The American artist with any pretensions to total seriousness suffers still from his dependency upon what the School of Paris, Klee, Kandinsky, and Mondrian accumulated before 1935… . All excellence seems to flow still from that vivacious, unbelievable near past which lasted from 1905 until 1930 and which not even the First World War, but only Hitler, could definitely terminate.
—Clement Greenberg, 1947

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss.
—Robert Motherwell, 1951

We Americans have the technique to bring something to performance so well that the subject is left out. There is nothing we throw away so quickly as our données; for we would make always an independent and evangelical, rather than a contingent, creation… . We throw away so much and make so much of the meager remainder. We make a great beauty, which is devastated of everything but form and gait.
—R. P. Blackmur, 1958

Is it possible that the significance of the New York School has been misconstrued? Is it possible that the much vaunted “triumph” of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s—when, for the first time in our history, an entire “school” of advanced American painting commanded international attention and acclaim—might not, after all, have been the unqualified artistic success it is nowadays taken to be by all the organs of established cultural opinion? That the emergence of the New York School in the decade that followed upon the end of the Second World War brought an immense change in the fortunes of American art is certainly beyond dispute. That this momentous change was closely linked to a decline in the fortunes of modernist art in Europe—the art from which Abstract Expressionism derived its principal impetus and ideas—remains a far more contentious issue. That the implications of that decline did much to determine the scope of what it was possible for the New York School to achieve is a question which few chroniclers of the Abstract Expressionist movement have been willing to confront. From a critical perspective of this persuasion, however, the emergence of the New York School is best understood as at once an epilogue to and a quintissentialization and apotheosis of the great epoch of early twentieth-century modernist painting in Europe.

Such a view is, of course, very much at odds with current critical orthodoxies. On the one hand, there is the citadel of institutional opinion that insists on celebrating the New York School as a grand departure from European tradition, quite as if Abstract Expressionist painting was to be seen as some sort of analogue to Whitman’s poetry or jazz. On the other hand, there is a counter-orthodoxy prevalent in the academy that holds to a belief that the American avant-garde somehow “stole” its artistic ideas from their legitimate European custodians under the malign auspices of the Cold War. The first attempts to aggrandize the New York School by exaggerating its originality and uniqueness, while the second attempts to demonize it for purely political purposes. (To this demonizing political agenda, moreover, the academic Left has lately added equally irrelevant charges of racism and sexism.) Yet neither of these critical orthodoxies seems true either to our experience of the art itself or to the historical circumstances in which it was created.

What is essential to understand about the historical origins of the New York School is that it emerged from a world in which the political geography of modernist art had suffered a severe contraction. Even before the Second World War brought the public life of art in Europe to a virtual standstill, modernism had been outlawed in two of its vital centers—first in Russia under the Soviet regime of Stalin, and then in Germany under the Nazi regime of Hitler. This malevolent fate had particularly grievous consequences for the votaries of abstraction, which was everywhere seen—by its champions no less than by its enemies—to represent the most extreme manifestation of the modernist spirit in art, and was thus even more vulnerable to hostile opinion than its figurative counterpart.

What is also important to understand about the fate of modernist art in the decade prior to the Second World War is that even in those countries where it was more or less accepted as a legitimate, though still controversial, component of modern cultural life—which was largely the case in France, Britain, and the United States—abstraction continued to meet with fierce institutional resistance. In France, except for Léger and Delaunay, the masters of the School of Paris were hostile to pure abstraction. In the 1930s, moreover, the dominance of Surrealism on the Paris art scene had the effect of marginalizing even abstract artists of the stature of Mondrian and Kandinsky. (That the abstract art of Kandinsky had exerted a crucial influence on Miró, the greatest painter to receive the imprimatur of André Breton, hardly mattered. Kandinsky remained excluded from the Surrealist canon.) In Britain, too, despite a spirited campaign mounted in the critical writings of Herbert Read on behalf of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo, abstraction was generally regarded by both the cognoscenti and the public as something alien and absurd. Even a modernist critic as enlightened as Roger Fry had harbored serious doubts about its aesthetic efficacy.

