Early Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism Author(s): Robert C. Hobbs Source: Art Journal, Vol. 45, No.

4, The Visionary Impulse: An American Tendency (Winter, 1985), pp. 299-302 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776801 . Accessed: 13/04/2014 12:18
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Early
and

Abstract Expressionism Surrealism

By Robert C. Hobbs

World War II had cut off Europe from the rest of the world and the United States was becoming involved with the war first in an effort known as Fortress America, and then as an actual combatant. Thus, during their formative years the Abstract Expressionists were floundering through a number of halfunderstoodtruths about modern art and attempting to find a way to communicate their feelings about the apocalyptic state of the world. Robert Motherwell has argued persuasively that some of the painters who were to become known as the Abstract Expressionists were working with the Chilean painter Roberto Matta Echaurren, a young member of the Surrealist group, to establish a Surrealism faithful to the original tenets of Andre Breton's 1924 manifesto,' but his argument fails to take into consideration those aspects of Abstract Expressionismwhich distinguish it from Surrealism and make it a very different way of coming to understand the modern psyche, its relationship to historical culture, and the very real concerns of the war. Although both Surrealism and Abstract Expressionismare concerned with the subconscious or unconscious mind, the former is classical in its orientation whereas the latter is romantic. I am here using "classical" to mean the desire to create an order that is understandable by a group and "romantic" to mean the distillation of perceived truth through the personalvision of the artist. Surrealism, as defined by Breton in his first manifesto, is Pure psychic automatism by whose means it is intended to express ... the actual functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason and outside of all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. [It] is based on the belief in the superior

When began to paint in the early 1940s,

the Abstract Expressionists

reality of certain forms of association hitherto neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin, once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms and to replace them in solving the main problems of life.2 Thus, by definition the Surrealists were more classical than romantic. This observationis supportedby the fact that the Surrealists were a closely knit group of painters and poets who understood from the outset what constitutes a Surrealist painting or object;they had affinities with the Positivists, who intended to categorize and define elements in such a way that their truths are verifiable. Yet, despite Breton'sinsistence on "the actual functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason," the Surrealists actually approachedtheir art in a way that is just as reasoned as Descartes's famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am." Emphasizing wonderful conjunctions of radically different objects and images, they created thrilling sensations of a higher reality. The Surrealistsregardedthe poet's study or the painter's studio as a laboratory where they could experiment with creativity in the form of automatic writing and psychic automatism. Although they sought to discover thought before it becomes rational, the Surrealists were rarely content to leave inchoate scribblings in their finishedpoems or mindless doodles and puddles of paint in their completed paintings; rather, they felt compelled to exercise the constraints of the conscious analytic mind on these unbridled outbursts and to force them into culturally prescribedareas in order to make the mysteriouscomprehensible. Many Abstract Expressionists used an improvisatory technique that resembled psychic automatism, which Motherwell termed "plastic automatism." Motherwell identified it as a sequence of three logical stages: scrib-

bling or doodling to coax the mind to release its sub-, pre-, or unconscious elements; reflecting on these improvisations to see what kinds of structuresthey suggest; and ordering all the elements into a composition that takes into consideration these structures and builds on them.3 A basic assumption of both plastic and psychic automatism is that the unconscious mind is the real great creative genius, the artistic muse whose powers must be first unleashed and then regrouped into some acceptable order. Plastic automatism is close to Surrealism, and Motherwell is closer to the French art than is any other Abstract Expressionist but Arshile Gorky. But Motherwell and his fellow Abstract Expressionists chose to complete the third phase of psychic automatism in a way that radically differs from many Surrealists: unlike the Surrealists, they were content to play on spontaneity and allow it a role in the completed work. modernists. In the early forties the Abstract Expressionists were trying to understand all the European "isms" that Alfred Barr had laid out so carefully in his two magisterial exhibitions of the late 1930s, Cubism and Abstract Art and Dada, Surrealism, and Fantastic Art, but many of the stylistic designations did not make sense to them. Picasso, for example, was both a Cubist and a Surrealist, but some of his most Cubist works seemed more Surrealist to the Americans than his so-called Surrealist works. The Abstract Expressionists also saw works by Paul Klee in a variety of styles and enough important early Kandinskys to make them wonder about where he fit in the so-called Cubist-Surrealist polarity. And Piet Mondrian puzzled them, too. Mondrian, the hero of the American Abstract Artists group, whom the Abstract Expressionists for the most part discounted as mere decorative artists, had his first one-person exhibition at the Valentine Winter 1985 299

