Art - Phaidon and Taschen Popular Guides Compared
The Phaidon Colour Library is a remarkably cheap if old-fashioned set of full colour guides to the great artists and to some of the schools of art that make up the canon. Three particular choice from three successive decades are Roland Penrose on Picasso, Simon Wilson on Surrealism and Jamie James on Pop Art.
The Phaidon Guide to Picasso (48
pages) is, unfortunately, somewhat hagiographic because the extensive
Introduction is by his friend, the surrealist painter Roland Penrose. At this time, Picasso's post-war work was not being
widely appreciated by critics (with some justification). Simultaneously, the
artist was the subject of a highly developed cultural myth of greatness
that owed more to the politics of the Cold War than to any reasoned
assessment of the work he was undertaking at the time.
Picasso,
by this time. was in the awkward position (he died two years later in
1973) of being lionized by the Left and disregarded by the
artistic community except as a historical figure of note. As a result,
this guide is good for an account of what Penrose thought of his friend
but, to get a more nuanced and reasoned view, you will have to go
elsewhere. The truth is that Picasso was a genius but one whose
talent lay in his stylistic adaptability and experimentalism based
around a surprisingly few themes fully derived from the mainstream
historical tradition of Western art. There is a coldness, facility and
even occasional inauthenticity in his work at times as if the artist was
a very decent man but not a great man even if he was a great artist.
Perhaps
he was most true to himself as an artist, without external worries
about the wider world or women, during the remarkable Cubist phase when,
in tandem with Braque, he worked a fairly cold-hearted theory through
every possible development, from beginning to natural end. He
transformed the way art is seen in terms of form even if the hermetic
nature of the experiment meant that it was intellectually exhausted by
the early 1920s.
The very early work look sweet. It is not his fault
if they have been degraded from over-use by UNESCO for Christmas cards -
the international secular liberal community having adopted him as their
patron saint from the 1950s. The last works (when he was over 60 from
the late 1940s through to the early 1970s) unfortunately look like
repetitive simplistic daubs. I have not yet seen a convincing reason why
they should be seen as more than relatively minor works despite every
attempt to proselytise for them from Picasso-philes. So, once the
experiment of Cubism is taken for read, why is he great? Because at key
junctures, he found a certain authenticity that was not pure
intellectualism nor scrabbling around to find a voice in a market.
The
first phase of true greatness starts with the discovery of primitivism
in sculpture. The remarkably simple and erotic 'Nude Against a Red
Background' (1904), 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907), 'Three Women'
(1907/1908) and 'The Dryad' (1908) are works that open the space for
Cubism but allow sculptural representation on canvas that expresses raw,
primal emotion. The irony that his art swings from this to a rigid
intellectualism of observation in the Cubist phase is interesting
(approx. 1909-1920) but it does not detract from Picasso being the true
bridge between Cezanne and abstraction through a mastery of form.
The
second phase comes ultimately from his adoption by the surrealists. The
Three Dancers of 1925 is a welcome return to primitivism and the early
1930s see brutalist deconstructions of a classicism that was
increasingly being associated with conservative authoritarianism and
fascism, alongside primally erotic paintings of his mistress ('Nude
Woman in an Armchair' and 'Woman Asleep in an Armchair' (1932). This
combination of revolt against convention and interest in expressing
primal feeling - much as in the 1904-1908 works - came together in some
dramatic works of the late 1930s that have become iconic and the basis
of his later position as secular saint.
The politics of this
second phase are important. Surrealism gets left behind and we see a
series of major works, of which Guernica is the most culturally
significant but which also include 'Weeping Woman' and 'Cat Devouring A
Bird', in which Picasso responded to the violent collapse of
civilisation in the 1930s with a raw power that was to buy him his
post-war reputation on the internationalist Left. Perhaps war
exhausted him. He did not scuttle to America. He joined the Communist
Party after the war and perhaps it was just easier to leave changing the
world to the comrades. He could claim to have done his bit. Similarly,
by 1944, he was well over 60 with, perhaps, a more moderated libido. Still,
his achievement from his early 20s to his late 50s is remarkable. He
deserves his great status. If only his admirers would leave him alone, this greatness might be better appreciated. Buy the book for the plates - the series
is very cheap to own and even an unsatisfactory introduction can be
overlooked for this reason.
