Articles unpublished by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
In the short lived periodical Possibilities 1947-48, co-edited by Motherwell and Rosenberg, the i... more In the short lived periodical Possibilities 1947-48, co-edited by Motherwell and Rosenberg, the issue being negotiated was artistic freedom and community at the close of World War II and the commencement of the Cold War. In its very openness it served as a site from which, and in response to which, the post-war art critical establishment was generated. Its editorial policy was self-consciously a "collage" of approaches to artistic freedom, as Ann Gibson has noted. Both an existential/nihilistic and what I want to call a mythopoetic/sacralized aesthetics coexisted. The full complexity of this collage is important to resuscitate, as the voice of the mythopoeic, as it had earlier been espoused by the Surrealists and the Art of this Century circle and advanced in Possibilities especially by Andrea Caffi, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel, and Jackson Pollock, was shortly to be muted, in what Motherwell later called, as noted by Martica Sawin, a conspiracy of silence. The positivist Greenberg quickly made known his resistance to the mythopoeic position of Possibilities; Rosenberg's existential position consolidated in 1949; the mythopoeic position, with its interest in art as a mediation of the individual and a larger collectivity, was submerged. This essay re-examines the case of Possibilities as one of the last presentations, with its strengths and flaws, of such a mythopoeic aesthetics. Its silencing is explored by focusing on the case of Jackson Pollock: on the six paintings reproduced in Possibilities, on his artistic statement "My Painting," and on the way it was misunderstood.
Conference Presentations by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
Today there is little serious interest in alchemy. It seems part of a past that no longer has m... more Today there is little serious interest in alchemy. It seems part of a past that no longer has much to tell us heirs of the Enlightenment. Even more than astrology it seems to have a place on the intellectually suspect fringes of our modern world. This makes it difficult for us to recognize and do justice to the widespread interest in alchemy in the twentieth century.
Rooted in ancient and hermetic traditions presented under the veil of enigma, allegory and symbols, alchemy is a transformative practice predicated on the belief that Spirit is present in all that is in the universe. The goal of the ancient alchemist was to accomplish the Great Work, the realization of Spirit in matter, figured by the transformation of lead into gold. On one level this effort was a proto-chemistry; on another, a psychological quest: as lead is transmuted into gold, so the soul is purified, dissolved and crystallized anew, to reveal Spirit.
These two metaphors for alchemy, as psychological change and as transformation of matter, are intimately linked in the painting of Jackson Pollock. I will focus here on one drawing from c. 1943, given as a gift to his first biographer, B. H. Friedman. Its symbolic images and numbers, and, rare in Pollock's work, sequence of words, provide crucial insight into Pollock's art: his symbolic figuration, his turn to abstraction, his quest for meaning which persists throughout his career. Understanding the import of the drawing takes us to two of Jung's texts on alchemy to which Pollock had access. Emotionally needy, he was in Jungian analysis between 1939-43 and open to the alchemical myth with its promise of integration and redemption. But as James Elkins demanded of the painter, he practices a pictorial alchemy, spiritualizing matter. Pollock does not simply illustrate Jung. In showing what Pollock made of his alchemical knowledge, I will have occasion to refer to the widespread cultural and artistic interest in alchemy in the 1930s and early 40s as well as the more immediate context of his own mythic works of 1942-43. Here we see Pollock in the laboratory, the alchemist painter, launching himself on a pictorial journey that revolutionized abstract painting.
Challenging the commonly perceived rupture between Pollock's early symbolic imagery and his abstract work, alchemy lets us understand the early symbolic work as the very basis for Pollock's turn to abstraction in the poured paintings. Countering the material positivism of Clement Greenberg's aesthetic response to Pollock's abstraction, still dominant in the literature, alchemy allows us to appreciate Pollock's spiritual approach to matter. The transformative dynamism of destruction- creation worked out in symbolic imagery continues to animate the abstract poured paintings of 1947-50.
Jürgen Habermas, carrying the mantle of Enlightenment reason, came to recognize that the expectat... more Jürgen Habermas, carrying the mantle of Enlightenment reason, came to recognize that the expectation that religion would give way to reasoned reflection with the promise of a golden age has proven wrong. Faith in reason has failed to meet legitimate needs that have long found expression in religion and art. Even as Habermas would look to reason to retool itself to fill this need, the return of religion invites a more searching reconsideration of its place in the modern world.
Jackson Pollock can serve as an example of spiritual thinking that still importantly feeds creative work. He was raised in a secular and left-leaning family that was, as he put it, "violently anti-religious. " But, as he told his wife Lee Krasner, he felt a loss there, because he did have strong religious impulses. These were first nurtured by his high school art teacher in Los Angeles, Frederic John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky.
Given the way critics and art historians have emphasized the formal side of the art of Jackson Pollock, this spiritual side has until recently received scant attention. The significance of Schwankovsky for Pollock’s self-understanding as an artist has thus remained unexamined. But in him Pollock found a mentor who set him on a course that he pursued to the very end. In this paper I begin such an examination, focusing on two paintings, Schwankovsky’s Modern Music (c. 1925) and Pollock’s, Moon Woman (1942).