he Americanswere not orthodox

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Dudensing Gallery in 1942. That exhibition revealed to many of the Abstract Expressionists, including Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, Mondrian's genius and his position as the most advanced artist in the 1940s. They did not understand why Mondrian's recent works, such as Broadway Boogie Woogie, were so moving when the entire moderne enterprise that was tied to De Stijl and Art Deco seemed to them so superficial and empty. Mondrian's art affected them deeply in the late forties and continued to affect Newman in the 1960s when he painted Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? and Motherwell in 1967 when he began his Open series. Because the Abstract Expressionists were cut off from Europe, where no doubt they would have attached themselves to only one group of artists, and because they saw Purists, Cubists, Surrealists, Constructivists, and German Expressionistsall working in New York, they began to achieve a grand synthesis of modern art by taking first from one group and then from another. Ironically, they borrowedfrom various avant-garde artists even though they distrusted modernism. To them modern art was Art Deco, which seemed cold and decorative, and the American Abstract Artists, who seemed academic. And the entire modernenterpriseseemed alien to them: mass media, mass transit, and especially the new technological developments-air power, armaments, and the like-because they had resulted in World War II, were suspect. Moreover, science, the biological sciences, in particular, had been bankrupted by the Nazi obsession with enhancing desirable human traits through science to produce a supreme race of beings and eradicating those with traits they considered undesirable. The Abstract Expressionists thus were caught up in a contradiction:they were fiercely antimodern even though they respected most modern artists. They looked at the European avantgarde less as a corps of progressivesand more as isolated individuals who, like themselves, were caught up in the frustrations of an inhuman scientific and technological age and intent on redeeming personal values and intuitive insights. It is possible in the decade preceding the 1940s that Picasso's creation of images of the mythic halfhuman/half-beast Minotaur helped them to formulate their romantic stance. This antimodern bias attracted them to certain aspects of Surrealism, particularly Max Ernst's collages using engravings from nineteenth-century textbooks, Andr6 Masson's visionary pictures of a primordialworld populated 300 Art Journal

by insects and strange plant forms, and Joan Mir6's works that employed images taken from Catalan folk art. Although they gravitated towards these works, they did not pursue the Surrealists' desire to reformulate Renaissance perspective by using the irrationality of dreams-a quest evident in the art of Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, and Matta Echaurren. The Abstract Expressionists during the war years did not want to create predictable works of art: they found logic questionable and distrusted the scientific metaphor that the Surrealists had used in testing themselves and their subconscious. The Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s were concerned less with clinically examining the mind than with learning to play their hunches. Their exploits representreal attempts to trust themselves, to see if the seeds of culture were buried within them, if somehow Jung's idea of archetypes as genetically encoded predilections to certain kinds of imagery and religious experiences was true. They embraced ambiguity; they believed in mysteries; and they aided their internal exploits by reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Frazer's Golden Bough, Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, and Freud's and Jung's writings on the subconscious and unconscious minds. Pollock in addition read Bureau of Ethnology reports on the North American Indians; Gottlieb and Theodoros Stamos at different times visited the Southwest; Newman and William Baziotes frequented the American Museum of Natural History; and Arshile Gorky crouched low in the grass to examine the strange world of insects. realists and the Abstract Expressionists, differences in religious affiliations are rarely mentioned, despite the relevance of religion to the respective movements. Surrealism, for example, represented an attack on the Catholic Church. Motherwell tells a story about how the Surrealists ganged up on Mir6 one day after he returned home from mass and threatened to hang him if he did not give up Catholicism and abide by the religion of Surrealism.4Although the story is probably apocryphal, it does reveal their concern and fear of the Church. Although Dali later became a devout Catholic, Buiiuel never stopped his crusade against the Church, as his film Viridiana (1962) indicates. The Surrealists, then, were fighting one dogma by producinganother;their reaction became a mirror of its antithesis. Consequently many of their paintings and objects took on the characteristics of devotional objects and liturgical vessels.

