a name. He suggested “abstract-symbolism” and “intra-subjectionist”
(Cox 1). Robert Coates was the first to use the term “Abstract Expressionism”
in 1946 at an exhibition review (Hopkins 8). He chose this name because the
artists’ work combined nonobjective art of the early twentieth century with the
emotional influence of German Expressionism (Doss 367). They also added the
form, line and space use of Cubist or Abstract artists (Cox 4). Abstract
Expressionists didn’t want to name themselves, and they refused to write a
formal statement, or manifesto, like many other avant-garde artists did to
defend their art (Cox 1). They also stopped
titling their works in the late 1940s. Not giving names to their works made it
even more difficult for art appreciators to understand the subject of their
paintings (Cox 1). The artists thought
Abstract Expressionism was nothing more than a name, and to them it did not
represent a thing, object, organized movement or school, but rather an
“adjectival characterization” (Cox 151).
In post-war America, people were looking
for a community and many searched for an identity within that community.
Jackson Pollock was able to take all of people’s feelings and express them on a
canvas that was larger than life (Doss 365). He used movement and body gestures
to communicate his emotions to the canvas. Pollock said he wanted to express
social anxieties like freedom, strength and a lack of conflict (Doss 365). He
often borrowed his sense of independence from his friend, Thomas Hart Benton
(Hoving 244). Even though Pollock was criticized and nick named “Jack the
Dipper,” he was a favorite artist of many upper-class art collectors, including
Peggy Guggenheim, who was a huge patron of modern art, and Clement Greenberg,
who in 1945 said that Pollock was “the strongest painter of his generation and
perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró*”
(Doss 364). He also said Pollock was one of the most powerful painters in
modern America (Doss 367). He used few political references, even though
Abstract Expressionist usually combined modern art with radical politics (Doss
17). During the Depression, Pollock joined other artists in the denunciations
of nationalism in art (Cox 23).
Until the early 1940s, Pollock used an easel
and brushes like most artists, but he soon realized he preferred to paint on
the floor, because there was no gravity to interrupt his painting (Frank 113).
By pouring the paint directly from the can he was able to create a new style.
Pollock seemed to dance [Appendix A] around his canvas, creating action and
excitement. He used gigantic canvases to create an intimacy with the viewer
(Frank 24). Nothing was accidental with Jackson Pollock (Parmesani 51). His
free, informal technique of dripping and smearing paint was given the name
“gestural painting” (Smith 33). In Pollock’s 1952 painting called “Blue Poles”
[Appendix B] he created poles that seemed to bend and sway (Hoving 244). He
confronted with his viewer through a huge landscape of green, red, yellow,
pink, and blue. This masterpiece was considered a “post-nuclear forest of
energy” (Hoving 244).
Barnett Newman was one of the artists who got
the closest to writing a manifesto, but instead he wrote to his friends and
explained his work to them (Smith 103). Unlike his ally Pollock, to Newman the
painting and it’s meaning was more important than how it was executed. Newman
got into a close-knit group during the Depression while he lived in New York
City and worked on the Federal Art Project (Smith 103). He wanted to create a
field with his artwork rather than a composition (Smith 103). He had a much
greater ambition than artists like Pollock did (Smith 103). Often criticized
for having a lack of passion and emotion, Newman was calm when he painted
(Parmesani 53). He envisioned a space and visual field to paint on.
One of Barnett Newman’s greatest
accomplishments was his group of fourteen works, titled “Stations of the Cross”
(Alloway 14). He completed the first two paintings in 1958 [Appendix C]. To do
the first one, Newman used dry brush marks that expand into a narrow band. The
second was a narrow band that he outlined with a centered, wider, gray band. He
was going to originally title the two works “Adam and Eve,” but he decided to
continue to paint and see what his end result would be. He finished the next
two paintings in 1960, and he was inspired to do more. He titled the set of
four paintings “Station.” In 1962, he completed the next two, three more done
by 1964, another three by 1965 and the final two in 1966 [Appendix D]. Newman
felt these paintings were a “process of self recognition” (Alloway 11). He used
black and white to encourage the identification and the parallelism he felt his
paintings had to Christ instead of traditional iconography*
(Alloway 13). At the bottom of his last painting, Newman included Christ’s last
words on the cross, “It is finished” (Alloway 14). He felt these words
emphasized the unity of passion he was trying to create with his art. Clement
Greenberg examined Newman’s artwork and in 1962 labeled him as well as Mark
Rothko “color-field painters” due to their use of color as a tool to paint a
space (Parmesani 52).
While Newman’s paintings had a meaningful
facade, Rothko wanted to guide his viewers to a point beyond the surface of his
paintings. Mark Rothko liked being part his artwork. He didn’t use subject or
form but instead a material and spiritual action (Parmesani 51). Rothko was
purely abstract and more tranquil than artists like Pollock. Similar to Newman,
his strength was his use of color, but he had more passion and drive than
Newman (Smith 42). He was admired for his embodiment of the American Dream
(Seldes 3).
On February 13, 1965, Mark Rothko signed on
to start on to start a project that would change the idea of chapels forever
(Barnes 48). Architect Philip Johnson designed the unusual octagon-shaped
chapel and decided to place it in Houston, Texas, at the University of St.
Thomas (Barnes 48). To his friends, Rothko called his paintings “voices in an
opera;” the octagon shape would allow the “voices” either to be heard
individually or in unison (Barnes 50). Rothko worked with three assistances,
but would not allow them or anyone else to watch him paint. All the materials
he used would be put away before he allowed any visitors to come into the room
(Barnes 54). The first year of painting, everything he did was trial and error.
Rothko developed an elaborate pulley system because the canvases were so large
and then was able to work alone (Barnes 55). He used an unusual medium mixed of
dry pigments dissolved in heated rabbit-skin glue (Barnes 55). During the
second phase of the painting, he allowed the new assistants to do some of the
base painting, but Rothko did the details (Barnes 58). He had come up with the
perfect balance of interlocking ideas for his paintings: seven black rectangles
on maroon background and seven plum colored paintings (Barnes 57). Rothko’s
last configuration of how the paintings should look on the walls are as
follows: the north wall would have a triptych, the east and west would have
similar triptychs, the south would have a single narrower vertical canvas, and
there would be four single paintings, one on each of the diagonal walls (Barnes
65). The paintings were finished in April of 1967, but the construction of the
chapel had not yet begun (Barnes 67). The designers decided to place a
sculpture by Barnett Newman in a reflecting pool near the south end of the
Rothko Chapel (Barnes 90). The sculpture was named “Broken Obelisk.” The Rothko
Chapel was dedicated on February 27, 1971 (Barnes 103). A day later, “Broken
Obelisk” was dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., on February 28, 1971 (Barnes
90).
These three artists helped define the first
great American art movement, Abstract Expressionism. By using new techniques,
Jackson Pollock invented a whole new style of painting. Barnett Newman obtained
a new level of religious symbolism by using simple color to increase a
painting’s intensity. Mark Rothko used his sense of tranquility to assemble a
chapel that would take away the world’s problems and create harmony. Many
artists tried to imitate these innovators, but none could recreate their unique
and incredible styles. These artists had the freedom to express their thoughts
through their art. They shared similar viewpoints, rather than styles which
made them hard to categorize. Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko
not only developed new styles of painting, they had the ability to engage their
views and take them beyond of surface of their paintings into a whole different
world.