In May 1929 Schwankovsky, interested in yoga and a recent convert to Theosophy, took Pollock to Ojai for a week of mass camp meetings led by Krishnamurti. We know the nature of Krishnamurti's teachings at the time, as his campfire talks were published. Their message is self-discovery and self-emancipation, the need to find a path to a higher reality. Unhappy with school, Pollock toyed with thoughts of following the master to his camps in India and Holland. His brother Charles helped convince him that art was a better choice, but the artist would not forget what he had learned from Schwankovky and Krishnamurti.
Although later Pollock found new inspiration in Jung and shamanism, Theosophy remained significant. Especially important here is his involvement in 1941-42 with John Graham, a modern artist and mystic interested in Theosophy and yoga. But Pollock's life-long conviction that art and life are one, that “Painting is life itself," is rooted in his experience with Schwankovsky and Krishnamurti.
Articles in anthologies by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
Sakralität und Moderne, 2010
already in 1945 designed such a chapel for Fritz Bultman in Provincetown. In 1948 he had become c... more already in 1945 designed such a chapel for Fritz Bultman in Provincetown. In 1948 he had become close to Pollock. Looking out for possible mural commissions for his friend, he suggested to Ossorio that he would design a church for a still unspecified site that would call for six of Pollock's classic poured paintings, including Lucifer (fig. 1), a favorite of Smith's. 2 Ossorio responded positively and Pollock, too, was intrigued.
Biocentrism and Modernism, 2011
Abstract Expressionism invites interpretation both as the end of an anthropomorphic tradition of ... more Abstract Expressionism invites interpretation both as the end of an anthropomorphic tradition of painting rooted in the Renaissance and as an attempt to leave that tradition behind in favor of a biocentric approach. In different ways Greenberg and Clark suggest the former. I address the latter, by considering one episode in the artistic development of Pollock, his 1949 collaboration with Peter Blake in creating a model for an “Ideal Museum.”
In leaving panel painting behind, Pollock struggles to make "life" or "nature," rather than the human subject, the center of his art. Framing Pollock’s poured paintings within a Miesian glass architecture, Blake opens his Museum and the paintings within it to nature. In it we become aware of Pollock’s own evolution towards such an opening. As the Ideal Museum dramatizes, Pollock’s pictorial approach invites bodily enactment or mimesis of the energies of nature: a new relationship between art and spectator.
Gravity in Art : Essays on Weight and Weightlessness in Painting, Sculpture and Photography, 2012
Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being addresses the conflicting desires in every human being: ... more Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being addresses the conflicting desires in every human being: to fly and be free, and to be firmly placed. Levity speaks of freedom; gravity of what gives our lives weight. What can integrate these conflicting desires? Both religion and love, in so far as they bind our freedom, address our need for integration. Art as well can address this need. Jackson Pollock's poured paintings express these tensions, and sometimes their resolution. For example, a poured enamel drawing of 1950 embodies both the weighty materiality of paint, and the impulse to make this matter fly or perhaps dance. But Pollock's achievement in the poured paintings has most often been discussed in formal terms. Rosalind Krauss has emphasized Pollock's surrender to materiality, the bassesse of his art. TJ Clark celebrates Pollock's pourings as the song of a heroic knight, totally free, singing of nothing, in the end a vacuous art. I propose rather that Pollock in his poured paintings seeks to wed materiality and freedom. The metaphor of the dance is appropriate, touching on the spiritual dimension of these paintings.
An archaeology of the pouring process attests to this spiritual dimension. While there are numerous points in Pollock's career where he makes important strides towards his poured style, I shall focus here on one of the first steps, the group of his first poured paintings made in 1943. On a drawing of that year Pollock wrote the phrase "the effort of the dance." Here I explore not so much the accomplished dance, but the effort. Landau and Katz have importantly pointed to the influence of Herbert Matter's experimental motion photography and his vitalism on Pollock's early exploration of movement. A more deeply rooted and ultimately more encompassing influence is Pollock's attraction to The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese book of yoga and mystical alchemy, that contained an introduction by CG Jung and was shown to him by his Jungian analyst. In the book he found a spiritual philosophy aimed at integrating the desire for release and freedom with a need for groundedness. Embracing the book's tenets, he used them to get himself going as a painter and in the process produced the first poured paintings, one of which became a wedding present for Herbert and Mercedes Matter.
While other artists in New York City were attracted to The Secret of the Golden Flower as a guide to creative release, Pollock was both quite literal in his doodled responses to its wisdom, and able to convert these doodles into powerful and original paintings. The formal advances are so compelling in part because his interpretation of The Secret of the Golden Flower draws on the wellsprings of his deep personal psychological needs and his innate instinct for mythic story telling. Looking at the iconography of The Secret of the Golden Flower, as it impinges on his own story telling, illuminates the spiritual meaning of the first pourings and sets us on a path to better appreciate the spiritual meaning of the mature pourings of 1947-50. It also helps us to appreciate the universal spiritual significance of the strife between gravity and levity.
Practical Reasoning and Human Engagement: Language, Ethics, and Action, 2012
Immanuel Kant distinquishes between wisdom and science: "Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom ... more Immanuel Kant distinquishes between wisdom and science: "Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life." But what organizes life?