Writing of surrealism we should note another in the Phaidon series. Ian Turpin's review of the work of Max Ernst plays it straight with a sound introduction that emphasises Ernst's interest in innovative technique as a means to open up his creativity. The 48 illustrations are large-scale and good quality chronologically exploring his work rather than just giving us an art book version of his 'greatest hits'. In retrospect, what does not last well becomes as interesting as what still resonates today.
Polonsky's Chagall is, by contrast to Penrose's Picasso, an excellent introduction to another twentieth
century artist from Phaidon. It is hard not to compare Chagall with
Picasso - near contemporaries who lived to a ripe old age and who basked
in near-deification within the international community after the Second
World War. Both represented a profoundly syncretic and humanist view of
European culture. Where Picasso experimented with form
constantly and then recorded his universe in the light of his personal
responses as art for art's sake (even when politically enraged),
Chagall's vision remained wholly figurative within one consistent
self-created vision from his time growing up in Vitebsk through to his
grand European and American commissions in his later years. There are
images from the 1900s that would still be recognisable in the 1960s as
by the same hand: this could not be said of Picasso.
The two
grand old men of European art (perhaps with Matisse as Father to Picasso
as Son and Chagall as Holy Ghost) made every effort to retain a
personal artistic integrity yet respond to the violent events of their
day. If Picasso's political master work was Guernica, Chagall was
equally tormented by war and revolution, and if Picasso recorded his Mistresses
in often unrecognisable and ambiguous ways, Chagall expressed his
dynamic love for his Bella in ways that exude love through paint on
canvas. One played with cubism while the other briefly lived it. One
portrayed Paris second only to his beloved remembered Vitebsk, the other
was the essence of Parisian art in the 1920s and 1930s. Both took a
particularly interest in the circus and acrobatics, in outsiders and
contortions.
Chagall is seen, quite rightly as a magical realist
but he should also be seen as the great cultural syncretist. He never
lost his profound commitment to European Jewish culture before it got
perverted by Nazi oppression, Zionism and Wall Street and yet, much to
the distaste of many Jews, he would express the suffering of his people
as the suffering of all those oppressed by tyranny through, of all
things, the crucifixion. Similarly, his detailed and humane
remembering of Russian-Jewish culture before the revolution did not stop
him from using his visionary approach to colour and light to meet
Christian commissions in stained glass across Europe, including the
Parish Church at Tudeley in Kent and Chichester Cathedral in the UK.
He
is the artist whose portrayal of the fiddler on the roof has helped
define our mental image of shtetl culture (even if we must admit privately that this was a romantic distortion of reality). He reminds us, first, that
Jewish culture was integral to the blood and soil of Europe and, second,
that the Judaeo-Christian tradition could be lively and humane without
any necessity of conflict between its two components. Chagall would also
have no fear in introducing secular and pagan themes alongside the
religious (Picasso tended to introduce only these themes and to avoid
the religious). One guesses that he would not have been shy of adding
Muslim ones if he had lived in our time. This
book contains (in conformity with the rest of the series) 48 full
colour plates. The only regret is that one of these is not the
remarkable 'The Praying Jew (Rabbi of Vitebsk)' of 1914, a personal
favourite. More generally, it is the use of colour that startles, amazing blues and reds
and ochres, as well as dreamlike twistings of the human body. He was
unique - a last gasp of European traditionalism perhaps but with a
remarkable commitment to a distinctive vision of a world now lost. A
genius.
Wilson's Surrealism in the Phaidon series is a superb
short introduction to the School with 48 full colour plates. The
author briefly tells the story of surrealism and its emergence out of
Dadaism, in reaction to the First World War and as a response to the
discovery of the unconscious. He then splits it into its two main
'traditions' - the oneiric or dreamlike (of which Ernst, Dali and
Delvaux are typical) and the automatic (of which Miro, Tanguy and Matta
are the types) - all under the intellectual leadership of the poet Andre
Breton. Ernst and Magritte adopted an intellectual and poetic
approach just as more complex artists such as Picasso and Giacometti
responded to surrealist ideas and engaged with them before moving on.
