In Defense of Abstract Expressionism

Author(s): T. J. Clark
Source: October , Summer, 1994, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994), pp. 22-48
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778988

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 In Defense of Abstract
Expressionism

T. J. CLARK

1. We have come a certain way from Abstract Expressionism, and the question
of how we should understand our relationship to it gets to be interesting again.
Awe at its triumphs is long gone; but so is laughter at its cheap philosophy, or
distaste for its heavy breathing, or boredom with its sublimity, or resentment at the
part it played in the Cold War. Not that any of those feelings have gone away or
ever should, but that it begins to be clear that none of them-not even the sum of
them-amounts to an attitude to the painting in question. They are what artists
and critics once had because they did not have an attitude-because something
stood in the way of their making Abstract Expressionism a thing of the past.

2. Not being able to make a previous moment of high achievement part of

the past-not to lose it and mourn it and if necessary revile it-is, for art under
the circumstances of modernism, more or less synonymous with not being able to
make art at all. Because ever since Hegel put the basic proposition of modernism
into words in the 1820s-that "art, considered in its highest vocation, is and
remains for us a thing of the past"-art's being able to continue has depended on
its success in making that dictum specific and punctual. That is to say, fixing the
moment of art's last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and
discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melan-
choly or decadent continuation to seem possible after all. The "can't go on, will go
on" syndrome. I think of the relation of nineteenth-century orchestral and cham-
ber music to the moment of Mozart and Beethoven; or of how nineteenth- and
twentieth-century literature managed to continue living on the idea of "the
Romantics," or on the terminal images it fashioned of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, or
of the past that "Impressionism" went on providing for French painting deep into
the twentieth century (till the deaths of Bonnard and Matisse), or of the feeding
of later modernisms on the myth of the Readymade and the Black Square.
Hegel's dictum had to be localized, that is to say. And to point to the fact that
it can be localized, and therefore in a sense evaded, is, of course, to confirm the
Hegelian thesis, not refute it. For Hegel did not anticipate any literal ceasing, or

OCTOBER 69, Summer 1994, pp. 23-48. ? 1994 TJ. Clark.

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Willem d

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 MrMTZATRIMM,
N't" *41
Jackson Pollock. Phosphorescence.
All.
qI 1947.

je,

Tga
P

7l
'4-74
-WA&

Xv

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Clyfford Still. 1949. 1949.

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 In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 25

even withering-away, of activities calling themselv

they could possibly remain the form in which me
relations of mind and body to possible worlds. Or I
good effect. What he did not see, as I understand i
implication of that inability-the inability to go on
ous immediacy, of a kind that opened both to the
prove a persistent, maybe sufficient, subject. Tha
hubris about philosophy, and because he could not d
of world-historical beginnings and endings that cam
the shadow of the French Revolution. And other reasons besides. He could never
have guessed that the disenchantment of the world would take so long.
Modernism, as I conceive it, is the art of the situation Hegel pointed to, bu
its job turns out to be to make the endlessness of the ending bearable, by time an
again imagining that it has taken place-back there with Beethoven scratching
out Napoleon's name on the Eroica symphony, or with Rimbaud getting on the
boat at Marseilles. Every modernism has to have its own proximate Black Square.
Therefore our failure to see Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still as ending
something, or our lack of a story of what it is they were ending, is considerabl
more than a crisis in art criticism or art history. It means that for us art is n
longer a thing of the past; that is, we have no usable image of its ending, at a tim
and place we could imagine ourselves inhabiting, even if we would rather not.
Therefore art will eternally hold us with its glittering eye. Not only will it foreg
its role in the disenchantment of the world, but it will accept the role that h
constantly been foisted upon it by its false friends: it will become one of the
forms, maybe the form, in which the world is reenchanted. With a magic no mo
and no less powerful (here is my real fear) than that of the general conjuror o
depth and desirability back into our world-that is, the commodity form. For th
one thing the myth of the end of art made possible was the maintaining of som
kind of distance between art's sensuous immediacy and that of other (stronger
claimants to the same power.

3. Of course the situation I have been describing may not be remediable. I

may be that we have lost Abstract Expressionism because we have lost modernism
tout court, and therefore the need to imagine art altogether-whether continuin
or ending. I have my doubts. But in any case my object in this essay is limited. I am
going to mount a defense of Still and Pollock and others, couched in historical
terms. Whether the defense makes any of them usable, in the sense I have bee
proposing-whether it makes them a thing of the past-depends on whether wh
I have to say tallies in the long term with art practice. At the moment I see no re
son that it should; but, equally, I find it hard to believe that the present myth
post-ness will sustain itself indefinitely. All this remains to be seen; it is not art his-
torians' business. I only bring it up because it would be futile to pretend that I d
not think a great deal hinges on somebody, eventually, giving this painting its due.