n distinguishingbetween the Sur-

In contrast to the Surrealists, a number of Abstract Expressionists were Jewish; Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman, Lee Krasner, and Ad Reinhardt, among them. Because many of the Jews who fled Germany in the 1930s had come to the United States, information about the Nazis' anti-Semitic outrages was widespread in New York City. The awareness of the atrocities committed against their fellow Jews was likely a motivating force for their attempts to explore their psyches for metaphors dealing with the origins of life and culture. Gottlieb's Eyes of Oedipus (1941 ), which memorializes the Greek king who blinded himself to avoid the guilt of his father's murder, takes on new meaning when it is viewed in the light of Jewish consciousness of Nazi activities in Europe and the new, restrictive immigration regulations of 1939-41 in the United States, which prevented Jews and others from entering the country.5 Also Gottlieb's poetic statement of 1943 regarding the importance of subject matter takes on new meaning when considered in relation to the enormousnumber of Jews who were then being herded off to concentration camps and killed: If we profess kinship to the art of primitive man, it is because the feelings they expressed have a particular pertinence today. In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of color and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurities of life. That these feelings are being experienced by many people throughout the world today is an unfortunate fact and to us an art that glosses over or evades these feelings is superficial and meaningless. That is why we insist on subject matter that embraces these feelings and permits them to be expressed.6 And when these atrocities are taken into account, Newman's Pagan Void (1946) and Onement(1948) similarly yield new interpretations:the former painting suggests that the artist is attempting to penetrate the dark core from which all existence began; the other to create a healing picture that would serve as a new mandala indicating a possible unity and wholeness after the war.' Certainly the emphasis on the Sublime in these works of the late forties, on the strongest aesthetic emotion one is capable of feeling, develops out of postwar attitudes that include full knowledge of the horrors of war.

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It seems to me that the possibility of losing all Europe to the Fascists struck a deep chord in the Americans and convinced them that their art must be oracular and that it ought to strike a regenerative note. If one were to line up all early Abstract Expressionist works of art, there would be a surprising number of paintings conceived in earth colors and a great number that deal with planting symbols (Gottlieb's Persephone [1942] and Stamos's Movement of the Plants [1945] come immediately to mind, as do Still's chthonic works in browns, blacks, tans, and earth reds), with underwater imagery (Rothko's watercolors, Pollock's Pasiphaie [1943] and Guardian of the Secret [1943]), with unicellular life (Pousette-Dart's Symphony Number I The Transcendental [early 1940s], Newman's early pastels), and with the fecundity of nature, in the form of hybrids (Gorky's plants with bones as stems from which sprout blossoms certainly fit into this category). Although the early Abstract Expressionists rarely created harvest images, some would later paint ironic or tragic images of harvest: De Kooning's full-blown women invert the tradition of fertility figures to become harpies. And Motherwell's Elegies announce the death of nature in the form of castrated phalluses and exploding fruit still hanging on limbs. n consideringthe relationshipbetween Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, one cannot discount the importance of formal manifestos for the former group and the absence of any such universally agreed upon statement of intent in the latter group. Although individual Abstract Expressionists stated their goals and some even banded together to write proclamations, none of the writings had the cohesive and official force of the Surrealist manifestos. In addition, all the writings of the Abstract Expressionists appear to have been made after the act of painting; none of them have the impact of a preformulative mission statement. The Abstract Expressionists in their statements appear to be fumbling for words, to be attempting to discern among all the threads and ideas which ones were decisive. Their suspension of meaning to an end result, their ability to deal with ambiguity and flux, and their reliance on the medium itself as a vehicle for their ideas are all aspects of their art that differentiated them from the Surrealists. The Abstract Expressionists relied more on the artistic medium as the bearer of their ideas than did the Surrealists, who were frequently transposing mixed metaphors and verbal contra-

Fig. I Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1944-46, watercolor and ink on paper, 217/8x 211/4".Iowa City, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation. dictions into painting, into drawings called "Exquisite Corpses," and into found objects that were sublty altered to conjure up the magic of disparate worlds and a higher reality. The Abstract Expressionists followed Mallarm6, who asserted that poems were made with words not ideas, and created works with paint, whose ideas or content were the result not the predeterminedgoal. These American artists bridged a contradiction, which I believe they never resolved. They attempted to suspend thought and work in a medium in the hope that the medium itself would evoke feelings, spiritual intimations, and understandings. They attempted to imbue the material with the spiritual, and their work frequently attests to the late capitalist era in which they were working because the materiality of their means is so readily apparent, so clearly trying to transcend itself in the quest for the spiritual. In Abstract Expressionism there is still an element of the nineteenth-century truth-to-materials concept that was promulgated by Horatio Greenough. But truth-to-materials ultimately becomes in a capitalist society truth to the object, a quest for the essence of the object through a quasiphilosophical justification of its constituent elements. When this idea is transmitted to art, it becomes at best Winter 1985 301

