Freedom and Abstract Expressionism

Jackson Pollock "White Light", 1954, Collection MOMA

Coinciding this month with the large Abstract Expressionism show at MOMA in NYC, a fascinating article written in 1995 has been re-circulating online recently.  Though it has been over 50 years since its critical emergence, Abstract Expressionism (AbEx) is still what many people think of as the American art form. How did this happen?

At the close of World War II, there were three coexisting movements in American painting, each vying for critical dominance: American Regionalism, Social Realism and Abstract Expressionism.  Artists that belonged to the two former camps populated their paintings with people and they were often awarded large public commissions or included in prestigious museum exhibitions. After 1953, this changed and Abstract Expressionism, an open ended art, free from depicting people, places or events, became the de facto American art form. As it so happens, the CIA secretly funneled money into cultural foundations that were solely created to exclusively promote Abstract Expressionism.

According to the article’s author Frances Saunders, the CIA was involved with financing traveling   exhibitions during the 1950s that promoted Abstract Expressionism throughout the US, Europe and the Soviet Union. The US was engaged in dismantling the Soviet ideology at every turn and, to the CIA, art was another means to fight the cold war. To its promoters, AbEx was known as free market painting and the exhibitions were to show that there was no official style and no government censorship.  By the CIA’s analysis, everyone would conclude that the US government was unrestrictive and that in America artists could do whatever they desired.

By contrast, at this time Socialist Realism was the government-sanctioned style of the Soviet Union. Socialist Realism was a figure-based art, which took inspiration from the severe art of the Roman Republic. Often depicting a young handsome couple valiantly holding aloft sickles and shears or peasant farmers gleefully gathered around Stalin, Socialist Realism expressed the idea of the worker as hero and the virtues of the Stalinist state.

By promoting AbEx, the CIA believed they were promoting freedom of expression to the world at large. The CIA never interacted with the artists but rather gave money to taste makers and backed off letting them run with the organization and presentation of the art. In the quest by these cultural institutions to dominate the discussion anything representational or figure-based became suspect.  In the end, the figure in art became associated with a totalitarian impulse.

Soon the best practices of representational painting were abandoned in the art schools and what took generations to build up was destroyed by a single generation.  Art curricula dedicated to the freedom to pursue any form of  expression so consistently denied students the opportunity to pursue a particular path, namely that of representational art.  It is unfortunate that what started out as a platform to showcase examples of freedom par excellence devolved, in the hands of academicians and tastemakers, into soft totalitarianism.

Read the article "Modern Art was a CIA Weapon” by Frances Stonor Saunders here:

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-a-cia-weapon-1578808.html


In 1999, Ms. Saunders published a book on this topic:  The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

Jack Levine and Social Realism

Jack Levine "Adam and Eve: Expulsion" 1981

Recently the artist Jack Levine passed away at the age of 90. I vaguely remembered the work of Levine and the online retrospective that accompanied his obituary was a good reminder of his painterly talents. 

Levine, whose parents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, grew up in Boston and attended Harvard where he studied under Denman Ross.  He was associated with the Boston Expressionists, which included his fellow classmate Hyman Bloom and Karl Zerbe.  Levine’s early work is strongly influenced by Oscar Kokaschka and Chaim Soutine and reveals a strong wit and a talent for social commentary.  His early work is expressive and evocative rather than accurately descriptive.

After graduation he was employed for five years by the Works Progress Administration. He participated in exhibitions at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum as well as New York’s Museum of Modern Art before serving 3 years in the Army during World War Two.  In 1951, Levine toured Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship and became enamored with El Greco’s mannerist distortions.

It is interesting that in Levine’s case studying mannerist distortions actually meant that he learned restraint.  Always a deft painter, after viewing El Greco his contours became clear and he learned to control his raw expressive power.  He moved away from boundless shape and color to depicting forms that were contained within line. 

Never at home with only pure expression, Levine populated his pictures with people. However, his interests weren’t those of an academic or realist artist as his instinct towards the human form was always that of a caricaturists. Though Levine surely bumped shoulders with the American Regionalist and the Abstract Expressionists, he belonged to the movement known as Social Realism.

