In
attempting to bring into focus the historical picture of the
remarkable transition that characterized the decade of the 1940s,
we might start with the year 1947. If we accept Willem de
Kooning's generous statement, that it was 'Jackson Pollock [who]
broke the ice,' the breakthrough surely dates from the winter of
1946-47, when Pollock first articulated his canvases with
'allover' webs of poured paint. Pollock had painted some beautiful
pictures
in the early forties, but, unlike his later work, they are not
'world-historical' in the Hegelian sense; despite their
originality, they do not possess his full identity, containing
perhaps too much of Picasso, Miro, and Masson, to allow this.
De Kooning,
Still, Motherwell, and Rothko, among others, also painted fine
pictures in the early forties, but again, it was only during the
period 1947-50 that they realized their more personal styles and
painted what in some cases remain their best pictures.
The major
influence on these American painters in the early forties was
Picasso, but the most omnipresent and pervasive, though in
generalized form, was surrealism, mostly Miro, secondarily Masson
and Matta, and marginally Ernst and Arp (the illusionistic side of
surrealist painting, as exemplified by Dali and Magritte, had no
influence at all on these artists). But transcending the works of
the surrealist painters were certain surrealist ideas relating
picture-making to unconscious impulses and fantasies through the
methods of automatism; these ideas never fully realized in
surrealist painting itself - were very much in the air in the
early and middle forties.
Gorky was by no means the first to come in contact with them; as
early as 1940 Motherwell was exploring ideas like these in
discussions with Matta, with whom he was then quite friendly, and
the former soon brought them to the attention of Pollock. Within a
few years such diverse painters as Still, Rothko, Gottlieb,
Baziotes, and Newman were working in a manner that might well be
termed quasi-surrealist (what the French call surréalisant).
None were members of the surrealist group (although Motherwell and
Baziotes were shown in a major surrealist exhibition), but the
morphology of their work, its Freudianized mythological symbolism,
and the flirtation with automatism, all seemed
related to surrealism. These were just the qualities (with the
exception of automatism) which tended to be purged by the end of
the decade.