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Notes
1 Sidney Simon, "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1943: An Interview with Robert Motherwell Conducted by Sidney Simon in New York in January 1967," Art International, 11, no. 6 (Summer 1967), p. 21. 2 Andre Breton, "The Manifesto of Surrealism," in The Autobiography ofSurrealism, ed. Marcel Jean, The Documents of 20th-Century Art, New York, 1980, p. 123. 3 Robert Hobbs, Conversation with Robert Motherwell, May 28, 1975. See also: Max Kozloff, "An Interview with Robert Motherwell: How I Admire My Colleagues," Artforum, 4, no. 1 (September 1965), pp. 33-37. 4 Hobbs, Motherwell Conversation (cited n. 3). The event occurred in Paris, not New York, and was related to Motherwell by one of the Surrealists living in New York. 5 David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, New York, 1984, pp. 5-6, 20-21. My conversation with Audrey Chanen, who is involved in a study of the Holocaust, has proved valuable for this article. 6 Statement by Adolph Gottlieb, from Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, "The Portrait and the Modern Artist," mimeographed script of a radio broadcast on "Art in New York," H. Stix, director, WNYC, New York, October 13, 1943, n.p. One might well wonder why these artists did not deal directly in their art with the world problems that obviously troubled them. The answer lies in the excesses of the Social Realist painting of the 1930s that simplified art and turned it into thinly veneered propaganda. The Abstract Expressionists recoiled from Social Realism and were determined to find a way to create an abstract art of meaningful content. At some point, Rothko's development of traditional Christian iconography will need to be explored in relation to his Jewish background. 7 Newman painted Genetic Moment in 1947 and in 1958 began The Stations of the Cross, which are subtitled Lema Sabachthani, "Why do you forsake me?" These titles signify his interest in apocalyptic subject matter and perhaps refer indirectly to the brutality endured by many people during World War II. Together with the editors of Tiger's Eye and such contributors as Robert Motherwell, Newman helped to reframe the Sublime, the strongest aesthetic emotion, so that it would be relevant to modern art. See: "The Ideas of Art--6 Opinions on What is Sublime in Art," Tiger's Eye, 1, no. 6 (December 1948) pp. 51-53.

Fig. 2 Matta [Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren], Like Me, Like X, 1942, oil on canvas, 28 x 36". Iowa City, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim. problematic and at worst an inherent contradiction because it posits a materialistic doctrine that never allows one to transcend the art object but always keeps one coming back to it as the soul of the aesthetic. In other words, this theory actually posits the essence of sculpture to be stone, bronze, and wood; of drawing to be Cont6, graphite, and paper; of painting to be oil paint, sizing, and canvas. The way the American Abstract Expressionists hoped to attain the spiritual through the material was by courting ambiguity and creating an aura in their work that would take viewers away from the contemplation of a painting as an object and evoke the mystery of being. Despite their recourse to ambiguity, their work differs from Surrealist pictures of the realm of dreams: Abstract Expressionist works tend to be less literal and focused, more concerned with sleeping metaphors that suggest without spelling out the meaning of their art. A comparison of Rothko's Untitled (Fig. 1) with Matta's Like Me, Like X (Fig. 2) underscores the difference. Whereas Rothko alludes to underwater realms and pictures strange hybrids that seem distantly related to tribal fetishes, paramecia, jellyfish, and medieval costumes without seeming to focus on any one element in particular, thus remaining dreamlike and diffuse, Matta's work is more clearly science fictional and looks like an image either of outer space or of the placenta as viewed by an embryo. 302 Art Journal early Abstract Expressionism was marked by a divergence from Surrealism. I would emphasize the romanticism of the early Abstract Expressionists, their desire to use themselves as distilleries for universal truths, their insistence on letting meaning be an outcome of free play rather than a mission to be carried out, their realization that apocalyptic times call for positive convictions, their interest in Jung's archetypes as a working premise, and their desire to rely on the expressive qualities of their medium and to avoid the materialism inherent in a truth-to-materials ethic by cultivating ambiguity and the aura of an idea rather than attempting to create a literal manifestation of it. One could say that the Abstract Expressionists emphasized the generative, improvisatory aspects of art more than did the Surrealists. And unlike the Surrealists, they distrusted modernism and science, and hoped to restate the history of human culture by finding seeds of it within themselves, in their own unconscious. One might generalize, with the full realization that generalizations are only partial truths, and say that the Surrealists were reworkingthe Renaissance picture and intent on breaking apart its logical structure, while the Abstract Expressionists were returning to the very beginnings of art and using cave painting as a necessary metaphor of renewal and continuance in their very apocalyptic era.

n certain essential respects, then,

Robert Hobbs is Curator,Contemporary Arts Museum,Houston.

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