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26 OCTOBER

4. To talk of
some time no
The various re
ing new and
function) in t
believed that t
of Abstract E
and art world
right people. B
sort of upsho
one thing to
national bour
and exotic as
of that encou
extent was th
contingent? T
deepest level-
making-to th
that answers t
done. And cert
of the paintin
discovering fo
or Clyfford S
impede the im
back to the p
time even thi
was in anothe
their research
objects resist
their prearran

5. Sometimes
from proposi
might be seen
with no very
what sorts of
this way? Ho
worse? (Somet
end to a false,

1. Hubert Damisc
Seuil, 1984), p. 6
applied, by Damis

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 4?x,

777 wi?- NOW

Willem de Kooning. Collage. 1950.

Milton, and Feneon about Monet, than all Milton's and

together.) The theses that follow are offered in a similar specu

6. I think we might come to describe Abstract Expressio

if we took them above all to be vulgar. The word for us i
understood as such in the arguments to come. But this sh
insuperable problem, especially for those of us used to thin
After all, modernism has very often been understood as d
a range of characteristics that had previously come un
pejorative descriptions-from ugliness, for example, or th
and disheveled; from the Material as opposed to the Ideal;
limiting fact of flatness; from superficiality; from the l
Nonetheless there still may be a slight frisson to the idea that
Expressionism's immersion in bassesse was vulgarity. It is n
Willem de Kooning's Collage for instance, or Bradley Wal
Night, No. 2, that they are vulgar is to do anything besides de
fine by me. Not to be certain for once that the negative
describe a modernist artifact can ever be made to ear
emerge transfigured from the fire of discourse-may mea
thing. To call an art work vulgar is obviously (at least for
more transgressive than to call it low or informe. To have
had that be the quality in it (the only quality) that raised
had it speak a world-must have been difficult. Pollock

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 28 OCTOBER

Left: Bradley Walk

Night, No. 2. 194

Opposite left: Hans

Garden. 1956.

Opposite right: Adolph Gottlieb. Black,

Blue, Red. 1956.

..........

instance, seem to have been begun at the end of 1947 in a mood of triumphant
access to the gaudy and the overdone-Phosphorescence is typical in this regard, and
Ralph Manheim's title, beautiful as it is, somewhat naturalizes the painting
essential tackiness.2 The drip paintings came to an end three years later when
their maker discovered that even here, or especially here (on the floor, flicking his
Duco and aluminum), true vulgarity was beyond his reach.

7. It is an advantage to the term "vulgar," as far as I am concerned, that

discursively it points two ways-to the object itself, to some abjectness or absurdity
in its very makeup, some telltale blemish, some atrociously visual quality that th
object will never stop betraying however hard it tries; and to the object's existenc
in a particular social world, for a set of tastes and styles of individuality that have
still to be defined, but are somehow there, in the word even before it is deployed
Herein, I hope, lies the possibility of class ascription in the case of paintings lik
Pollock's Cut-Out and de Kooning's Woman-the possibility of seeing at last, and
even being able to describe, the ways they take part in a particular triumph and
disaster of the petty bourgeoisie. But I am coming to that.

8. In Abstract Expressionism, and here is the painting's continuing (maybe

intensifying) difficulty for us, a certain construction of the world we call "individu-

2. On Manheim's titling of works for Pollock's first show at Betty Parsons's, see Ellen Landau,
Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1989), pp. 169-77.

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 29

i li i iii~i~ i iiiiiii

~ii

?i ....

ality" is revealed in its true, that

or rather, paintings like Hans H
Blue, Red, done under the sign
search of the gratifications and a

9. I should try to define my

word "vulgar" and its cognates
vulgarly, in the slipping and s
elusiveness (but for that very
built into them. The three quot
are looking at are, first, Jane A
"the vulgar freedom and folly" o
her no recommendation"-I thi
that Austen objected to, and ne
Arnold in 1865, making the lin
ularly concerns us here: "Saugr
other vulgar words, very expr
Life as saying of Byron, in a lett
minded genius that ever produ
his or her own favorite candid
when things went best for him-

10. Scanning the columns, th

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30 OCTOBER

and offensiv
good taste;
1643; of per
The key idea
who by righ
shift, thoug
Coleridge's co
and it becom
Modern Paint
shades of Q
them, and s
"a vulgar pe
around 1800.