The oneiric style eventually had massive effects on popular culture, if
only through advertising and the movies, while the automatic moved to
New York as the second world war raged where it influenced acceptance of
Abstract Expressionism, a whole new world of thinking about art and the
artist. Surrealism is thus far more than the melting clocks of Salvador
Dali or Magritte's phallic trains. The English school is well
represented with five plates from different artists, women less so and
not with work that really impresses. Surrealist ruminations on sexuality
seem to have been masculine - or rather open rumination on sexuality in
this way is only now, in our culture, being allowed to women by women
themselves. Perhaps a new and great art will appear from this growing
cultural revolution in female sexuality.
To an extent, surrealist
thinking has so entered into our culture that it is very hard to see
much of it now except in terms of art history. But, placing to one side
the issues of innovation or intellectual importance, some paintings
(such as Miro's 'Birth of the World' (1925) and Salvador Dali's 'The
Metamorphosis of Narcissus' (1938)) are 'eternals'. Similarly,
Max Ernst's almost Lovecraftian fantastic creations of the late 1930s
and early 1940s and the erotic dream worlds of Paul Delvaux in the
oneiric tradition still hold attention in their own right. But
the great discovery is a late artist, the Chilean, Roberto Matta, who
produced, in the 1940s, dense three-dimensional attempts to create the
landscapes of the mind without obviously coherent biomorphs (as in
Tanguy's work) or figurative images (as in the oneiric tradition). These
canvases by Matta are the climax of surrealism as a serious contributor
to cultural history. Bellmer's raw and disturbing expressions of
sexuality provide another climax (pun intended) which has spawned a
whole art based on the tearing away of taboo.
Matta was interested in
magic, the occult and tarot but somehow the impetus for an exploration
of the dark side began to be sidelined, perhaps because it conflicted
with the concerns of a post war Western elite that was determined to see
things only in terms of the light and the individual after the
experience of the 1930s and war and in opposition to the cold logic (as
some saw it at the time) of communism and its socialist realism. The
next stage was to move away from the collective unconscious with its
limbic aspects and into the ego-individualism of the American avant
garde.
From Pollock and Rothko to Warhol and the post-war cult
of Picasso is a perhaps the story of a cold Apollonian denial of the
Dionysiac (even in the vices of a commercialised Factory that leads
ineluctably towards the commodity orientation of the Saatchis and Damien
Hirst). It was where the West chose to go for a while, away from the
particular and the hermetic to the universal and the consciously
reproducible and tradeable. It has been largely down hill under late liberal capitalism from that point onwards - into trite identity politics, posturing and marketing.
Jamie James introduction to Pop Art, published in 1996, is a sound short entry into the School, again with the standard 48 full colour plates. Jamie
James, an arts correspondent based in New York provides a good
introduction to the three schools of Pop Art - the London (Paolozzi,
Blake, Hamilton and early Hockney), the New York (Johns, Rauschenberg,
Lichtenstein and Warhol) and the less inspiring West Coast, with a very
brief nod (too brief) to the German School of Polke and Richter. The
reproductions are excellent. The Jasper Johns masterpiece 'Flag' of
1955 is presented so that you can see its painterly quality in a way
that many art books do not allow. In this respect, the Phaidon series can be
generally superior to the Taschen series, an example of which is reviewed below. The Pop Art School is presented through the
eyes of a man of the mid-1990s, just before the debasement of the style
into post-modernism. We have seen, since, Brit Art and a whole slew of
contemporary mimicries and other localised reactions to
create the great wealth-seeking and ostentatious art market that has been developed under
the aegis of entrepreneurs like Saatchi, a positively Barnum-like
phenomenon in high culture.
