ART THEORY AND ART CRITICS

INTRODUCTION:

Art theory may sound like a complex, modern invention, but ideas about art are as old as art itself. The very first artists held some elementary ideas about imagery when they began making marks on the surfaces of caves - otherwise they wouldn't have made them. Perhaps those ideas weren't as sophisticated as those which have informed modern artists, but many of the most advanced artists today still hold theories about art which are little more than a series of unspoken, instinctively held assumptions. The writings of the critics and historians that are explored in this section sometimes interrogate those assumptions, but often they simply elaborate upon them and bring them to a wider audience.

This section offers several routes to an understanding of Abstract Expressionist theory. There is an overview of the movements' key ideas, showing what it derived from artists that came before it, what it absorbed from the beliefs of its own time, and how its ideas have since fared. There is also a timeline setting out the major contributions to art and ideas in the America of the 1940s and 1950s. And there is a full biographical directory of the major critics and historians who interpreted and contextualised the movement, then and since.

GUIDE TO ART THEORY:

You have several options on how to learn about Modern Art Theory on this website. Information on art theory from 1930 to 1970 can be accessed via one of these routes: Overview of Abstract Expressionist Ideas INTRODUCTION Looking back on the development of Abstract Expressionism from the vantage point of the late 1950s, critic Clement Greenberg concluded that a strange reversal had taken place in the art of his generation. Artists who had once been inspired by politics, were later devoted to the cause of art alone, and the results had been great and heroic. It is a strange paradox that many of the artists who would later become Abstract Expressionists, started out their careers as Social Realists. Most matured in America in the 1930s as left-wing radicals, and were committed to art that might depict the lives of ordinary people, in styles which were vivid and meaningful to those same people. They disdained abstraction as irrelevant, decadent and bourgeois, and they followed philosopher John Dewey in his belief that art should be grounded in personal experience; Social Realism, they believed, offered the most adequate means of communicating that. The experience of the Depression of the 1930s cemented the beliefs of many of these artists, and during that period many gravitated to the Communist party. But later in the decade, as the effects of the Depression began to be alleviated, many became disillusioned with radicalism. The Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty of 1939, and then the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland: all these events began to turn the radicals away from Russia. And since the Communist Party had decreed that the acceptable style of art was Social Realist, their disillusionment also encouraged them to look to other styles. Other critics, artists and writers encouraged a break with Social Realism as well. In 1937, Meyer Shapiro wrote his essay, "The Nature of Abstract Art," in which he argued that abstraction was just as imbued with contemporary life as figurative art - both were as much a product of their time. And, even more significantly, in the following year the exiled Communist, Leon Trotsky, collaborated with the Surrealist, André Breton, on a statement entitled "Manifesto: Toward a Free Revolutionary Art." Published in the American periodicalPartisan Review, it argued that total artistic freedom was vital for social and political progress. GREENBERG AND ROSENBERG The stage was being set for politically committed realist painters to turn to abstraction, and in 1939 a young critic named Clement Greenberg gave them further impetus with his essay, "Avant-garde and Kitsch." Published in Partisan Review, this argued that with the old bastions of avant-garde culture falling to totalitarian regimes across Europe, advanced artists had an obligation to take up its cause and save culture from being dominated by the 'kitsch' of the masses (which he described as encompassing everything from academic painting to popular music). By the late 1940s, Greenberg was emerging as one of the most prominent promoters of advanced art in America. He argued that analysis of form - discussion of factors such as color, line and space - provided the only adequate means of explaining the historical development of modern art. Therefore, only attention to form could reveal what was important and significant in the new art. Essays such as "Avant-garde and Kitsch" established Greenberg's reputation by the early 1940s, but in the early 1950s a new voice in American art criticism emerged. Harold Rosenberg's writing was shaped not by idealist thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, but by the Existentialism then current in Continental Europe. Rosenberg spoke of Abstract Expressionist paintings as records of an encounter between the artist and the canvas. As he put it, "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act.. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." The canvas was no longer "the space in which to reproduce, re-design, analize, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined." Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg were by no means the only critics to write about Abstract Expressionism, but they represented its most prominent explicators. Their ideas might have diverged - and personally and professionally they were aggressive competitors - yet that divergence is characteristic of a movement which itself was an awkward union of very different talents.    "THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN PAINTING" Greenberg and Rosenberg may have seen the task of the avant-garde artist to be one of lonely struggle against the idiocy of the masses, yet it is remarkable how much attention popular media gave to Abstract Expressionism. As early as 1948, a key year in the development of many painters' work, Life magazine - then the magazine with the largest circulation in the U.S. - gave it lavish coverage. And in 1951 Vogue magazine used Jackson Pollock's paintings as the backdrop for a fashion shoot. Many art critics were happy to promote the Abstract Expressionists as America's first home-grown avant-garde, and they none-too-subtly suggested that its advent might represent a sign that the U.S. had stolen the role of cultural leadership from Europe. Soon, even members of the State Department saw the potential for good publicity in a movement which seemed to represent freedom of expression at a time when the nation's foremost rival, the Soviet Union, was still demanding that its artists paint in academic realist styles. And by the late 1950s the government was sponsoring touring exhibitions of American painting around cities in Europe. When the historian Irving Sandler titled his history of the movement, "The Triumph of American Painting," he certainly captured its mood, and in the decades since, many have pondered the connection between artists who were once radicals, and the supposedly conservative Eisenhower government of the 1950s. DISSENT AND DECLINE Success in art attracts imitation, which in its turn speeds on decline, and decline only encourages opposition. By the mid 1950s, there were sure signs that Abstract Expressionism was becoming academic - and this surely spelt the end for a movement whose artists so often projected desperate heroism, lofty emotion, and tragedy. In 1956, the critic Leo Steinberg wrote that the style was entering "the impasse of expressionism settling into style and turning into habit." In 1961, The New York Times critic John Canaday published a lengthy attack on the style. By the following year, even Greenberg and Rosenberg seemed to believe that innovation was needed.   A NEW GENERATION: POSTMODERNISM AND BEYOND Even if it was in terminal decline by the late 1950s - even if its reign lasted no more than a decade - Abstract Expressionism bequeathed a great deal in terms of ideas. As early as 1958, the artist Allan Kaprow was asking, in an article for Art News, "What is the Legacy of Jackson Pollock?" and his conclusions pointed not to painting but beyond it, into performance art. Kaprow's ideas borrowed something from Rosenberg's notion that art was an event, an action, an encounter: he wondered if that encounter might be theatrical. For other critics, however, the maintenance of painting was still important. Clement Greenberg, realising that the time necessitated some alteration of his previous theories, published his essay "Modernist Painting," in 1960, and pointed to a new set of problems for a new generation. Instead of focussing on flatness as a key constituent of modern painting, as he had done in previous essays, he began to speak of opticality, an experience of pictorial space that "can be travelled through, literally or figuratively, only with the eye." Greenberg's significance as a critic faded in the 1960s with the advent of new styles such as Pop art. But unlike Rosenberg, whose importance waned with Existentialism, his ideas have continued to influence further generations of critics and historians. Perhaps his most able follower has been Michael Fried, who began by supporting many 'post-painterly' abstract artists such as Jules Olitski and Larry Poons, and went on to attack Minimalism on terms very similar to those laid down by Greenberg. Even critics such as Rosalind Krauss, whose writing has so often attacked him, have been shaped by Greenberg's advocacy of medium-specificity, giving Abstract Expressionism a very lengthy afterlife.

Art Theory Timeline

INTRODUCTION The Art Theory Timeline provides a detailed account of major events in the development of ideas relating to Abstract Expressionism. These events include the publication of articles, lectures, reviews, manifestoes, interviews, and books, between 1931 and 1978. The timeline is divided according to the following key: Black Line: Early moments in the development of Abstract Expressionist ideas. Red Line: Moments in the development of Clement Greenberg's ideas, and related interventions. Blue Line: Moments in the development of Harold Rosenberg's ideas, and related interventions. Green Line: Dissenting voices in the debate between Greenberg and Rosenberg. Purple Line: Moments in the later critical reception of Abstract Expressionism following the decline of the movement.

Critics and Theorists 

Read about the individual critics and historians that shaped the theory behind art.