11. I am pro
is its engage
special abou
ernisms-is t
"low." I thin
century art
avoidance of
shifting and
sentimental
actual place
Expressionis
We are used
tawdry, and
tawdriness
Expressionis
appalling) it
is that cheap
values, the o
Abstract Ex
empty inten
and generali
consuming
degree of g
giving them
1948 and 19
be continued

12. Nobody
Abstract Ex

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 31

any more than the issues of flatness and modernity,

Manet's critics. But one would at least expect to find
issues being avoided. Here is a New York critic in 1
greatly admires:

In this case the background is without question t

overwhelming the artist has ever contrived. I
flagrant and bombastic French Baroque wallpape
to a maximum its brown and orange arabesque w
of the harshest blue in the centers of which cluster
All these gratuitous incidents superimposed on th
to break up and confuse the patterns on these su
can find no security even in the repetition of
comfort afforded in ... earlier compositions...
Visually the Decorative Figure is a garish, violent
ture. The rather mild problems which [the pain
for himself during the previous five years are here
almost to the point of burlesque. Luxe, calme et v
and in their places discomfort, excitement, and
Seated Nude of the year before had expressed [t
against ease and softness; this big odalisque adds a
and good taste. It represents a triumph of art ove
Yet because the picture is so clearly an act of will in
victory seems Pyrrhic.3

The last two sentences in particular-"It represents

tious vulgarity. Yet because the picture is so clearly
artifice, the victory seems Pyrrhic"-seem to me
description of Abstract Expressionism. The key que
critic understandably skirts round) is whether the v
to seem Pyrrhic-whether the hollowness of the vict
to figure most urgently. But of course it is right a
these words were written at the height of Abstract
very seat of the movement's institutional power-by
catalogue-they precisely could not be written of
Kooning, but only of Matisse, of his Figure decorativ
quarter of a century earlier.

13. I realize that it is still not clear what Barr or I m

as applied to paintings. And I do not think it ever w
points, as Ruskin knew, to a deep dilemma of bourge

3. Alfred Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museu

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 32 OCTOBER

ultimate term
"Two years ag

when I was
one of my k
d'Aosta in th
ty?" merely
sudden answ
"It is merely
the reply at
the difficul
clusion. Yet,
well as concl
death itself
however, co
the minor c
selfishness" will embrace all the most fatal and essential forms of mental
vulgarity.4

I do not bring this passage of Ruskin on in hopes of solving our problem of

definition, but more because it shows (more clearly than anyone nowadays would
dare to) what the problem is-what terrible cocktail of class ascriptions and bodily
disgust the word "vulgar" is an empty container for, and how fatal and essential is
the sliding within it between a handy form of class racism and a general sense of
class doom. Vulgarity is foulness and degeneracy; it is a "dulness of bodily sense,"
"all which comes of insensibility." "The black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not
vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is."5 But Brett's dictum is ultimately
impatient of such distinctions. We are all housemaids now.

14. "Vulgarity is merely one of the forms of Death." Beware of taking Brett's
dictum too literally in the case of Abstract Expressionism, and above all beware
of converting it back into some ridiculous (vulgar) retelling of Abstract
Expressionists' life stories. I think there may be some kind of fatal connection
between this painting's deep vulgarity and its incessant courting of Death; but
that is not to be understood as a biographical proposition but a formal one. It is a
way of thinking again about Pollock's or Still's repetition compulsion, their con-
stant (fruitful) drive toward emptiness, endlessness, the nonhuman and the
inorganic. "Perhaps the last paradox these works contain is that of death," writes
the novelist Parker Tyler of Pollock's drip paintings some time early in 1950,
before the last show of them at Betty Parsons's:

4. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (Boston and New York: Colonial Press Company, n.d.), vol. 5, pp.
347-49.
5. Ibid., p. 344.

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 33

For in being a conception of ultimate time and

of infinity, Jackson Pollock's latest work goes b
processes of life-however these might be visuali
into an absolute being which must contain death
the spatial distinctions achieved by lines and
Pollock's rectangles go as much beyond mere opt
possible to painting....
Jackson Pollock has put the concept of the laby
and unreachable distance, a distance beyond th
distance.... If one felt vertigo before Pollock's dif
then truly one would be lost in the abyss of an
being. One would be enclosed, trapped by the lab
space. But we are safely looking at it, seeing it s
whole, from a point outside. Only man, in his p
superman, can achieve such a feat of absolute con
of an image of space in which he does not exist.6

It would be easy to make fun of this. Its metaphysics

the tone seem to me as close as Pollock got to approp
time. It is fitting, again, that these were paragraphs
1950 by Robert Goldwater, editor of the Magazine of A
part of Pollock criticism because the artist seems to
by the writer at the time, and kept it in his files.