Historians may have to look elsewhere for
something that represents the origins of the next stage of artistic evolution -
possibly not to be found in paint or sculpture or in galleries or
museums but in the performance of popular culture: multidisciplinary teams creating what the mass desires with exceptional skill rather than what the rich desire as a tradeable store of value.The two
themes of Pop Art are cool (as James describes) and sexuality (which he
merely alludes to). Cool, an attitude of detachment, sometimes verging
on the sociopathic, is not what we find in Britain but it is the core of
the revolt against the tormented egoistic individualism and hermeticism
of Abstract Expressionism in America. Abstract Expressionism, in turn,
was partly derivative of the equally hermetic psycho-drama of
Surrealism. Abstract Expressionism was intrinsically liberal in a
dutiful sort of way while Pop Art was libertarian in a cynical way.
The
history of twentieth century art is partly a political history - an
attempt to liberate the 'artist' as self-appointed representative of
suffering humanity. 'Guernica' was the type of this attitude, as if a
painting could change anything. Abstract Expressionism merely turned
this inwards towards the psychic suffering of the intellectual faced
with a greyness that held little optimism after Auschwitz and Hiroshima -
a recognition that the artist could change nothing. The American
pop artists (again the British were motivated differently as were the
Germans, using Americana for local purposes) said, 'to hell with all
that po-faced earnestness, let's go party', sell paintings and have
ideas, lots of them to startle and impress. This was art reflective of
consumerism and eventually as a consumable for the very rich. It suggested that
nothing needed to be changed - or conformed to for that matter.
This
form of art is not the only form that emerged in the last third of
the twentieth century but it was the dominant one. Its politics were worn
lightly if at all and generally only to say that the artist's
playfulness and marketability should not be interfered with. The works
are startling and impressive at their best, but precisely to the degree
that they can be interpreted as intellectually and emotionally shallow.
The
other aspect of twentieth century art, sexuality, is often neglected.
It is the history of the artist's attempt to find sexual freedom within a
very closed cultural system, at least until artists and circumstances
opened it up. In general, this consideration of liberation has been a
male prerogative and it helps to explain that canard that women cannot
be great artists. What this really means is that women cannot
easily find groups which can link to markets that meet the cultural
needs of the time, needs that are generally only the needs of a dominant
few. There may be a psychological truth that the male mind does tend to
open up new territory and breach taboos more easily but the structure
of twentieth century culture seems to have mitigated against the
corollary - that women can take that space and make it mean something.
Obviously,
much of the history of art (perhaps epitomised by Boucher) is
represented by the male gaze, generally laid on the female or young male
model. By the turn of the century, artists like Schiele and Klimt and
the Symbolists were making the imagery increasingly pornographic and
distanced from reality with visions of the woman as vampire or some
other stereotype that merely tells you that the sensibility was
adolescent because the culture was so repressed in matters of sexual
expression (although calling that pre-Hitlerian culture adolescent is
truly an insult to today's sophisticated Western teenagers).
The
Surrealists were liberatory because they recognised both the sheer
intensity of desire (Bataille) and of the unconscious - and yet the
woman is nearly always the object of desire. It is no accident that any
anthology of Surrealist Art will tend to refer to only one female
artist, Dorothea Tanner, actually rather derivative but able to join the
group as wife of Max Ernst, and one 'master work', Meret Oppenheim's
fur covered cup and saucer, which is only included because this single
creative act caught the public's imagination. Nothing much else of real
consequence emerged from Ms. Oppenheim. The Abstract
Expressionists were similarly inclined to the heterosexual but they
returned to the repressed, throwing more paint on canvas to represent
their inner selves and, again, few women (though with significant exceptions) were involved except as causes
of torment.
And so we come to Pop Art where we see an inordinate
influence from 'gay' artists (Johns, Rauschenberg, Hockney, Haring and
others), homosexuality being associated then (possibly now) with
masculine detachment, with presentation and with style over content.
This is not to stereotype as a fact but only to recognise that a certain
type of sexuality was able to merge its sensibility with the cultural
direction of the time (shifting from grey earnest liberalism requiring
correct behaviour and thought to fun-loving libertarianism and 'art pour
l'art') and with the market. Rothko kills himself but Warhol gets shot
at.