Granted that at one level nature and society have already organized our life for us, the question remains: how ought we to live our lives? What ought we to make of our selves, how ought we meet our need for love, cope with the fact of death?
In the past religion offered guidance. Our present concern with wisdom is due perhaps to the fact that religion no longer functions in this way, while science is unable to offer what we need. In the absence of religion, Kant thought that our reason could become practical and guide us in organizing our lives. But reason has failed to provide the necessary guidance, made clear by the horrors of the twentieth-century. Philosophy, too, has revealed the limits of reason. Given all this, it is now hard to take comfort in the Enlightenment's faith in reason as the answer to the question "What organizes life?" Is there an alternative answer that does not return us to the old religion or to the Enlightenment?
One alternative answer put forward at the end of World War II was the idea that the organization of life was the task of the individual. But with existentialism, the basic problem of what is to bind freedom remains. If reason fails to provide us with the necessary bond, where are we to look? Could it be that, as Schiller already hinted, wisdom needs art? This paper explores that question with a case study, the work of the American painter Jackson Pollock.
Throughout his life Pollock understood the making of art as a vehicle for discovering how to live, at first through visual thinking with symbolic images, then later through the very process of painting his mature abstract poured canvases. Meeting personal and public crises, he discovered how, in the face of death, to aspire towards an erotic opening, whether to woman, nature, or simply to paint. The specificity of the forms and rhythms in his mature work make them powerful conveyors of mood. Responding to its moods, the viewer encounters Pollock’s struggle between an existential desire for unbound freedom and a longing for totalization and homecoming. Pollock's art is not so much a communication of specific insights as it is makes the person who struggles with his art more wise, by revealing to us something about the meaning of the human condition in an age that has experienced the death of god.
Meanings of Abstract Art Between Nature and Theory, 2012
Jackson Pollock - The “Sin” of Images
Can an abstract artist let go of images without losing tou... more Jackson Pollock - The “Sin” of Images
Can an abstract artist let go of images without losing touch with the source of inspiration? The answer in Pollock’s case is no. To track the transition between early imagery drawn from his inner nature and his universalizing abstraction, I turn to the shamanic imagery of Totem Lesson I 1944, the transitional engraving ART 1944-45, and the abstract rhythmic expression found in Autumn Rhythm 1950. Paradoxically by covering up his images, Pollock removed himself from the emotional well-spring of his art. The very success of his abstraction led to a dead end, provoking a desperate attempt to reengage his earlier imagery.
Articles in journals by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
In working towards his mature abstract poured paintings, Pollock not only learned from Masson'... more In working towards his mature abstract poured paintings, Pollock not only learned from Masson's abstract linear automatism, but was challenged by Masson's mythological narratives: Mythology of Being 1942 and Anatomy of my Universe 1943. Pollock's response to these narratives of male descent into the female labyrinth in search of harmony is evident in his Male and Female 1942, and later in his exploration of these same themes using an increasingly abstract automatist line in prints made at Hayter's Atelier 17 in 1944-45. In addition to Masson's example, what Hayter taught Pollock about the ability of an engraved line to move in the "space of the imagination" anticipates the three-dimensionality of Pollock's future poured gestures.
... This is true not just in 1947-50, or even in this one instance in 1943, but for all of Polloc... more ... This is true not just in 1947-50, or even in this one instance in 1943, but for all of Pollock's work.Varnedoe (in the catalogue) 114 SUMMER 1999 ... Elizabeth L. Langhorne is associate professor at Central Connecticut State University, where she teaches modern art history. ...
Arts
Clement Greenberg interpreted the rise of authentic modern art as a rejection of kitsch and “half... more Clement Greenberg interpreted the rise of authentic modern art as a rejection of kitsch and “half-baked” religiosity and celebrated Jackson Pollock as representing what he called for. However, his presentation of Pollock as a leading modernist fails to do justice to his lifelong spiritual quest and to his desire to reach a broad public, which led him to open his art and person to the popular media of photography and film. Following Greenberg, Donald Kuspit would have us understand Pollock’s embrace of and by the public as a self-betrayal, transforming his great abstractions into decorative kitsch. Kuspit’s understanding of Pollock’s “true self”, however, cannot convince. His embrace of the public did lead Pollock to doubt his artistic enterprise: his dream of art as alchemy. But, the great abstractions testify to the power of that dream to create great art, challenging us to reconsider the relationship between authentic art and mass culture, of modernism, spirituality, and the public.