15. Maybe the Death in Brett's dictum is simply

Maybe it always was, for Brett and Ruskin as much as P

16. Death makes a bad metaphor. Pictures that s

Newman's passim, Rothko's from 1957 on-get to lo
That we are meant to take the portentousness as ul
"painting" or "signification" or some such only ma
enlisted to make vulgarity look deep.

17. The trouble with Barnett Newman is that he w

only vulgar on paper.

18. The great Rothkos are those that everybody l

mainly; the ones that revel in the new formula's ch

6. Parker Tyler, unedited text of "'Jackson Pollock: The In

American Art, Pollock Papers 3048, pp. 548-49. (The edited text
March 1950.) My thanks to Michael Leja for pointing me to the
the circumstances of their disappearance. For full discussion of t
Abstract Expressionism (New Haven and London: Yale University Pr

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 34 OCTOBER

hectoring ab
thing, devou
purples, oran
form betwee
Renoir.

19. "When they are hung in tight phalanx, as he would have them hung, and
flooded with the light he demands that they receive, the tyranny of his ambition
to suffocate or crush all who stand in his way becomes fully manifest.... It is not
without significance, therefore, that the surfaces of these paintings reveal the
gestures of negation, and that their means are the devices of seduction and
assault. Not I, but himself, has made it clear that his work is of frustration, resent-
ment and aggression. And that it is the brightness of death that veils their
bloodless febrility and clinical evacuations": Clyfford Still to Sidney Janis, April 4,
1955.7 This is very like Fen0on on Monet: mean-spirited, partial, and tendentious,
but somehow for that very reason (because it steps out of the circle of deference
for once) the best criticism Rothko ever received.

20. And so to the question of class. "While formal analysis," says Adorno in
his Introduction to the Sociology of Music, "was learning to trace the most delicate
ramifications of [a work's] manufacture, . . . the method of deciphering the
specific social characteristics of music has lagged behind pitifully and must be
largely content with improvisations."8 Quite so, and maybe improvisation will turn
out to be its method. But equally-this is Adorno in the same paragraph-"If we
listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie-
not the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in
which reason and freedom are to have their warrant-we understand Beethoven
no better than does the listener who cannot follow his pieces' purely musical
content, the inner history that happens to their themes."

21. What remains to be thought about Abstract Expressionism (though th

thought haunts everything written on the subject, especially those texts mo
anxious to repress it) is the painting's place in a determinate class formation; o
which, though long prepared, took on the specific trappings of cultural power
the years after 1945. I said its place in a determinate class formation-not in
State apparatus or a newly improvised system of avant-garde patronage o
museum/art world superstructure. Not that the latter are irrelevant. But th

7. Archives of American Art, Alfonso Ossorio papers, quoted in James Breslin, Mark Rothko
Biography (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 344. Copies of the letter se
to have been circulated at the time, either by Still orJanis.
8. Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), p.
(translation slightly modified).

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 35

cannot be what we mean, fundamentally, when we

representational practice inhering in the culture of a c
practice somehow participates in that class's whole const
are talking of overlap and mutual feeding at the level of
at the level of symbolic production (ideology). When
bourgeois, the key facts in the case are not eighteenth-c
or even the uses early readers made of Young Werther.

22. Clement Greenberg begins a review of an exh

Wildenstein's in January 1949 by saying that "Bosch, B
unique in that they are great artists who express what m
geois attitude."9 Like Barr, he seems to me to be averti
and Clyfford Still. What is new in their case, of course
(hybrid) form of petty bourgeois culture-I am including
set of political and economic compromise formations, w
to match, as well as a set of established styles of per
form, the only viable medium, of bourgeois class powe
bourgeoisie in America has power, but that its voice has
1945, the only one in which power can be spoken; in it
heard the last echoes of what the bourgeoisie had once
of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that
[no longer reason] is to have its warrant."0o

9. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicag

Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 2, p. 275, from The Nation, January 8, 1949.
Greenberg reviews Gottlieb and Pollock. "I feel that Gottlieb should m
more obvious," he writes (ibid., p. 285), though he welcomes the painter'
the perfect Abstract Expressionist title), Ashes ofPhoenix, and Hunter an
direction. His review of the Pollock show at Betty Parsons's is that i
1948-"this huge baroque scrawl in aluminum, black, white, madder
Pollock has become a major artist. The words "baroque scrawl" seem to
ties in Pollock's work that I am insisting on here.
10. This is not the place to enter into the difficulties involved in mak
tion between bourgeois and petty bourgeois as terms of class analysis
tion is real, and I do not want my talk in the text of class "cultures"
impression that I do not believe the distinction is ultimately one of ec
me, is someone possessing the wherewithal to intervene in at least so
decisions shaping his or her own life (and those of others). A bourgeoi
(reasonably) to pass on that power to the kids. A petty bourgeois is so
or security, and certainly no such dynastic expectations, but who noneth
with those who do. Of course this means that everything depends, f
moment, on the particular forms in which such identification can take
bourgeoisie within capitalism is therefore a history of manners, symbol
sarily fixated on the surface of social life. (Chapters 3 and 4 of my Pain
such a history for the late nineteenth century. The material on "M
Reframing Abstract Expressionism strikes me as providing some of the e
of the 1940s and '50s.)

