Art Beat – Action/Abstraction

– By Mary Brennan Gerster –

The power of the pen is most acutely felt when wielded by critics. Curators, artists, poets, choreographers and dancers all are too often at the mercy of the opinion of a single critic. A scathing review can pour cold water on a gallery exhibition and close a Broadway show.
During the reign of the Abstract artists, two critics held sway as the arbiters of great art in New York, which was then the center of the art world. These two native Jewish New Yorkers, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, are the focus of “Action/Abstraction: Polock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976”, an informative and visually enjoyable exhibition at the Jewish Museum.
The Jewish Museum brings us a survey of the art produced in New York City that changed the art world forever. The quality of the examples of each of the artists, praised or not by these two critics, is exceptional; the exhibition includes some of the best work of the abstract artists of the mid-twentieth century, including Hans Hoffman, the revered teacher of so many of the Abstract Expressionists.
Clement Greenberg, influenced by Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, was a proponent of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed artists during the Great Depression. The WPA afforded artists the opportunity to paint on a large scale, such as murals in government buildings. You can see an example of WPA art, the Jay Family mural by Guy Pene du Bois, in the Rye Post Office. For Greenberg, with his socialist leanings, it made sense for the government to employ artists, like any other profession.
Greenberg was disinterested in subject matter; so, when he encountered the raw passion of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, he declared him “the strongest painter of his generation.” As a result of Greenberg’s review, Pollock was featured in Life magazine in 1949, bringing him into four million American homes. He wrote for the Nation and the Partisan Review, among a number of publications.
Greenberg connected Pollock with other American artists, comparing him with Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. He believed in the “stylistic evolution” from Giotto to Courbet and up to Pollock. He was so strongly against figurative references that when deKooning produced his divine “Women” series, Greenberg objected vigorously.
Harold Rosenberg was a proponent of Existentialism and a follower of the theories of Jean Paul Sartre. He was against the WPA, thinking it offensive to classify art as a job.  Writing for ART news, and as the longtime critic for The New Yorker, he originated the term “action painting” to describe the art he championed, including Pollock, deKooning, Motherwell, Gorky, Barnett Newman and Rothko.
While Greenberg may have been disappointed by deKooning’s (1904-1997) Woman (1949-50) because of its references to the figurative, to me it reveals the wonder of this artist’s genius. It is passionate, with a lush sense of female form and emotion in every gesture.
Clyfford Still (1909-1980) hailed from North Dakota, and in all of his work there is a sense of the open plains of America. He is an abstract Hudson River painter that brings us the panorama of the country. In 1950 - No. 2, deep reds, maroons and umbers in ragged patches of color create the sense of a Native American blanket or woven rug.
Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) is a surprising addition to this exhibition, and the piece, Collection (1971), is a delight. It’s a series of slim wood panels descending into a vortex creating a sense of depth on a flat plane. Steinberg seems to be having fun with Greenberg’s insistence on flatness. Each wood panel represents an artist likely to be in a great collection — Monet, Picasso and Mondrian are a few.
Greenberg and Rosenberg gave little or no attention to female artists, notwithstanding their egalitarian views; and African-American artists such as Norman Lewis were equally ignored. Ironically, the most famous photo of this group of artists, all white males, was taken by Gordon Parks, the great African-American photographer.
My favorite works in the show are by Grace Hartigan (1922- ). Despite her friendship with Pollock, deKooning, Motherwell and Rothko, as well as both critics, she received no reviews from them. Summer Street (1956) shines with the colors of a summer day. The paint is dense and sunlight shimmers on water and grasses and flowers. though none are depicted. In New England October (1957), one feels the fall air thick with ochre and rust leaves, deep rose madder of Japanese cherry trees and slivers of sky shining through. Her work is simple delicious.
Helen Frankenthaler is another great female artist whose works are in this show. She was influenced by Pollock’s method of taking the canvas off the easel, laying it on the floor and approaching it from four sides. She used unsized canvas and had the paints bleed into the canvas as she poured them on. Mountains and Sea (1952) has soft undulating colors with the palest of pinks and blue and yellow.
Frankenthaler in turn influenced Morris Louis (1912-1962) represented here with Iris (1954). The multi shades of purple and lavender found in an iris slowly unfold as stripes of color vertically cross the canvas.
If you have never understood or liked non-representational art, a visit to this exhibition will make you a believer.

“Action/Abstraction” runs through September 21. The Jewish Museum, located at 1109 Fifth Avenue, is closed on Friday and free on Saturday. Call 212-423-3200 or visit www.thejewishmuseum.org.