In recent years Greenberg's formalist account of abstract art has come under heavy fire, but no n... more In recent years Greenberg's formalist account of abstract art has come under heavy fire, but no new, equally comprehensive, theory to account for the formation and importance of abstract art during and after World War II has taken its place. The encounter of Pollock and Graham in 1940 points towards just such a theory. To their shared desire to challenge the art of Picasso, Graham brought his fascination with alchemy and its implications for investing spiritual and emotional meaning in the act of painting, whether painting symbols or manipulating raw pigment. Because paint mattered more to Pollock than mere words or explicit symbolism, he was able to incarnate spirit in matter in a way that eluded his guru. But, although Graham beat a retreat from his long standing convictions about the power of abstraction to the domain of symbols, he was able to recognize and respect, as Greenberg was never able to, Pollock's ambition for a painting that could fuse the evolution of form with content, and so achieve a thoroughly pictorial alchemy.
www.kunstgeschichte-ejournal.net/463/, 2016
In working towards his mature abstract poured paintings, Pollock not only learned from Masson's a... more In working towards his mature abstract poured paintings, Pollock not only learned from Masson's abstract linear automatism, but was challenged by Masson's mythological narratives: Mythology of Being 1942 and Anatomy of my Universe 1943. Pollock's response to these narratives of male descent into the female labyrinth in search of harmony is evident in his Male and Female 1942, and later in his exploration of these same themes using an increasingly abstract automatist line in prints made at Hayter's Atelier 17 in 1944-45. In addition to Masson's example, what Hayter taught Pollock about the ability of an engraved line to move in the "space of the imagination" anticipates the three-dimensionality of Pollock's future poured gestures.
Books by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
This manuscript is the original English version of what was later translated by Karsten Harries a... more This manuscript is the original English version of what was later translated by Karsten Harries and published in a reworked German version as
JACKSON POLLOCK - KUNST ALS SINNSUCHE: Abstraktion, All-Over, Action Painting (Havel Verlag, 2013).
The abstract for the original English version follows:
By now Pollock’s place in the canon of great artists is secure. But just what makes him deserving of that place remains a question. Behind this lurks another question. Why does an art such as Pollock's, which in its abstractness seems to say nothing, matter?
The dominant narrative that presides over the understanding of Pollock's art remains the modernist one rooted in Clement Greenberg's aesthetics. Even when art historians question or resist such formalist criticism, they remain within the orbit of Greenberg's approach (Krauss, Leja, Clark). This book proposes to break free from this Enlightenment approach to art, and recover the story that artists were telling themselves about art as a discovery of meaning.
As Meyer Schapiro put it in 1936, the artists’ ambition was to address in art "a whole complex of longings, moral values and broad conceptions of life." Harold Rosenberg, the other major critic of Pollock's art, does address the link between art and life in his 1952 article "American action painters," but sees art as an expression of individual self-assertion. Both Greenberg's and Rosenberg's understanding of Pollock's art leaves something fundamental unaccounted for: the spiritual dimension of his search for self.
The symbolic figuration and structure in Pollock’s early paintings and related drawings, hitherto largely passed over except for the preliminary efforts of Leja and Cernuschi, offer a key to this dimension, and to his oeuvre. They reveal his responses to the rich cultural context of 1939-1946 -- focused by his own imaginative and personal quest to put his troubled self in relationship to a transcendent other, as this touched him in the mysteries of death, birth, sex, love. The stimulation of his first art teacher Schwankovsky's interests in theosophy, yoga and Indian philosophy, his experience of Jungian psychotherapy, the application of the hermetic alchemical interests of his guru John Graham, the impact of Masson's surrealist narratives, the writings of the surrealist apostate Wolfgang Paalen on totemism are among contextual influences brought to light, as Pollock weaves these threads into his own mythic story. In his search for an integrated self Pollock explores his relationship with the other, whether understood by him as an inner woman, a real woman, nature or ultimately paint.
The formal and narrative patterns that evolve within his early work continue to inform the poured abstractions of 1947-50, allowing us to discover meaning that previous critics and art historians have failed to see. These patterns illuminate as well the pathos of Pollock's re-emergent imagery in the last phase of his career. Approaching his art as a search for self allows us to recognize that it is fraught with tensions: between spiritual conviction on one side, aestheticism and existential freedom and despair on the other.
His search does find a powerful and abiding embodiment in the material forms of his art, justifying Greenberg's aesthetic appreciation; at times his search, emphasizing transformation and process, takes on an existential cast. But understanding Pollock's art as a search for meaning reconciles and subsumes Greenberg's and Rosenberg's narratives, to reveal the sustained passion of Pollock's spiritual quest. His search for an integrated self binds his career into a whole, and continues with its affective force instantiated in his art to attract us today as we consider in what ways art matters.
Papers by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
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Articles unpublished by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
Conference Presentations by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
Rooted in ancient and hermetic traditions presented under the veil of enigma, allegory and symbols, alchemy is a transformative practice predicated on the belief that Spirit is present in all that is in the universe. The goal of the ancient alchemist was to accomplish the Great Work, the realization of Spirit in matter, figured by the transformation of lead into gold. On one level this effort was a proto-chemistry; on another, a psychological quest: as lead is transmuted into gold, so the soul is purified, dissolved and crystallized anew, to reveal Spirit.
These two metaphors for alchemy, as psychological change and as transformation of matter, are intimately linked in the painting of Jackson Pollock. I will focus here on one drawing from c. 1943, given as a gift to his first biographer, B. H. Friedman. Its symbolic images and numbers, and, rare in Pollock's work, sequence of words, provide crucial insight into Pollock's art: his symbolic figuration, his turn to abstraction, his quest for meaning which persists throughout his career. Understanding the import of the drawing takes us to two of Jung's texts on alchemy to which Pollock had access. Emotionally needy, he was in Jungian analysis between 1939-43 and open to the alchemical myth with its promise of integration and redemption. But as James Elkins demanded of the painter, he practices a pictorial alchemy, spiritualizing matter. Pollock does not simply illustrate Jung. In showing what Pollock made of his alchemical knowledge, I will have occasion to refer to the widespread cultural and artistic interest in alchemy in the 1930s and early 40s as well as the more immediate context of his own mythic works of 1942-43. Here we see Pollock in the laboratory, the alchemist painter, launching himself on a pictorial journey that revolutionized abstract painting.
