Abstract Expressionism and Soft Power
Wednesday 15 July 2009 at 10:24 Art can never be entirely divorced from politics. Of course, much art is private but, even here, the fact that private collectors can exist in a market divorced from Government says something about political conditions - as much as does the ideological sponsorship of socialist realism by the Soviet Union.
This is relevant today because all the indications are that US strategic funds are about to be reallocated from military hardware into soft power operations that will mimic expenditures against communism from the late 1940s until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The target this time will be illiberal insurgency.
The lessons of the 1940s are worth considering, especially where ostensibly personal and direct art becomes carefully associated with liberal values in order to make a political point. This applies as much to that most personal and direct of art, American Abstract Expressionism, as to any other.
Abstract expressionism emerged in reaction to the New Deal's era of government engagement with art in a somewhat pale pink version of Soviet realism, much as New Deal Washington architecture could be a pale grey version of Mussolini's classicism.
It offered a new 'free market' model of art based on a rapidly expanding gallery sector centred on New York. It is an irony that women artists in the movement were systematically diminished by critics as adjuncts to their 'hero' husbands and lovers.
Ironic because 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 whilst 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 would any similar dynamic be within a Jane Austen novel.
Unfortunately, the truth is that the women artists in this case were generally less interesting because abstract expressionism is hormonal in a very male way. There is more artistic engagement by women than in preceding movements in Europe but it is rather restricted in terms of attainment and importance.
Abstract Expressionism, from Pollock's The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle (1943) through to the Rothko Chapel of 1965-1966, is a movement that emerges out of a distinctive American response to European surrealism.
The highest point arguably is the tormented Mark Rothko, the subject of a recent major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London.
The movement starts with an appreciation of 'primitive' (actually Amerindian) art but moves thence into an austere philosophical statement about the nature of art and its relationship with the spectator that eventually seeds the Minimalist and Conceptual Art revolutions.
There is an action school but also there is the far more austere field painting of Barnett Newman, Rothko (of course), Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt and 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 ...
Abstract Expressionism thus 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, it became despite itself, Cold War propaganda, asserting individual self-expression against socialist realism, and, second, it became integrated with an art market and with patrons from whom the artists consistently tried to demand understanding as a right to own their works.
This was a classic internal contradiction. Drives that were romantic and personal became enmeshed with drives that were both commercial, based on elite status games, and political in a 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 New Deal WPA artist) into specially lit and designed rooms - and, finally, as the Chapel.
The fear of becoming decorative strained against 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 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 a wider market (beyond a small circle of insiders).
Commodities (including brands and women) were given equal status to their own 'mentalities'. Pop Art subverted the Abstract Expressionists' romantic idea of art, only cover for a commodity relation in practice, in order to capture greater 'real' freedom of action as 'brands' in their own right.
Inner souls were abandoned in order to effect freedom from torment. Pop artists have certainly tended not to top themselves. They also like showing sexy bodies and things of desire. Politically they have subverted Government authority in favour of the market.
In a sense, Pop Artists were ironically commenting on their own condition as commodities and in this way, paradoxically, regained their freedom to do as they wished and still make money.
The Abstract Expressionists had believed that they were free to act as they wished but were, 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.
And so we have a lesson for our time - artists must either find patrons (whether the rich or governments) to allow them to work or embrace the commodity aspects of their own market. Will strategic soft power funds cause yet another shift in taste in the West and how will artists respond?
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