The situation in America was somewhat different, however. While mainstream critical opinion in the United States was similarly hostile or indifferent to the achievements of abstract art in the 1930s, there was nonetheless some significant institutional support for its European masters. The Museum of Non-Objective Art—later to be better known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—was founded in New York in 1937 as a kind of shrine to Kandinsky and his followers. (Jackson Pollock worked there, doing odd jobs, in 1943.) Even earlier, in 1927, A. E. Gallatin had opened his Gallery of Modern Art, a collection that favored abstraction, at New York University, and earlier than that, in 1920, Katherine Dreier had founded the Société Anonyme, which was also sympathetic to abstraction. Most important of all was the founding in 1929 of the Museum of Modern Art, where in 1936 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., organized a major exhibition of “Cubism and Abstract Art,” which gave the public of its day its first comprehensive account of the history of abstract art in Europe.

Yet not a single American painting was included in the “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition, though Alexander Calder was represented by his mobile sculpture. This implicit downgrading of American abstraction deeply embittered our embattled native modernists, who in the 1930s were fighting a lonely struggle for recognition against the popularity of reactionary Regionalist and Social Realist painting. This led to a public protest in 1939 when a group called the American Abstract Artists, which had been organized in 1936 to advance the cause of abstract art in the United States, issued a broadside that asked the question, “How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?” It was signed by fifty-two artists, and caused the museum a good deal of embarrassment. It did not, however, prompt any immediate change in policy.

The reason, though never publicly avowed, was nonetheless clear. American abstract art in the 1930s was not deemed sufficiently powerful or original to merit more vigorous support. As one of the museum’s curators, James Thrall Soby, confided on another occasion: “You cannot possibly present twentieth-century American painting as we have presented School of Paris painting. The revolutionary impact is not there.” This is a judgment that posterity has somewhat modified—for there was more going on in American art in the 1930s than the museum quite appreciated —but not essentially altered. Even the most advanced American art of the time was still largely tethered to European initiatives.

This was a situation that the eruption of the Second World War radically changed. The fall of Paris to the Nazi army in June 1940 marked the end of an era in European modernism. If the modernist movement in art was to have any immediate future, it would be left to artists in the United States —both native modernists and European émigrés—to create that future. Almost overnight, then, New York became the sole remaining outpost of the modernist movement, and thus the de facto capital of the international avant-garde. This was as much of a shock to the Americans as it was to the Europeans, for modernist art was essentially a European creation and American artists were used to regarding themselves as the underdogs of the movement. That its future might now be in American hands was a daunting prospect for which few American talents had prepared themselves. Yet it was in this atmosphere of shock, dislocation, and worldwide crisis—a crisis in the very civilization that had produced the modernist movement—that the New York School emerged in the early years of the war.

Like so many of the other American painters who constituted that first generation of New York School painters, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was abysmally ill-prepared, by training or temperament or intellect, to respond to this daunting challenge. That he succeeded to the extent that he did—which was for a very brief period between 1947 and 1950—was itself a remarkable feat, a triumph of ambition and short-lived inspiration over a severely handicapped and unruly personality. The figure he most resembles in American cultural history isn’t Walt Whitman but Hart Crane, whose horrific career traced a similar course of self-destructive combat with extreme circumstance to wrest from the conventions of European modernism an authentic statement of American experience.

In September 1939, when the war in Europe commenced, Pollock was a twenty-seven-year-old painter whose accomplishment was negligible and whose personality was already showing signs of fracture and disarray. For two years he had been under psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and would remain under treatment—mostly of a Jungian persuasion—for some years to come. As an artist he was still very much under the influence of his teacher and mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, one of the leaders of the Regionalist school. He had also taken a keen interest in the Mexican muralists, especially José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who in the 1930s were very much in vogue in the United States. (They indeed enjoyed more favor at the Museum of Modern Art than most American modernists.) It was from Siqueiros in the 1930s that Pollock acquired an interest in the use of enamel paint and some of the techniques for dripping and pouring it, though it would be another decade before he put them to significant use in his own painting. It was not until 1940 that, as his brother Sande wrote at the time, Pollock had “finally dropped the Benton nonsense.”

What seems to have changed everything for Pollock was seeing Picasso’s Guernica at the Valentine Gallery in New York in the spring of 1939, and then, later that year, the mammoth exhibition “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art” at the Museum of Modern Art. It was his intense encounter with Picasso that marked Pollock’s entry into the arena of modernist painting, which Benton had famously repudiated—an arena in which Picasso would presently be submerged, in Pollock’s case, by the impact of Kandinsky, Miró, Masson, and Matta. It was to a large extent the therapeutic ethos of Jungian psychoanalysis, however—an ethos that conferred immense metaphysical authority on so-called “archetypes,” which were believed to lie buried in the recesses of unconscious memory but were waiting to be magically summoned for conscious purpose—that determined the way Pollock performed in that arena.