Challenging the commonly perceived rupture between Pollock's early symbolic imagery and his abstract work, alchemy lets us understand the early symbolic work as the very basis for Pollock's turn to abstraction in the poured paintings. Countering the material positivism of Clement Greenberg's aesthetic response to Pollock's abstraction, still dominant in the literature, alchemy allows us to appreciate Pollock's spiritual approach to matter. The transformative dynamism of destruction- creation worked out in symbolic imagery continues to animate the abstract poured paintings of 1947-50.
Jackson Pollock can serve as an example of spiritual thinking that still importantly feeds creative work. He was raised in a secular and left-leaning family that was, as he put it, "violently anti-religious. " But, as he told his wife Lee Krasner, he felt a loss there, because he did have strong religious impulses. These were first nurtured by his high school art teacher in Los Angeles, Frederic John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky.
Given the way critics and art historians have emphasized the formal side of the art of Jackson Pollock, this spiritual side has until recently received scant attention. The significance of Schwankovsky for Pollock’s self-understanding as an artist has thus remained unexamined. But in him Pollock found a mentor who set him on a course that he pursued to the very end. In this paper I begin such an examination, focusing on two paintings, Schwankovsky’s Modern Music (c. 1925) and Pollock’s, Moon Woman (1942).
In May 1929 Schwankovsky, interested in yoga and a recent convert to Theosophy, took Pollock to Ojai for a week of mass camp meetings led by Krishnamurti. We know the nature of Krishnamurti's teachings at the time, as his campfire talks were published. Their message is self-discovery and self-emancipation, the need to find a path to a higher reality. Unhappy with school, Pollock toyed with thoughts of following the master to his camps in India and Holland. His brother Charles helped convince him that art was a better choice, but the artist would not forget what he had learned from Schwankovky and Krishnamurti.
Although later Pollock found new inspiration in Jung and shamanism, Theosophy remained significant. Especially important here is his involvement in 1941-42 with John Graham, a modern artist and mystic interested in Theosophy and yoga. But Pollock's life-long conviction that art and life are one, that “Painting is life itself," is rooted in his experience with Schwankovsky and Krishnamurti.
Articles in anthologies by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
In leaving panel painting behind, Pollock struggles to make "life" or "nature," rather than the human subject, the center of his art. Framing Pollock’s poured paintings within a Miesian glass architecture, Blake opens his Museum and the paintings within it to nature. In it we become aware of Pollock’s own evolution towards such an opening. As the Ideal Museum dramatizes, Pollock’s pictorial approach invites bodily enactment or mimesis of the energies of nature: a new relationship between art and spectator.
An archaeology of the pouring process attests to this spiritual dimension. While there are numerous points in Pollock's career where he makes important strides towards his poured style, I shall focus here on one of the first steps, the group of his first poured paintings made in 1943. On a drawing of that year Pollock wrote the phrase "the effort of the dance." Here I explore not so much the accomplished dance, but the effort. Landau and Katz have importantly pointed to the influence of Herbert Matter's experimental motion photography and his vitalism on Pollock's early exploration of movement. A more deeply rooted and ultimately more encompassing influence is Pollock's attraction to The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese book of yoga and mystical alchemy, that contained an introduction by CG Jung and was shown to him by his Jungian analyst. In the book he found a spiritual philosophy aimed at integrating the desire for release and freedom with a need for groundedness. Embracing the book's tenets, he used them to get himself going as a painter and in the process produced the first poured paintings, one of which became a wedding present for Herbert and Mercedes Matter.
While other artists in New York City were attracted to The Secret of the Golden Flower as a guide to creative release, Pollock was both quite literal in his doodled responses to its wisdom, and able to convert these doodles into powerful and original paintings. The formal advances are so compelling in part because his interpretation of The Secret of the Golden Flower draws on the wellsprings of his deep personal psychological needs and his innate instinct for mythic story telling. Looking at the iconography of The Secret of the Golden Flower, as it impinges on his own story telling, illuminates the spiritual meaning of the first pourings and sets us on a path to better appreciate the spiritual meaning of the mature pourings of 1947-50. It also helps us to appreciate the universal spiritual significance of the strife between gravity and levity.
Granted that at one level nature and society have already organized our life for us, the question remains: how ought we to live our lives? What ought we to make of our selves, how ought we meet our need for love, cope with the fact of death?
In the past religion offered guidance. Our present concern with wisdom is due perhaps to the fact that religion no longer functions in this way, while science is unable to offer what we need. In the absence of religion, Kant thought that our reason could become practical and guide us in organizing our lives. But reason has failed to provide the necessary guidance, made clear by the horrors of the twentieth-century. Philosophy, too, has revealed the limits of reason. Given all this, it is now hard to take comfort in the Enlightenment's faith in reason as the answer to the question "What organizes life?" Is there an alternative answer that does not return us to the old religion or to the Enlightenment?