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 36 OCTOBER

23. Abstract
geoisie's aspi
that momen
allow it to sp
that aspiratio

24. Or could
geoisie's aspir
itself no long
nay, vanishe
formations,
are dealing wi
resentational
sociological
Frankenstein

25. Vulgarity
individuality
tain our atte
this limited c
struggles to
never tired o
art and an ethics of reconciliation or transcendence-but what we shall value most
in the painting is the ruthlessness of (self-) exposure, the courting of bathos, the
unapologetic banality. The victory, if there is one, must always also be Pyrrhic.

26. You see now why the concept "vulgarity" has more and more the notion
of betrayal written into it as the nineteenth century goes on. For the bourgeoisie's
great tragedy is that it can only retain power by allowing its inferiors to speak for
it, giving them the leftovers of the cry for totality, and steeling itself to hear the
ludicrous mishmash they make of it-to hear and pretend to approve, and maybe
in the end to approve without pretending.

27. If this frame of reference for Abstract Expressionism turns out to work at
all, one of the things it ought to be best at is a rethinking of the stale comparison

There is no need to be oversubtle about this. Sometimes symbols and lifestyles still have class
inscribed on them in letters ten feet tall. What could be more disarmingly bourgeois, in the old sense,
than the first-class section on an airplane crossing the Atlantic? And what more dismally petty bour-
geois than coach? (Those in business-or what my favorite airline calls Connoisseur-class would take
a bit more ad hoc class sorting, some going up, some going down. A lot depends on particular styles of
corporate reward to middle management, for instance, which varies from country to country and
phase to phase of the business cycle.) Anyway, the rough balance of numbers in this case seems to me
quite instructive for the balance of numbers in the world at large.

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 37

AsgerJorn. Paris by Nigh

between America and Europe. European painting after the

a very different set of class formations. Vulgarity is not its p
for example-to turn for a moment to the greatest painte
painting confronts as its limit condition is always refinement
process of coming to terms with the fact that however this se
tortured, exacerbated, or erased they still end up being w
is; and the torture, exacerbation, and erasure are discover
refinement, that is, the forms refinement presently tak
enough; they are what refines painting to a new preciousne
that preciousness and dross are the same thing).

28. In calling Jorn the greatest painter of the 1950s I m

about the general health of painting in Europe at the time
cliches in the books are true. Jorn's really was an endgam
other hand, back on the other side of the Atlantic, turn
keeping the corpse of painting hideously alive-while coque
Death.

29. An Asger Jorn can be garish, florid, tasteless, forced, cute, flatulent,
overemphatic; it can never be vulgar. It just cannot prevent itself from a tamper-
ing and framing of its desperate effects which pulls them back into the realm of
painting, ironizes them, declares them done in full knowledge of their emptiness.
American painting, by contrast-and precisely that American painting that is

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 38 OCTOBER

closest to the
in the traditi
(false) declara
get to Jorn's v

30. It is my
lead to a new
and between
one or two su
paintings in 1
to give a prel
together und
accompanying
Gottlieb, you
of Abstract E
vulgar-minde
Lawrence We
Like to Get Y
properly unbe
his best when
of Time or Li
Two Squares, g

31. Certain m
everyone, th
painting begin
Woman series
was recoiling
Kooning to ex
heart of his a
on a soldier's
face of a hou
ment." Green
Kooning's mi
would make i
pitch of tawd
Only when d
rather, to ha
transparently
needed. The m
up a storm. It
at not findin
the sexes.

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 39

........ . .

i;3 vy:

a i

: pp

:-:::-Mi i

... ... . ..

Adolph

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 40 OCTOBER

32. Vulgari
belonged (as
sexual men.
reading fro
Parker Tyler
sion, would
defensible h
Greenberg,
necessarily
partake of
Greenberg w
that he foun
in the prose

33. I do not
am pointing
utterly disp
when that ha
and terms
instance, had
his great essa

I don't know
Impressioni
Abstract Ex
time please
shudder"],
though not
the first re
because it m
Whitman's
stale journa
that stale, p
the name o

11. It would b
pictorially; it d
the result would
obviousness of t
to Greenberg's
when it went
Greenberg perf
even one as bri
a seam between
disinter Pollock
maleness.