This liberation to some extent permitted heterosexuality to
break free of masculine neurosis, initially through some obviously
quasi-pornographic artistry (Jones, Ramos and Koons) that seemed to
intensify the 'chauvinist' aspects of the case. Jamie James, who does
not refer to Allen Jones and avoids the sexual content of Koons, is
po-faced and negative about an artist on only one occasion: he refers to
Wesselman's use of nudes as 'naive and dated' because of 'changes in
sexual politics'. In fact, the righteous anger of feminism and
the psychological detachment of the complex gay culture of the major
cities increasingly seems transitional. The assertive ironic treatment
of heterosexuality as a result of the Pop Art revolution has created
space, possibly for the first time in history, for a genuine feminine
sensibility in art that might well show great fruits in the next
artistic cycle.
The marker works (not in this book) may prove to
be the sexually explicit cycle produced by Koons with his then-wife La
Cicciolina in which the kitsch and explicitness is matched by a genuine
equality of experience between man and woman. This woman loves bonking
and does not mind who knows it. And the man is not using her, or forcing
her to submit to some weird symbolist stereotype. By one of those
paradoxes which are central to cultural life, the ultimate in the
pornographic may free the spirit to move away from the object-centred
treatment of sexuality (unless women decide to reverse things and
portray men as objects) towards something different. Perhaps towards
subject-centred sexuality which has room for the emotion of love as well
as the torment of desire.
In this book of nearly 30 artists,
only three are women (which at least is just a little better than in the
Surrealism volume). The sensibility of Marisol is quite definitely
female and Cindy Sherman has a formidable body of work in her own right.
Perhaps Deborah Kass is simply reinterpreting Warhol as a Jewish
Lesbian and missing the 'cool' point but the door is opening. Tracy
Emin's importance is that she has grasped this challenge and run with it
on her own account. Perhaps I am too optimistic because the two
other conditions of change, in addition to there being people of talent, are a
community of artists who share and compete with ideas and a market for
art that fits with the cultural needs of the age. We just do not know
what the pandemic and economic crisis world will bring. The post-credit crunch brought us little more than an intensification of the trite liberal politics noted above and cartoonish NFTs. Who will pay for art and
on what terms and, if it is the public purse, will the art oblige
artists to offer politically correct versions of what it is to be a
woman or will women artists make those choices themselves?
This
essay on sexuality in art may not have been overly helpful in assessing
this book. The book is cheap and should be bought for the reproductions
if for no other reason but it strikes me that art is not just an
entertainment but a force for contemplation. The coolness and detachment
of Pop Art tells us a great deal about that phase of civilisation that
began intellectually in the 1960s, reached its apogee in the 1980s and
now, in the the twenty-first century, was in its death
throes replaced by a new and rather weak-minded eartnestness. It was a culture of maximum detachment from value and of maximum
personal freedom - and it started to collapse with the politics of the liberal left and the surge of arts graduates with nothing to do except emote and struggle for notice.
We can now turn to the Taschen series with a direct comparison in the handling of Picasso in Ingo Walther's Picasso, 1881-1973. This is one of a number of portraits of individual artists in the fine Taschen series that retailed at a phenomenally low price when I bought it with my only caveat being a tendency occasionally to over-explain some works. Nevertheless, this is an excellent introduction to Picasso that I think is superior to the older Roland Penrose introduction in the Phaidon series which has just a touch too much hagiography for my taste (see above). Walther's book made me appreciate Picasso as an artist and as a man far more than did the attempt of Penrose to deify him. This was a man who was, indeed, greater than his image. I ended up actually liking him a great deal regardless of the art!
Walther still did not convince me that Picasso's work in
his old age was overly-significant except to himself but it has its
own integrity. It may even be argued that a genius with a sustained
commitment to recording his declining powers and the effects of old age
is doing a curious and unique service to humanity and that perhaps we
should consider this late body of work of importance for that reason
alone. We live with a prejudice (which I share) for innovation and youth
but there is little justification for that position other than cultural
ideology. The reproductions are excellent, much more balanced
than in the Phaidon collection, with more emphasis on telling the story
of Picasso in the round and much less on the 'great works' syndrome.