One alternative answer put forward at the end of World War II was the idea that the organization of life was the task of the individual. But with existentialism, the basic problem of what is to bind freedom remains. If reason fails to provide us with the necessary bond, where are we to look? Could it be that, as Schiller already hinted, wisdom needs art? This paper explores that question with a case study, the work of the American painter Jackson Pollock.
Throughout his life Pollock understood the making of art as a vehicle for discovering how to live, at first through visual thinking with symbolic images, then later through the very process of painting his mature abstract poured canvases. Meeting personal and public crises, he discovered how, in the face of death, to aspire towards an erotic opening, whether to woman, nature, or simply to paint. The specificity of the forms and rhythms in his mature work make them powerful conveyors of mood. Responding to its moods, the viewer encounters Pollock’s struggle between an existential desire for unbound freedom and a longing for totalization and homecoming. Pollock's art is not so much a communication of specific insights as it is makes the person who struggles with his art more wise, by revealing to us something about the meaning of the human condition in an age that has experienced the death of god.
Can an abstract artist let go of images without losing touch with the source of inspiration? The answer in Pollock’s case is no. To track the transition between early imagery drawn from his inner nature and his universalizing abstraction, I turn to the shamanic imagery of Totem Lesson I 1944, the transitional engraving ART 1944-45, and the abstract rhythmic expression found in Autumn Rhythm 1950. Paradoxically by covering up his images, Pollock removed himself from the emotional well-spring of his art. The very success of his abstraction led to a dead end, provoking a desperate attempt to reengage his earlier imagery.
Articles in journals by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
Books by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
JACKSON POLLOCK - KUNST ALS SINNSUCHE: Abstraktion, All-Over, Action Painting (Havel Verlag, 2013).
The abstract for the original English version follows:
By now Pollock’s place in the canon of great artists is secure. But just what makes him deserving of that place remains a question. Behind this lurks another question. Why does an art such as Pollock's, which in its abstractness seems to say nothing, matter?
The dominant narrative that presides over the understanding of Pollock's art remains the modernist one rooted in Clement Greenberg's aesthetics. Even when art historians question or resist such formalist criticism, they remain within the orbit of Greenberg's approach (Krauss, Leja, Clark). This book proposes to break free from this Enlightenment approach to art, and recover the story that artists were telling themselves about art as a discovery of meaning.
As Meyer Schapiro put it in 1936, the artists’ ambition was to address in art "a whole complex of longings, moral values and broad conceptions of life." Harold Rosenberg, the other major critic of Pollock's art, does address the link between art and life in his 1952 article "American action painters," but sees art as an expression of individual self-assertion. Both Greenberg's and Rosenberg's understanding of Pollock's art leaves something fundamental unaccounted for: the spiritual dimension of his search for self.
The symbolic figuration and structure in Pollock’s early paintings and related drawings, hitherto largely passed over except for the preliminary efforts of Leja and Cernuschi, offer a key to this dimension, and to his oeuvre. They reveal his responses to the rich cultural context of 1939-1946 -- focused by his own imaginative and personal quest to put his troubled self in relationship to a transcendent other, as this touched him in the mysteries of death, birth, sex, love. The stimulation of his first art teacher Schwankovsky's interests in theosophy, yoga and Indian philosophy, his experience of Jungian psychotherapy, the application of the hermetic alchemical interests of his guru John Graham, the impact of Masson's surrealist narratives, the writings of the surrealist apostate Wolfgang Paalen on totemism are among contextual influences brought to light, as Pollock weaves these threads into his own mythic story. In his search for an integrated self Pollock explores his relationship with the other, whether understood by him as an inner woman, a real woman, nature or ultimately paint.
The formal and narrative patterns that evolve within his early work continue to inform the poured abstractions of 1947-50, allowing us to discover meaning that previous critics and art historians have failed to see. These patterns illuminate as well the pathos of Pollock's re-emergent imagery in the last phase of his career. Approaching his art as a search for self allows us to recognize that it is fraught with tensions: between spiritual conviction on one side, aestheticism and existential freedom and despair on the other.
His search does find a powerful and abiding embodiment in the material forms of his art, justifying Greenberg's aesthetic appreciation; at times his search, emphasizing transformation and process, takes on an existential cast. But understanding Pollock's art as a search for meaning reconciles and subsumes Greenberg's and Rosenberg's narratives, to reveal the sustained passion of Pollock's spiritual quest. His search for an integrated self binds his career into a whole, and continues with its affective force instantiated in his art to attract us today as we consider in what ways art matters.
Papers by Elizabeth L . Langhorne
Rooted in ancient and hermetic traditions presented under the veil of enigma, allegory and symbols, alchemy is a transformative practice predicated on the belief that Spirit is present in all that is in the universe. The goal of the ancient alchemist was to accomplish the Great Work, the realization of Spirit in matter, figured by the transformation of lead into gold. On one level this effort was a proto-chemistry; on another, a psychological quest: as lead is transmuted into gold, so the soul is purified, dissolved and crystallized anew, to reveal Spirit.
