The
history of the movement is relevant both to its present status of
wide acceptance and its view of itself. In the background of its
formative years were combined two separate and, in most ways,
antithetical experiences; first, the Federal Art Project of the
WPA (the government's economic assistance program), which during
the thirties was literally essential to the continued existence of
most of the artists who, sometime after 1945, were to become
'abstract expressionists' (as well as to many others whose styles
were to evolve differently); and second, the arrival in New York,
during the early forties, of an important group of School of Paris
artists (and writers), most of them in or on the fringes of the
surrealist movement.
The brief need for the use of these [mythological] symbols
indicates, among other things, that independence came hard. So too
in a different way does that phase of thick, reworked paint
surface, heavy impasto and incrustation which for many of the
older generation seems also to have been a necessary preliminary
to a clear style. The pictures of this phase, most of them
executed in the early forties and often containing the kind of
symbolism just mentioned, reveal the artists' working process, the
stages of development in the work, with less differentiation, less
sureness and immediacy than is developed later; but the
incorporation of this revelation into the final effect led toward
subsequent freedoms.
To make the work itself the bearer of emotion - this goal was not
attained without dedication and struggle. Criticism has commonly
stressed that this battle (which is a battle for control) is
evident in the finished work, and that the sum total of these
works, mirroring the artist's internal combat, adds up to an
atmosphere of crisis. But if for a moment one ignores intentions,
looks at this art historically, as it were, from the outside
rather than the inside, and allows the art to speak for itself, as
it so eloquently does, it is evident that one of the principal
characteristics of the New York School has been its great sensuous
appeal. With certain exceptions (of whom de Kooning is the most
obvious) this is a lyric, not an epic, art. Judged by their
finished works ... here are artists who like the materials of
their art: the texture of paint and the sweep of the brush, the
contrast of colour and its nuance, the plain fact of the
harmonious concatenation of so much of art's underlying physical
basis to be enjoyed as such. They have become fine craftsmen with
all the satisfaction that a craftsman feels in the controlled
manipulation of his art, and all his ability to handle his medium
so that his pleasure is transmitted to the beholder.
This
concentration upon sensuous substance is something new to American
art: to the extent that the abstract expressionist is a
materialist (as he has been called) and views his art as more than
pure vehicle, to that extent he is not simply an expressionist. It
may be that the members of the New York School have been able to
enjoy themselves and so please others because unlike the School of
Paris they had no tradition of 'well-made pictures' and la
belle peinture to react against. Their 'academy' was one of
subiect-matter, of realism
and social realism, rather than the European one of clever,
meaningless, manipulative skills, so that they have been able to
rediscover the pleasures of paint.