What ignited this heady amalgam of modernist pictorial aesthetics and Jungian psychology in Pollock’s painting was the Surrealist doctrine of automatism, which was itself derived from the Freudian concept of the unconscious. This isn’t the place to explore the central role played by psychoanalytic theory and practice in the art and culture of the 1940s in this country. Suffice it to say that it was enormous. It effectively supplanted the role played by Marxist thought in the 1930s, and exerted an even greater influence on the conduct of life. Neither the art of the New York School nor the poetry of the same period—the poetry of the generation of Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell—can be fully understood or seriously assessed in isolation from the culture of psychoanalysis. Nor, for that matter, can any other area of American cultural life in the years between the Second World War in the 1940s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, a subject that still awaits a social historian to do it justice.

Be all this as it may, it was the doctrine of automatism that emancipated Pollock from the morass of modernist eclecticism and pastiche in which his painting remained mired during the war years when his art was just beginning to attract serious attention. His conversion to automatism also liberated him from the bogus mythification of those tacky Jungian “archetypes” that identify paintings like The Moon Woman, Male and Female, Guardians of the Secret, and The She-Wolf (all from 1942–43) as the work of an artist whose raw command of the painterly medium, while still pretty crude, was more impressive than his muddled attempts to deal with symbols ostensibly dredged up from the unconscious—but actually acquired from the intellectual hearsay of the period—as his principal subjects. It wasn’t until Pollock got rid of his subjects—or what R. P. Blackmur called “données” in the passage I have quoted above—that he was able to achieve an art that, as Blackmur wrote, “is devastated of everything but form and gait.” It was his total embrace of automatism in the “drip” paintings of 1947–50 that made the breakthrough possible.

It is one of the many problematic aspects of the retrospective “Jackson Pollock,” which Kirk Varnedoe has organized at the Museum of Modern Art this winter,[1] that it treats the artist’s oeuvre as if it were a consistently sublime achievement rather than what it is: a highly uneven body of work which, even in its rare moments of original accomplishment, is scarcely comparable to the greatest painting of the modernist era. This approach to the Pollock problem seems to have been dictated by a mistaken belief that Pollock’s life constitutes one of the master myths of twentieth-century American life. This belief is baldly stated in the opening pages of Mr. Varnedoe’s essay for the catalogue of the exhibition, an essay whose very title—“Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work”—puts us on notice that we are invited on this occasion not merely to examine an artist’s work but to participate in an historical romance. “The span from Elvis Presley’s first record in 1954 through Jasper Johns’s first show in 1958 formed a key divide in American life,” Mr. Varnedoe writes, “and Pollock’s car crash (like the actor James Dean’s the year before) was one of its benchmarks. In retrospect, that accident says ‘end’ as surely as Sputnik (launched the next year) says ‘beginning.’” And further:

Pollock now looms as a central hinge between the century’s two halves, a key to how we got from one to the other in modern art. As the pivot on which prologue and coda balance, he has become in history, still more than he was in life, a legitimator: validation accrues to the lineage fertile enough to have spawned him, or to followers clever enough to have properly read his message; and competing claims abound. Even more broadly, any theory of cultural modernity has to claim the summit he occupies before it can assert dominion on the territory; and in this way accounts of Pollock also become litmus tests for broader philosophical and political positions about the meanings of his epoch. Trying to write his history inevitably broaches larger queries about our own.

In the presence of such claims to world-historical importance, then, Mr. Varnedoe embraces the notion that “normal critical criteria” are still beside the point in discussing Pollock’s art, for how can mere art criticism hope to account for a phenomenon like “a central hinge” of an epoch that goes back a hundred years? Even in the vast literature devoted to Picasso, I cannot recall anything to equal this bizarre exercise in museological hyperbole. It makes even William Rubin’s misguided attempt to place the paintings of Frank Stella in the company of Shakespeare and Dante seem almost modest by comparison. In the end it is a testimony not to Pollock’s artistic achievement but to something far more mundane—a curator’s anxiety that a claim to anything less than the colossal and world-shaking will fail to bring in the crowds needed to justify an exhibition mounted on a blockbuster scale.

