The first
problem these young Americans seemed to share was that of
loosening up the relatively delimited illusion of shallow depth
that the three master cubists - Picasso, Braque, Leger - had
adhered to since the closing out of synthetic cubism. If they were
to be able to say what they had to say, they had also to loosen up
that canon of rectilinear and curvilinear regularity in drawing
and design which cubism had imposed on almost all previous
abstract art.
These problems were not tackled by program; very little in
'abstract expressionism' is, or ever was, programmatic; individual
artists may have made 'statements' but there were no manifestoes;
nor have there been 'spokesmen.'
What happened, rather, was that a certain cluster of challenges
was encountered, separately yet almost simultaneously, by six or
seven painters who had their first one-man shows at Peggy
Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in New York between 1943
and 1946. The Picassos of the thirties and in lesser but perhaps
more crucial measure, the Kandinskys of 1910-18 were then
suggesting new possibilities of expression for abstract and
near-abstract art that went beyond the enormously inventive, but
unfulfilled ideas of Klee's last decade. It was the unrealized
Picasso rather than the unrealized Klee who became the important
incentive for Americans like Gorky, de Kooning, and Pollock, all
three of whom set out to catch, and to some extent did catch (or
at least Pollock did) some of the uncaught hares that Picasso had
started.
The years
1947 and 1948 constituted a turning-point for 'abstract
expressionism.' In 1947 there was a great stride forward in
general quality. Hofmann entered a new phase, and a different kind
of phase, when he stopped painting on wood or fibreboard and began
using canvas. In 1948 painters like Philip Guston and Bradley
Walker Tomlin 'joined up,' to be followed two years later by Franz
Kline. Rothko abandoned his 'surrealist' manner; de Kooning had
his first show; and Gorky died. But it was only in 1950 that
'abstract expressionism' jelled as a general manifestation. And
only then did two of its henceforth conspicuous features, the huge
canvas and the black and white oil, become ratified.
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