ABSTRACT ART IN United States
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The exhibition AMERICAN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS AND IMAGISTS 1961 inaugurates at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum a new program for the investigation of current tendencies in American and European painting and sculpture. To open the series, it has seemed appropriate to re-examine the present state of the movement which has dominated American painting since the end of World War II, to which the names Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting are normally applied. Most of the paintings date from 1960 or 1961 and have not previously been exhibited. Included are major recent works by de Kooning, Baziotes, Kline, Guston, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Motherwell, and most of the other artists who are regarded as pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. A small background section includes important paintings by Jackson Pollock, Gorky, and Tomlin, pioneers no longer living, as well as earlier works by Barnett Newman, Still, and Matta.
The exhibition also includes a highly selective sampling of younger artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, such as Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, Joan, Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan. The number of younger painters who have during the last ten years practiced some form of Abstract Expressionism is so vast that this section could only be the briefest summary indication of the variety and vitality of the continuing movement.
This is, nevertheless, perhaps the most comprehensive survey of Abstract Expressionist painting ever to be held by a New York museum. It demonstrates the inadequacy of the terms "Abstract Expressionism" and "Action Painting" as applied to artists as diverse as Pollock, Tomlin, Newman, or Motherwell. Whereas the works of Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Tworkov, and many of the younger painters have the assertion, of the brush stroke, the sense of immediacy, of the act of painting which makes these labels more or less applicable, the impact of Rothko, Newman, or Tomlin is entirely different.
The sense of classic order, frequently suggestive of the continuing influence of Cubism, is most evident in works of Tomlin and Marca-Relli. Elements of what has been described as "Abstract Impressionism" may appear in the textures of Guston, Resnick, and Vicente-although the intents of these artists are quite different from those of the Impressionists.
As the title indicates, the present exhibition is really a double exhibition which not only surveys the present state of the Abstract Expressionists but follows in some detail the direction to which the name "Abstract Imagists" has been applied. It is a fact that from the late Forties to the present day certain painters, loosely grouped with the Abstract Expressionists, have rather been concerned through extreme simplification of their canvases-frequently to the dominant assertion of a single overpowering element-in presenting an all-encompassing presence. This "presence" could be described as an "image" in the sense of an abstract symbol rather than as a reflection or imitation of anything in nature. The paintings of Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, and frequently Still and Motherwell, all very different, all have in common this sense of symbolic content achieved through dramatic statement of isolated and highly simplified elements. A comparable effect is achieved in the endless hypnotic squares of Josef Albers and, among younger artists, in the great, floating, free color shapes of Raymond Parker or the precisely delineated shape tensions of Ellsworth Kelly.
In 1961, there was much evidence of seeking for new directions among younger American painters. Although the majority of younger painters is still probably exploring one or another form of free abstraction, a great deal of attention has recently been given to a number who are attempting to break with what they feel to be the tyranny of Abstract Expressionism. Some of these are seeking new expressive directions within the formal control of geometry; others are applying the directness and spontaniety of Action Painting to a restudy of the figure or of landscape. In both painting and sculpture there has been recently a resurgence of Dada and Surrealist exploration.
Bibliography: American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists. Publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1961
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