These two metaphors for alchemy, as psychological change and as transformation of matter, are intimately linked in the painting of Jackson Pollock. I will focus here on one drawing from c. 1943, given as a gift to his first biographer, B. H. Friedman. Its symbolic images and numbers, and, rare in Pollock's work, sequence of words, provide crucial insight into Pollock's art: his symbolic figuration, his turn to abstraction, his quest for meaning which persists throughout his career. Understanding the import of the drawing takes us to two of Jung's texts on alchemy to which Pollock had access. Emotionally needy, he was in Jungian analysis between 1939-43 and open to the alchemical myth with its promise of integration and redemption. But as James Elkins demanded of the painter, he practices a pictorial alchemy, spiritualizing matter. Pollock does not simply illustrate Jung. In showing what Pollock made of his alchemical knowledge, I will have occasion to refer to the widespread cultural and artistic interest in alchemy in the 1930s and early 40s as well as the more immediate context of his own mythic works of 1942-43. Here we see Pollock in the laboratory, the alchemist painter, launching himself on a pictorial journey that revolutionized abstract painting.
Challenging the commonly perceived rupture between Pollock's early symbolic imagery and his abstract work, alchemy lets us understand the early symbolic work as the very basis for Pollock's turn to abstraction in the poured paintings. Countering the material positivism of Clement Greenberg's aesthetic response to Pollock's abstraction, still dominant in the literature, alchemy allows us to appreciate Pollock's spiritual approach to matter. The transformative dynamism of destruction- creation worked out in symbolic imagery continues to animate the abstract poured paintings of 1947-50.
Jackson Pollock can serve as an example of spiritual thinking that still importantly feeds creative work. He was raised in a secular and left-leaning family that was, as he put it, "violently anti-religious. " But, as he told his wife Lee Krasner, he felt a loss there, because he did have strong religious impulses. These were first nurtured by his high school art teacher in Los Angeles, Frederic John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky.
Given the way critics and art historians have emphasized the formal side of the art of Jackson Pollock, this spiritual side has until recently received scant attention. The significance of Schwankovsky for Pollock’s self-understanding as an artist has thus remained unexamined. But in him Pollock found a mentor who set him on a course that he pursued to the very end. In this paper I begin such an examination, focusing on two paintings, Schwankovsky’s Modern Music (c. 1925) and Pollock’s, Moon Woman (1942).
In May 1929 Schwankovsky, interested in yoga and a recent convert to Theosophy, took Pollock to Ojai for a week of mass camp meetings led by Krishnamurti. We know the nature of Krishnamurti's teachings at the time, as his campfire talks were published. Their message is self-discovery and self-emancipation, the need to find a path to a higher reality. Unhappy with school, Pollock toyed with thoughts of following the master to his camps in India and Holland. His brother Charles helped convince him that art was a better choice, but the artist would not forget what he had learned from Schwankovky and Krishnamurti.
Although later Pollock found new inspiration in Jung and shamanism, Theosophy remained significant. Especially important here is his involvement in 1941-42 with John Graham, a modern artist and mystic interested in Theosophy and yoga. But Pollock's life-long conviction that art and life are one, that “Painting is life itself," is rooted in his experience with Schwankovsky and Krishnamurti.
In leaving panel painting behind, Pollock struggles to make "life" or "nature," rather than the human subject, the center of his art. Framing Pollock’s poured paintings within a Miesian glass architecture, Blake opens his Museum and the paintings within it to nature. In it we become aware of Pollock’s own evolution towards such an opening. As the Ideal Museum dramatizes, Pollock’s pictorial approach invites bodily enactment or mimesis of the energies of nature: a new relationship between art and spectator.
An archaeology of the pouring process attests to this spiritual dimension. While there are numerous points in Pollock's career where he makes important strides towards his poured style, I shall focus here on one of the first steps, the group of his first poured paintings made in 1943. On a drawing of that year Pollock wrote the phrase "the effort of the dance." Here I explore not so much the accomplished dance, but the effort. Landau and Katz have importantly pointed to the influence of Herbert Matter's experimental motion photography and his vitalism on Pollock's early exploration of movement. A more deeply rooted and ultimately more encompassing influence is Pollock's attraction to The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese book of yoga and mystical alchemy, that contained an introduction by CG Jung and was shown to him by his Jungian analyst. In the book he found a spiritual philosophy aimed at integrating the desire for release and freedom with a need for groundedness. Embracing the book's tenets, he used them to get himself going as a painter and in the process produced the first poured paintings, one of which became a wedding present for Herbert and Mercedes Matter.
While other artists in New York City were attracted to The Secret of the Golden Flower as a guide to creative release, Pollock was both quite literal in his doodled responses to its wisdom, and able to convert these doodles into powerful and original paintings. The formal advances are so compelling in part because his interpretation of The Secret of the Golden Flower draws on the wellsprings of his deep personal psychological needs and his innate instinct for mythic story telling. Looking at the iconography of The Secret of the Golden Flower, as it impinges on his own story telling, illuminates the spiritual meaning of the first pourings and sets us on a path to better appreciate the spiritual meaning of the mature pourings of 1947-50. It also helps us to appreciate the universal spiritual significance of the strife between gravity and levity.