This story is one of remarkable creativity based on one simple truth -
that art has no purpose other than the expression of the artist's
artistry. Picasso never seems to have believed the propaganda
surrounding him, never seems to have tried to search for meanings and
saw his work as fundamentally the artistic expression of himself.
This
is a form of egoism, of course, but not necessarily one of pride.
Rather it is one of exploration of doubt. If we non-artists can dream of
constructing ourselves as a work of art, Picasso's art is the outward
expression of that purpose - the recorded expression in art of one man
over time. This makes his recorded work the account of a man who had
amazing talent from early youth to great old age - not a continuous
vision in form but a continuous vision in underlying content. The works
of the old age are thus wholly consonant in fundamental intent with what
went on before.
A sub-text of the book and so reflective of
Picasso's ouevre is that, for all his innovation, he was an artist very
much within the Western tradition, despite the influence of so-called
primitivist non-European sculpture on 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' and
other works. Again, this becomes clear in direct references to the
'great' masters of the Western tradition in his old age (not to my
taste) but also in the classicism of the period between Cubism and the
radical works of the 1930s. There can be great beauty in the
apparent ugliness and disproportion of Picasso's work. I keep coming
back not to the obvious paintings like Guernica but to the almost
Vatican-purple, blues and blacks of 'Still Life with Steer's Skull' of
1942 which is almost the materialisation of the electric in colour. This
book is highly recommended as a very sound introduction to the artist.
Klingsohr-Leroy's Surrealism is a short guide from the almost
ubiquitous German art publishing house Taschen and it bears close
comparison with the Phaidon book on the same subject available at around
the same low price. The
two works are almost perfectly complementary, especially as the overlap
of illustrations is extremely small, perhaps indicating works that were
at hand in the Anglo-Saxon world (Phaidon) and Continental Europe
(Taschen) respectively. Even the introductions are
complementary. Phaidon's is a narrative that speaks of themes and
contrasts in precisely the way that the English like, whereas the
thoroughly Germanic introduction by Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy in the
Taschen volume is much more informative on the details and history of
the thoroughly clubbable Surrealist circle even if it lacks the level of
explanatory interpretation of Wilson's.
The treatment of the
master works is equally different and complementary but with one
extremely irritating editorial error on the part of Taschen. For some
thoroughly potty reason, Taschen has decided to place its pictures in
alphabetical order of artist and then chronologically within each
artistic portfolio. This leads to the absurdity of a 1934 work by the
otherwise early figure of Arp preceding both, say, Klee, his junior, but
also virtually every other work of note belonging to the school. What
is it about the sort of mind that insists on alphabetizing knowledge in
this way - the world is not alphabetized, it unfolds in time and space
and such methods are only useful in large encyclopedia and general
reference books where you think that you know where to start from the
beginning!
This error of judgement (Phaidon sensibly puts the
works in their chronological order) confuses all the more because the
Taschen descriptions of the paintings explore context more fruitfully
than Phaidon's, yet leaving the reader to scrabble around placing the
art works in some sensible order in order to understand precisely what
is going on. Nevertheless, if you can make the effort to do this,
the commentary is excellent. Phaidon only scores by having the same
number of (different) paintings and art works on a larger format and
with (in my opinion) a better, less glossy paper stock that gives more
of an illusion that you are seeing the art rather than merely an
illustration of it.
For an improved intellectual understanding of
surrealism, choose Taschen (and make yourself work a little). For a
better feeling for the art and a more leisurely approach, choose
Phaidon. But with both at such low cost, you may as well get both and
read them in tandem.
Barbara Hess' short guide Abstract Expressionism from the same Taschen series, corrects the flaws in the companion volume on Surrealism. This
is an ideal basic introduction to the political, social and commercial
environment (within the United States) as art came out of the New Deal era of government engagement with it and into the new 'free' model of a
rapidly expanding gallery sector centred on New York (although, of course, we now know that Government's involvement in art has morphed from open domestic support for artists to a Cold War subversion of art for Cold War propaganda purposes and abstract expressionism was at the very leading edge of that process).