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In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 41

print, "buckeye" is probably the most widely pr

neous kind of painting seen in the Western wor
painters, as far as I am aware, do landscapes exclu
or less directly from nature. By piling dry paint
impasto-they try to capture the brilliance of day
of painting becomes a race between hot shadows
invariable outcome is a livid, dry, sour picture w
surface that intensifies the acid fire of the gen
reds, browns, greens, and yellows. "Buckeye" lan
Greenwich Village restaurants (Eddie's Aurora on
used to collect them), Sixth Avenue picture stor
Eighth Street), and in the Washington Square
cannot understand fully why [these effects] shou
so uniform, or the kind of painting culture behin
Still, at any rate, is the first to have put "buckey
ous art. These are visible in the the frayed dead-
down the margins or across the middle of so man
the uniformly dark heat of his color, and in a dry
(like any "buckeye" painter, Still seems to have
thin pigments). Such things can spoil his pictures
in an unrefreshing way, but when he is able to su
of them, it represents but the conquest by high a
experience, and its liberation from Kitsch.12

There is a lot going on here, and no one interpre

tangents and redundancies in the text, which I have left
are actually vital to its detective-story tone). But wh
tially is struggling to describe and come to terms w
bourgeois taste. He rolls out the place names an
geography with a cultural explorer's relish, all the b
ignorance in the end-"I cannot understand fully... t
behind them." Readers of Greenberg will know tha
word kitsch is heavily loaded. Kitsch equals vulgarity, r
Trotskyite scheme of things the word had strong c
too late, by several years, for Greenberg to be willin
than he does. It is interesting (this is my argument)
Still's painting seemingly forces him to think again
art's courting of banality. And he is in no two min
importance of such a tactic, for all its risk. The ne
Still and kitsch reads as follows: "Still's art has a sp
because it shows abstract painting a way out of its ow

12. Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, pp. 230-31 (fr

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Clyfford Still. Untitled. 1951-52.

This sentence is altered out of all recognition in the version of "'American-

Type' Painting" Greenberg put in his book Art and Culture six years later.13 All of
the section on Still is given heavy surgery. The word kitsch gives way to "one more
depressed area of art," where surely "depressed" is exactly the wrong word. Kitsch
is manic. Above all it is rigid with the exaltation of art. It believes in art the way
artists are supposed to-to the point of absurdity, to the point where the cult of
art becomes a new Philistinism. That is the aspect of kitsch which Still gets

13. See Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 223-24. Part of the
reason for the changes was the vehemence of Still's and Newman's reaction to Greenberg's original
wording. See Greenberg's reply to a typical blast from Still (dated April 15, 1955, which suggests that
Still's original letter may have been sent off at much the same time as the one to Sidney Janis on
Rothko), quoted in ed. Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York: Abrams,
1990), pp. 251-53. The term "buckeye" is one of the main bones of contention in the exchange. Still
suspects that Greenberg borrowed not only the term from Newman (which Greenberg acknowledges)
but also its application to his work. Greenberg says no. "Barney was the first one I heard name a certain
kind of painting as buckeye, but he did not apply the term to yours. When I, some time later, told
Barney that I thought there was a relation between buckeye and your painting, or rather some aspects
of it, he protested vehemently and said your stuff was too good for that" (p. 252). Since Greenberg
regularly gets told off these days for being waspish and superior about the Abstract Expressionists (as
conversationalists and letterwriters) in retrospect, it is worth pointing to the well-nigh saintly patience
of his 1955 dealings with Still on the rampage.
Marnin Young points out to me that in his spirited attack on Still in The Nation, "Art,"January 6,
1964, Max Kozloff seizes on Greenberg's comparison to "Greenwich Village landscapists" (he quotes a
few sentences from the Art and Culture text) and goes on: "Critical attempts to portray [Still] as an
artist who bursts forth into a new freedom, or as an exponent of the 'American sublime,' overlook his
terribly static, one ought to say, vulgar, exaltedness" (p. 40). But is not that what makes him an expo-
nent? (Of course, given the date, one sympathizes with Kozloff's distaste.)

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 In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 43

horribly right. The "buckeye" of the Partisan Review

"demotic-Impressionist" or "open-air painting in au
almost completely-Greenberg cannot resist a single
the word toward the end.) There are no more na
Street, no more baffled talk of a separate, impenetr
a critic in flight from previous insights, I feel. And I t

34. Then, finally, there is the problem of Hans

surprised to hear that it was in coming to terms wi
the vocabulary of the present argument first surfac
cared at all about Hofmann (including Greenberg
always known that in Hofmann the problems of tas
come squawking home to roost. A good Hofman
tasteless in its invocations of Europe, tasteless in its
its Color-by-Technicolor, its winks and nudges towar
Stone title, the cloying demonstrativeness of its h
plete control of its decomposing means.