Social Realists were concerned with depicting the daily life of the Amercian working class in an un-romanticized manner. Many of the artists had socialist leanings and were influenced by the French Realists Millet and Courbet (whose own artistic ideas were strongly influenced by the French Socialist thinker Prudhon) .  It is interesting to note that Social Realism in some ways resembles that of the contemporaneous movement known as Socialist Realism, the official art of the Soviet Union.  However, unlike the Socialist Realism of the U.S.S.R., the Social Realist in the U.S. were free to depict whatever they desired. 

Many Social Realists were interested in eschewing prettifying effects in order to create works that empathized with the downtrodden worker.  As a movement it shared a common sentiment with the New York Ashcan school, which flourished in the early 1900s prior to the interest in the School of Paris brought to the US by the Armory Show. Similarly, the Social Realists fell out of favor during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, a movement influenced by the imported European Expressionism that came about between the two world wars.

Since the 1960s, Social Realism has fallen out of the spotlight.   Levine’s last retrospective was in 1978 at New York’s Jewish Museum so it is no wonder that I had a hard time recalling Levine’s work.  Moreover, since the death of his wife in the early 1980s, Levine became increasingly interested Hebraism and quietly produced many masterful paintings based on the Old Testament.  In this way Levine has become a New Old Master following in the footsteps of Rembrandt (who interestingly had influenced Levine’s adolescent painting idol Soutine).

Too long out of the public eye, Levine is about due for some public admiration just as the world is about due for some good painting from the Old Testament.

Rest in Peace, Jack Levine (1915-2010).

Grant Wood and American Regionalism

Grant Wood "Self-portrait" ca 1932-41

A new biography by R. Tripp Evans called Grant Wood: A Life, is a recent attempt to re-examine Grant Wood. Wood (1891-1942) was an American artist that belonged to a small group known as the American Regionalists who worked in the period between the two World Wars.  Last Sunday’s New York Times book review by Deborah Solomon is informative and interesting as it interprets Wood’s work as a type of nostalgia art. She asserts that Wood practiced elegiac painting and, feeling not quite home among his countrymen, Wood longed for the past. 

I don’t quite see it that way. As an artist, Wood had two purposes: he wanted to depict the look and feel of what he saw and he wanted to make it memorable and timeless. As an American Regionalist, Wood departed from the then-popular style of European Modernism and took as his subject rural American life. America is what Wood wanted to faithfully record and to make from it an art for the ages.

Unlike his colleagues Benton and Curry, who depicted American epic tales through large robust figure compositions, Wood tended to focus on portraits or landscapes. He adopted a Flemish style of painting he gleaned from looking at the works of Jan Van Eyck during his few visits to Europe. The uneasiness that the reviewer Deborah Solomon is picking up on, I believe, is the unintentional by product of this type of close-scrutiny painting. 

In the self-portrait above, Wood paints in a manner reminiscent of the 15^th century masters.  He presents an intimate head and shoulders portrait in the close foreground, surrounded by a vast expanse of rolling farmland. A water-pumping windmill is prominently featured to his left.

It is important what Wood depicts around him, namely the farmlands and a windmill.  This type of Aeromotor windmill was a major factor in making semi-arid land into sustainable farmland.   This windmill was so ubiquitous that it is still often today called “the American Windmill”. Though it is used and manufactured in several countries, it has reached the status as a representative symbol of America.

The painting is a tribute to a type of midwest American:  someone whose thoughts and feelings are intimately connected to the land, the seasons and to the viability of the family farm.   The painting is a portrait and as such Wood dutifully captures the psychological complexity of the sitter, himself. However, I believe, he was aiming for something much greater; he intended to capture the important dramatic role, as food producer and thus sustainer of life, that the heartland uniquely plays in America’s psyche. 

American Regionalism was an attempt at honest reporting that walked the line between nationalism and romanticism. It was devoted to the land, the people and the stories of America.  It was a short-lived movement that took place away from the cities. After the end of World War II, it was eclipsed by Abstract Expressionism (the New York City based art form often vigorously promoted as the genuine American art form).