Hess makes an effort to introduce and explain the role of women artists in
the movement and how they were systematically diminished by critics as
adjuncts to their 'hero' husbands and lovers. This is all the more
intriguing since the arbiters of taste and gallery owners were just as
likely to be women - Peggy Guggenheim, who represents some kind of link
to the sensibilities of the Old World, and Betty Parsons being the most
notable. There is a very interesting sexual dynamic going on
here in which hero-artists in the romantic tradition treat their
partners as (perhaps unintended) hand-maidens while having their
hero-status dependent on the interest and whims, in part, of independent
'queen bees'. Those who have watched the TV Series 'Mad' about Madison
Avenue advertising will recognise this strange arrangement of the sexes
that seems peculiar to post-war America and is as intimately related to
the ownership of property as any similar dynamic within a Jane Austen
novel.
Unfortunately, the truth is that the women artists,
despite Hess' efforts, are generally less interesting and, although there
is more artistic engagement by women than in the preceding movements in
Europe, it really is still quite restricted in terms of attainment and
importance. Hess scores over the Surrealism voluime in the series
by ensuring that not only does the introduction carefully place
Abstract Expressionism in its historical and cultural context but that
the artworks illustrated, from Pollock's 'The Moon-Woman Cuts the
Circle' (1943) through to the Rothko Chapel of 1965-1966, are in
chronological order. You can thus see a movement emerging out of a
distinctive American response to European surrealism and the
appreciation of 'primitive' (actually Amerindian) art into an austere
philosophical statement about the nature of art and spectator that
eventually seeds the Minimalist and Conceptual Art revolutions. This
volume is particularly recommended as an introduction to a school of
art whose highest point arguably is the tormented Mark Rothko.
Personally, it is a pleasure to praise
so much a book about a school to which I do not always warm. Certainly I see
little aesthetic value in the action school, if far more in the austere
field painting of Barnett Newman, Rothko (of course), Clyfford Still,
Ad Reinhardt, Hans Hofmann and, of course, there is the startling almost
calligraphic imagery of Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and Franz
Kline. William Baziotes ('Cyclops' (1947) and Theodoros Stamos
('Documenta II' (1959)), both, interestingly, of Greek extraction,
demonstrate a more symbolist sensibility within the movement. They
are discoveries about whom I would know more.
Abstract
Expressionism comes from a world initiated by Kandinsky (most clearly
seen in the work of Arshile Gorky) but its high seriousness - deeply
neurotic perhaps in the case of Rothko - was in permanent tension with
its use, first, as Cold War propaganda (noted above), asserting individual
self-expression against socialist realism, and, second, in its
integration with an art market and patrons from whom the artists
consistently tried to demand understanding as a right to own their
works. Drives that were both romantic and commercial (such a very American combination), based on elite status
games, were in permanent and painful tension. This tension
appears at its greatest in Rothko's removal of commissions from
restaurant and dining environments (as if revolting against the
implication of his being just an up-market WPA artist) and into
specially lit and designed rooms and, finally, the Chapel - the fear of
becoming decorative straining with the fact that patrons' instincts were,
precisely, to see the movement as decorative as it moved towards ever
more austere field painting.
In the end, the Movement exhausted
itself. Artists could either reject the patron (which was economically
absurd) or find a new way of approaching the 'market' before artists
went up their own nether regions like the proverbial Oozalum Bird. And
thus Pop Art was born - as an attempt by artists to relate to the wider
market (beyond a smaller circle of rich patrons) where commodities (including brands and
women) were given equal status to their own 'mentalities'. Pop Art
subverted the Abstract Expressionists' romantic idea of art, which was
only cover for a commodity relation in practice, in order to capture
greater 'real' freedom of action as 'brands' in their own right. Souls
were abandoned for freedom from torment. Pop Artists were ironically
commenting on their own condition as commodities and in this way,
paradoxically, they regained their freedom to do as they wished and still
make money. The preceding generation had believed that they were
free to act as they wished but been, in fact, increasingly constrained
by expectation and worn down by negotiations over how a work should be
seen and appreciated by the new Medicis of Wall Street.