35. Seen in its normal surroundings, past the uno

lilies, as part of that unique blend of opulence and s
the picture-buying classes in America, a good Hofma
out a dirty secret that the rest of the decor is consp
compact with its destination. It takes up the languag
it, running monotonous, self-satisfied riffs on the mai
to the point of parody, like Mahler with his sentim
melodies. A good Hofmann has to have a surface so
chocolate, stucco, and flock wallpaper. Its colors ha
worst kind of Woolworth forest-glade-with-waterfall-a
title should turn the knife in the wound.14 For what it shows is the world its users
inhabit in their heart of hearts. It is a picture of their "interiors," of the visceral-
cum-spiritual upholstery of the rich. And above all it can have no illusions about its
own status as part of that upholstery. It is made out of the materials it deploys. Take
them or leave them, these ciphers of plenitude-they are all painting at present
has to offer. "Feeling" has to be fetishized, made dreadfully (obscenely) exterior, if
painting is to continue.

36. I do not believe that what I have just offered is an account of Hofmann's
intentions, any more than if I had been arguing for the coldness and hardness of
Matisse's hedonism, say, or the pathos of Picasso's late eroticism. (Of course it
would be possible to give an account of all three which argued that our under-

14. .... And Thunderclouds Pass comes from a poem by the Austrian Romantic Nikolaus Lenau, And,
Out of the Caves from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, 2, 11.

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 Hans Hofmann. "And, Out of the
Caves, the Night Threw a Handful
of Pale Tumbling Pigeons into the
Light." 1964.

Hans Hofmann. "... And

Thunderclouds Pass." 1961.

Douglas M. Parker Studio. Marcia

Simon Weisman Residence. Circa
1962.

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 In Defense of Abstract Expressionism 45

standing of their intentions had been deficient up

the pathos or the coldness or the capacity for self-p
inclusions are necessary or plausible in Hofmann
"believed in" his own overblown rhetoric. (What w
at this pitch of intensity without believing in it? Lik
... And Thunderclouds Pass.) I dare say he thought h
is going to quarrel with Nikolaus Lenau and the Sonn
ernist cynic like me.) And as for the place of his p
sitting room? He surely assumed that at the level th
taste, as opposed to day-to-day preference-there w
interest between himself and the best of his clients. And so there was. He could
not have painted their interiors if they were not his interior too.
These are not the matters at issue, finally. The task for the critic is to fin
an adequate language for the continuing effect of, say, Hofmann's overblownnes
(I am not even saying that this is the only or primary quality of Hofmann's version
of Abstract Expressionism, but it is the one that gets more interesting over tim
The overblownness only matters because it seems to be what lends the picture
their coherence, maybe their depth. I am not meaning to congratulate Hofman
on getting a quality of petty bourgeois experience somehow "right." The quality
not hard to perceive and mimic. What is hard (what is paradoxical) is to make
paintings out of it. That is what Hofmann did. Of course I am saying that doing
involved him in an encounter with the conditions of production and consumptio
of his own art. That is my basic hypothesis. But the encounter could only take
place at the level of work, of painterly practice-the encounter was getting the
overblownness to be pictorial, or discovering that it was the quality out of whic
paintings now had to be made. Even to call this an "encounter" is to give it too
much of an exterior or discursive flavor. It was what Hofmann did, not what h
discovered.

37. This is not an argument, afortiori, about Abstract Expressionists' social

political opinions. Of course I relish the fact that Clyfford Still supporte
McCarthy, or that Pollock was "a Goddamn Stalinist from start to finish,"15
much the same way that I like to know Manet was a frightful Gambettist an
Renoir believed that "siding with the Jew Pissarro is revolution."16 But I know
interest does not count for much in understanding what any of the four did
painters. At best the facts may strike us as dimly consonant with one or anoth

15. On Still's McCarthyism, see Susan Landauer, "Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism in Sa
Francisco," in Clyfford Still 1904-1980: The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections, ed. Thomas Kell
(Munich: Prestel, 1992), p. 93. The verdict on Pollock's politics is Greenberg's, in an interview with
in 1981. I think he meant it seriously.
16. Rough draft of letter to Paul Durand-Ruel, February 26, 1882, discussing participation in tha
year's Impressionist exhibition. See Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de l'Impressionisme (Paris and N
York: Durand-Ruel, 1939), vol. 1, p. 122. (The sentence was omitted in Renoir's final draft.)