Alas, it is in the interest of museum marketing and mythmaking that war has been declared on so-called “normal critical criteria” in the organization of this retrospective and its accompanying catalogue, and not because such criteria are no longer relevant to what the artist accomplished or failed to accomplish in the course of a very troubled life.

What “normal critical criteria” amount to on this occasion turn out, for the most part, to consist of the critical observations made by the late Clement Greenberg in the course of his close involvement with Pollock’s painting. While paying a kind of pro forma lip service to Greenberg’s accomplishments as a critic, Mr. Varnedoe mounts a major assault on just about every aspect of his critical thought. Not only are we treated to the now familiar reference to Greenberg “as a tyrant of taste in the early 1960s,” but to a summary attack on Greenberg’s pessimistic views of American society in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the sense of “alienation” with which he identified both the New York School and the vicissitudes of high cultural aspiration in that period.

Taking what can only be called a Saturday Evening Post cover view of this postwar period, Mr. Varnedoe evokes a jolly time “when a world war against totalitarian powers had just been won, when prosperity had returned after the bitter years of the Depression, and when an enormous boom in new births apparently signaled a groundswell of confidence and relief.” Apparently he is unacquainted with W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety (1947), or the ballet later based on it, or with the pervasive influence in these years of such unjolly writers as Kafka and Kierkegaard and Sartre and Camus and Maritain—but why go on? About the spiritual temper of that postwar period Mr. Varnedoe remains as innocent —or ignorant—as one of those newborn babes he cites as evidence of a “groundswell of confidence.” Can he really have no idea of the spiritual disarray and psychological breakdown that the war and the Holocaust and the atomic bomb brought in their wake?

There is certainly plenty to take issue with in Clement Greenberg’s criticism, and with Greenberg himself, but on this subject—the moral and cultural temper of the period in which the New York School emerged—his pessimism was both accurate and prophetic. He wrote as follows in 1947:

The morale of that section of New York’s Bohemia which is inhabited by striving young artists has declined in the last twenty years, but the level of its intelligence has risen, and it is still downtown, below 34th Street, that the fate of American art is being decided—by young people, few of them over forty, who live in cold-water flats and exist from hand to mouth. Now they all paint in the abstract vein, show rarely on 57th Street, and have no reputations that extend beyond a small circle of fanatics, art-fixated misfits who are as isolated in the United States as if they were living in Paleolithic Europe.

Although Pollock’s principal critical champion, Greenberg didn’t write as a cheerleader—and it is for that reason, I suppose, that a curatorial cheerleader like Kirk Varnedoe is concerned to discredit him. While Greenberg did not hesitate to describe Pollock in 1947 as “the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one,” he also said of Pollock’s painting that “its paranoia and resentment narrow it; large though it may be in ambition—large enough to contain inconsistencies, ugliness, blind spots, and monotonous passages—it nevertheless lacks breadth.” It is for judgments like this that Greenberg has had to be demonized once again on the occasion of this retrospective.

For the entire premise on which this retrospective has been organized is the belief that Pollock ushered in a new golden age in American art—a golden age represented by the likes of Cy Twombly, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Lynda Benglis, Richard Serra, and Brice Marden, among many others. One can only say that golden ages aren’t what they used to be. On this matter, too, what Greenberg wrote about the Museum of Modern Art in 1947 remains amazingly relevant, for some things haven’t changed in the last fifty years. “Pusillanimity makes the museum follow the lead of the powerful art dealers… . But it cannot be blamed too much, since it reflects rather accurately the prevailing taste in American art circles.” If there really was “a tyrant of taste in the early 1960s” on the New York art scene, it was Leo Castelli, not Clement Greenberg—but to acknowledge that would capsize the premise on which this Pollock retrospective has been organized.

A more reliable key to our understanding of Pollock’s painting is, in any case, to be found in Greenberg’s observation that it “lacks breadth.” But to reflect on that realm of aesthetic actuality is to remove Jackson Pollock from the romance of history and return our attention to what the artist accomplished and failed to accomplish in the only important pictures he ever created.

Notes
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1. “Jackson Pollock” opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on November 1, 1998, and remains on view until February 2, 1999. The exhibition will reopen at the Tate Gallery, London, on March 11, 1999, and remain on view until June 6. A catalogue of the exhibition, by Kirk Varnedoe, has been published by the Museum of Modern Art and is distributed by Harry N. Abrams (328 pages, $75; $35 paper). Go back to the text.