At the very least American Regionalism is an important bridge between academic art of the Nineteenth century and Abstract Expressionism.  As a movement, it came about when what was American art and what was modern art were unsettled issues.  By the 1950s modern critics believed the issue solved, perversely linked this movement to Italian fascism and American Regionalism fell out of favor. It’s nice to see that this movement and the artists are being reconsidered for it was the last time that such an ambitious style emerged in the States.

Read the book review: www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/books/review/Solomon-t.html?pagewanted=all

Lost Michelangelo painting found?

Michelangleo "Pieta" drawing ca. 1538-44 Gardner Museum & Kober family"Pieta" (NYPost)

 

In early October of this year, a lost painting by Michelangelo may have been found.  The painting belongs to the Kober family of Buffalo, NY and is estimated as being worth up to $300 million. An exciting historical find.  But is it really a Michelangelo?

A Michelangelo "Pieta" painting is documented in Vatican letters to have been painted for Vittoria Colonna around 1545.  Michelangleo, born in 1475, would have been 70 years old when he painted it; nearly 45 years after his famous "Pieta" sculpture in St.Peter's Basilica, Rome.  

Interestingly, there is a drawing at the Gardner Museum in Boston of the same subject, which the museum dates to 1538-44.  A side by side comparison, as shown above,  reveals that the drawing was done by an artist extremely sensitive to human form.  Michelangelo was a master of human structure and could depict not only the effects of physical forces on the body but he knew how to do so for the utmost poetic effect.  Sadly, the painting  lacks any sensitivity or vitality.  

 Moreover, Michelangelo being a sculptor knew how to keep his forms organized in a hierarchical arrangement: the largest underlying form was clearly revealed and never overtaken by the smallest forms. The painting shows, especially in the costal arch of the rib cage, an extreme flattening with a poorly understood arrangement of shapes that break up into an inorganic pattern.

Continuing, the forms of Christ's face and forehead are primitive as are the forms of the cherub's left scapula.  Many of the forms are inexpertly delineated and harshly cut-off from the neighboring forms.  This is a common mistake of the novice who has understood how to see separate forms but not how to interweave the forms into a supple, cohesive whole.  The virgin's face is a distorted mask that lacks any emotion.  

It is an interesting find but I doubt this is by the great Michelangelo.

Photo from NYPost. com and you may read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/mike_found_in_buffalo_Or3Ok3NfUR21qEqBxK3u2H#ixzz14rA1UbTj

Sargent Mural Studies at MFA Boston

Studies for "Achiles and Chiron" by John Singer Sargent

I’ve always admired the artist John Singer Sargent.  In particular I enjoy his two murals located in Boston, one at the public library and the other at the museum.  Recently, I had a few hours to tour the Museum of Fine Arts and I headed to the grand rotunda to view Sargent’s several panel cycle of Greek myths that celebrate, among other things, the human body in movement.

The museum has undergone a major renovation and there have been curatorial changes throughout the museum.  A nice change was the room beneath the grand rotunda which was recently hung with some of Sargent’s preparatory studies for his mural.  This room is uniquely designed to house such an exhibition as it has a giant oculus in its ceiling and allows visitors to view the central portion of the mural above. Along the walls of this room are about a dozen sketches in both charcoal and oil paint. 

The charcoal studies are mainly of single figures kneeling, reaching, or stretching heavenward.  Sargent showing his mastery of human form filled the sheets with additional studies of arms, legs and feet.  A great surprise to see was a full value tonal study for “Chiron and Achilles” which appears in the upper corner of a sheet of hand studies.

The oil studies are elegantly painted. Though they are done with bold strokes that block out the major structures of the figures they are restrained by a red contour. This contour enables the viewers to clearly read the shapes of the forms at a distance.  I assume the red color keeps the contour light and allows for increased visibility at great distances. 

It is rare to view both the completed work and the sketches more or less side by side and it is worth taking a visit.  The MFA has a wonderful online database that one may access for free.  Typing in “Sargent” will allow you to view 10 pages of sketches, a few of which were on view.   Here’s the link: www.mfa.org/search/collections?keyword=sargent

Bartlett Pear

by Dennis Cheaney, oil on linen, 4"x4"

Agata's Gladioli

by Dennis Cheaney, oil on panel, 5"x5"