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 46 OCTOBER

aspect (usuall
epigrammatic
us nowhere w
face qualities
and compassi

38. I am not
evant. No dou
the petty bou
University-t

The Univers
which are sh
dren are em
present facu
were prepar
from army h
ulty in facul
guaranteeing
future.

The faculty
they must a
where there
grass. ....
Here is a self-perpetuating peonage, schooled in mass communal
living, which will become a formidable sixth estate within a decade.
It will have a cast of features, a shape of head, and a dialect as yet
unknown, and will propagate a culture so distorted and removed from
its origins, that its image is unpredictable.17

Anyone familiar with nineteenth-century styles of irony at the expense of the

nouvelles couches sociales will recognize this as generic (solecisms and all).
Condescension just is the form of the petty bourgeoisie's self-recognition. Look at
the recent literature on yuppies. All the same, even this passage does not help me
with what is really interesting, and ultimately baffling, about Rothko as an artist:
why the same banal loftiness could lead to the brightness of death at one moment
(1950), and to clinical evacuation at another (1965).

39. My title "In Defense of Abstract Expressionism" was not meant ironically.
I have offered what I think is the best defense possible of this body of work, and of
course I am aware that in doing so the noun '"vulgarity" has turned into a term of

17. Archives of American Art, Herbert Ferber papers, letter to the Ferbers, July 7, 1955, quoted in
Breslin, Mark Rothko, p. 352.

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Hans Hofmann. Memoria in Adolph Gottlieb. Coalescence. 1961.
Aeternum. 1962.

value, whether I wanted it to or not. If the formula were not so mechanical, I

would be prepared to say that Abstract Expressionist painting is best when it is most
vulgar, because it is then that it grasps most fully the conditions of representa-
tion-the technical and social conditions-of its historical moment.
The moment was brief. By the time of the two paintings I choose to en
with-1961 and 1962-it was almost over. The mode and indeed the titles of the
two pictures-Hofmann's Memoria in Aeternum and Gottlieb's Coalescence-are
nothing if not valedictory. Death puts in its usual appearance. The coffin is straight
out of Evelyn Waugh. And this overstuffed, overwrought, end-and-beginning-of-the-
world quality seems to me, to repeat, the key to these paintings' strength. They
have a true petty bourgeois pathos. One can see why art in New York felt obliged to
retreat from such dangerous ground in the years that followed, and why a last effort
was made to restabilize avant-garde practice in its previous (exhausted) trajectory.
The popular was easier to handle than the vulgar-it had more of the smell of
art about it. Reduction was a better way to generate recognizable modernist ar
works than this kind of idiot "Ripeness is all." The site-specific was preferable t
the class-specific. Art had to go on, and that meant returning art mainly to nor-
mal avant-garde channels.18 But for some of us-certainly for me-the price
paid for this accommodation in the 1960s and after seems prohibitively high.

18. This defense is not intended as a covert attack, and these few sentences do not claim to charac-
terize what was most productive (and genuinely excessive) in the art of the 1960s, especially from 1967
onward. But I let them stand, because I do think that part of the history of the 1960s will have to b
written in terms of art's withdrawal from Abstract Expressionism's impossible class-belonging--it

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 48 OCTOBER

The ridiculou
still want from

40. So now I
seems that I c
shift from an
do not believ
"lyric" I mean
rupted, absol
agency, maste
the expression
one strand of
of it. Lyric ca
Which is not
For lyric in
Abstract Exp
tooth.

This subject, of course, is far from being the petty bourgeoisie's exclusive
property. That is not what I have been arguing. Anyone who cares for the painting
of Delacroix or the poetry of Victor Hugo will be in no doubt that the ludicrous-
ness of lyric has had its haut bourgeois avatars. But sometimes it falls to a class to
offer or suffer the absurdities of individualism in pure form-unbreathably pure,
almost, a last gasp of oxygen as the plane goes down. That was the case, I think,
with American painting after 1945.

horrible honesty about art and its place. Only part. Because the point is that the project of "returning
art mainly to normal avant-garde channels" was and remains a hopeless one in America. The grounds
(always shaky) for an enduring avant-garde autonomy, or even the myth of one, simply do not exist. In
the later 1960s and early '70s the project imploded. Frantic efforts have subsequently been made to
reconstitute the project around some "new" technology, or set of art forms, or refurbished critical
discourse; but what is striking is the way these phenomena cannot escape the gravitational pull of the
later 1960s. And I am saying that the later 1960s are a satellite, or a form of anti-matter, to the prepon-
derant black star of Coalescence and Memoria in Aeternum.
A final thing I do not want to be taken as saying or implying is that art could make Abstract
Expressionism a thing of the past by imitating it, or trying to go one better than it in the vulgarity
stakes. That has been a popular, and I think futile, tactic in the last ten years or so.

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