Granted that at one level nature and society have already organized our life for us, the question remains: how ought we to live our lives? What ought we to make of our selves, how ought we meet our need for love, cope with the fact of death?
In the past religion offered guidance. Our present concern with wisdom is due perhaps to the fact that religion no longer functions in this way, while science is unable to offer what we need. In the absence of religion, Kant thought that our reason could become practical and guide us in organizing our lives. But reason has failed to provide the necessary guidance, made clear by the horrors of the twentieth-century. Philosophy, too, has revealed the limits of reason. Given all this, it is now hard to take comfort in the Enlightenment's faith in reason as the answer to the question "What organizes life?" Is there an alternative answer that does not return us to the old religion or to the Enlightenment?
One alternative answer put forward at the end of World War II was the idea that the organization of life was the task of the individual. But with existentialism, the basic problem of what is to bind freedom remains. If reason fails to provide us with the necessary bond, where are we to look? Could it be that, as Schiller already hinted, wisdom needs art? This paper explores that question with a case study, the work of the American painter Jackson Pollock.
Throughout his life Pollock understood the making of art as a vehicle for discovering how to live, at first through visual thinking with symbolic images, then later through the very process of painting his mature abstract poured canvases. Meeting personal and public crises, he discovered how, in the face of death, to aspire towards an erotic opening, whether to woman, nature, or simply to paint. The specificity of the forms and rhythms in his mature work make them powerful conveyors of mood. Responding to its moods, the viewer encounters Pollock’s struggle between an existential desire for unbound freedom and a longing for totalization and homecoming. Pollock's art is not so much a communication of specific insights as it is makes the person who struggles with his art more wise, by revealing to us something about the meaning of the human condition in an age that has experienced the death of god.
Can an abstract artist let go of images without losing touch with the source of inspiration? The answer in Pollock’s case is no. To track the transition between early imagery drawn from his inner nature and his universalizing abstraction, I turn to the shamanic imagery of Totem Lesson I 1944, the transitional engraving ART 1944-45, and the abstract rhythmic expression found in Autumn Rhythm 1950. Paradoxically by covering up his images, Pollock removed himself from the emotional well-spring of his art. The very success of his abstraction led to a dead end, provoking a desperate attempt to reengage his earlier imagery.
JACKSON POLLOCK - KUNST ALS SINNSUCHE: Abstraktion, All-Over, Action Painting (Havel Verlag, 2013).
The abstract for the original English version follows:
By now Pollock’s place in the canon of great artists is secure. But just what makes him deserving of that place remains a question. Behind this lurks another question. Why does an art such as Pollock's, which in its abstractness seems to say nothing, matter?
The dominant narrative that presides over the understanding of Pollock's art remains the modernist one rooted in Clement Greenberg's aesthetics. Even when art historians question or resist such formalist criticism, they remain within the orbit of Greenberg's approach (Krauss, Leja, Clark). This book proposes to break free from this Enlightenment approach to art, and recover the story that artists were telling themselves about art as a discovery of meaning.
As Meyer Schapiro put it in 1936, the artists’ ambition was to address in art "a whole complex of longings, moral values and broad conceptions of life." Harold Rosenberg, the other major critic of Pollock's art, does address the link between art and life in his 1952 article "American action painters," but sees art as an expression of individual self-assertion. Both Greenberg's and Rosenberg's understanding of Pollock's art leaves something fundamental unaccounted for: the spiritual dimension of his search for self.
The symbolic figuration and structure in Pollock’s early paintings and related drawings, hitherto largely passed over except for the preliminary efforts of Leja and Cernuschi, offer a key to this dimension, and to his oeuvre. They reveal his responses to the rich cultural context of 1939-1946 -- focused by his own imaginative and personal quest to put his troubled self in relationship to a transcendent other, as this touched him in the mysteries of death, birth, sex, love. The stimulation of his first art teacher Schwankovsky's interests in theosophy, yoga and Indian philosophy, his experience of Jungian psychotherapy, the application of the hermetic alchemical interests of his guru John Graham, the impact of Masson's surrealist narratives, the writings of the surrealist apostate Wolfgang Paalen on totemism are among contextual influences brought to light, as Pollock weaves these threads into his own mythic story. In his search for an integrated self Pollock explores his relationship with the other, whether understood by him as an inner woman, a real woman, nature or ultimately paint.
The formal and narrative patterns that evolve within his early work continue to inform the poured abstractions of 1947-50, allowing us to discover meaning that previous critics and art historians have failed to see. These patterns illuminate as well the pathos of Pollock's re-emergent imagery in the last phase of his career. Approaching his art as a search for self allows us to recognize that it is fraught with tensions: between spiritual conviction on one side, aestheticism and existential freedom and despair on the other.
His search does find a powerful and abiding embodiment in the material forms of his art, justifying Greenberg's aesthetic appreciation; at times his search, emphasizing transformation and process, takes on an existential cast. But understanding Pollock's art as a search for meaning reconciles and subsumes Greenberg's and Rosenberg's narratives, to reveal the sustained passion of Pollock's spiritual quest. His search for an integrated self binds his career into a whole, and continues with its affective force instantiated in his art to attract us today as we consider in what ways art matters.