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David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as CulturalCritique: Dissent During the McCarthy PeriodNancy Jachec aa Senior lecturer in the History of Art Department , Oxford Brookes University ,Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Nancy Jachec (1999) David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During theMcCarthy Period , Third Text, 13:49, 108-110, DOI: 10.1080/09528829908576830

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Book Review

David Craven, Abstract Expressionism asCultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthyPeriodNancy Jachec

Fluidly written and supported by an Impressivedepth of research, David Craven's AbstractExpressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent Duringthe McCarthy Period is an important contributionto the scholarship on Abstract Expressionism.This is because it has successfully challenged thebasic presuppositions about this movement thathave dictated our understanding of the politicalsignificance of Abstract Expressionism for thepast thirty years that Abstract Expressionismwas, in one way or another, in ideological lockstepwith the values of the US government during the1950s, at which time it became the internationallycelebrated avant-garde. Craven offers aconvincing, thorough critique of the concept of'dominant ideology' which has pervaded thestrongest work on the relationship betweenAbstract Expressionism and politics that bySerge Guilbaut, Michael Leja and Eva Cockcroft and which has blocked, firstly, a more nuancedand sophisticated understanding of therelationship between the US government and thevisual arts during the Cold War; secondly, thepossibility of individuals and groups to oppose,critically or otherwise, state-sanctioned ideology;and thirdly, the possibility of autonomousinterpretation of the politics of AbstractExpressionism amongst its diverse audiences, inthis instance, Latin America. Being the first to lookat the activities of Abstract Expressionist artists inthe 1960s, a decade commonly regarded in the

scholarship as marking the decline of themovement, Craven's book also overturns theproblem of period ghettoisation which has treatedAbstract Expressionism as a phenomenon of the1950s, and thus inextricable from a Cold Warcontext. Again doing this through politicalhistory, Craven looks at the involvement of aselection of artists with the civil rights movement,and, relatedly, these artists' interest in non-western artistic sources. Taken together, thesenew lines of inquiry have convincingly linkedAbstract Expressionism to a wider critique oftechnologism emerging within the nascent NewLeft in the 1960s, the origins of which Craventraces back to the 1930s, and to the influence of theFrankfurt School, then resident in New York City.Craven's study thus reveals that AbstractExpressionism had a more extended politicalinfluence outside the United States one thathad thus far been overlooked in Anglophonescholarship and certainly a more radicalinfluence there than it ever achieved domestically.

At the heart of this project is a rethinking of therelationship between ideology, art production anddissemination. Dismantling Guilbaut, Cockcroftand Leja's concept of dominant ideology, whichcentres on the reductive premise that artnecessarily performs for the ruling classes,cursorily described by them as 'business liberals',whose economic and cultural imperialism, andcollusion with the interests of the government, is

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implicit, Craven replaces it instead with acounter-hegemonic model of the interactionbetween individual and state. Consequently, whatCraven's account provides is the scope forindividual critical agency within art productionand reception, and he thus identifies the makingand the meaning of Abstract Expressionism to bean essentially postmodern practice, insofar as it isever open to interpretation and, in the context ofhis argument, potential radicalisation. This isclearly borne out by the reception of thismovement in, for example, Nicaragua where,Craven tells us, leftist abstract artist ArmandoMorales, heavily influenced by Motherwell in thelate 1950s, would serve as a UNESCO delegatewhilst the Sandinistas were in power during the1980s (p. 13).

likewise,. Craven relates that Che Guevarahimself dismissed Socialist Realism as recyclednineteenth century French realism, with theCuban revolutionaries using imagery fromcontemporary avant-gardes to their own ends(p. 6). Confirming that there are many types ofleftism, which may or may not take up certainforms of visual expression, Craven summarises:

...every visual language is, by its very nature,not merely a formative tool for political strugglebut also a location of ongoing political conflict.As such, all visual languages are inherentlyshaped by cultural, ethnic, and class tensions, sothat they are necessarily decentered.Accordingly, art does not simply reflect,embody, or parallel any one ideology, whetherthat of its patrons, makers, or spectators; rather,it signifies various ideological values andpossibilities at once, all of which are in alliancewith each other, none to the complete exclusionof all the others, (p 18)

The openness of the ideology of AbstractExpressionism to multiple and even conflictinginterpretations, as this rightly asserts, does notnecessarily secure, however, the radical pedigreeof this movement as embracing some sort ofessential Marxism. For the openness of AbstractExpressionism to multiple readings and appropri-ations does not assure that the centre or even theright would not find its own uses for it. One of thecore concerns of the book is to distance thismovement entirely from the 'vital centre', whatCraven defines as precapitalist and supportive ofmilitary intervention abroad, and embodied in thepolicies of the 'cold war foreign policies' of theKennedy and Johnson governments (pp. 45, 46).Against this, he argues that the AbstractExpressionists, guided by the unshakeably

democratic socialist spokesperson MeyerSchapiro, consistently affirmed 'subjectivity as acritical force in modern society', this criticismfocusing on imperialism, capitalism, the mechani-sation of labour and racial inequality(p. 64), And Craven convincingly identifies anumber of Abstract Expressionists as supportiveof these concerns theoretically, in the 1950s, and inpractice, in the 1960s. Yet if the piecemealsubscription of the artists concerned to the itemson this oppositional agenda highlight the waningof political action in the 1950s, as he again rightlypoints out (p. 54), what remains unresolved in thistext is the changing nature of socialism during theperiod in question which prevented any practical,party-political opposition from the left and for adiversity of socialist options to open up. For if, asCraven maintains, the Abstract Expressionists andthe left as a whole remained committed to 'someform of socialism (whether democratic socialism,social democracy, anarchism, or Soviet-stylesocialism)' and these 'were interrelated withsupport for domestic movements on behalf ofracial equality, opposition to US imperialismabroad, and an embrace of classical liberal civilliberties at home' (p. 80), clearly the idea ofsocialism was coming to be defined more subjec-tively, with individuals supporting traditionallysocialist concerns when they deemed itappropriate. Yet if one considers the history of the'vital centre', rather than equating it with theforeign politicies of any particular administration,it is clear that this term, coined in 1949, wasunderstood by its originator, Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr., as a form of democratic socialism,and a choice not between left and right, butbetween capitalism and communism. ThatSchlesinger was taken seriously by the Americanindependent left is evident in his being selectedby Partisan Review to participate in its symposiumThe Future of Socialism' (1947/48), alongsideformer communists Sidney Hook and GranvilleHicks, socialist George Orwell and the formerconfidant of Trotsky, Victor Serge. In his book ofthe following year, The Vital Center, Schlesingerrecommended a gradualist approach to alleconomic and political planning, with individualsworking to protect and extend civil liberties. Andwithin this group, artists in particular wouldprovide a critical voice that would act as a valvefor the tension created by social discontent. Infact, Schlesinger even referred to this model forthe relationship between the individual anddemocratic society as the 'new radicalism' (TTieVital Center, p. 234). While Craven does make acompelling and convincing case for many of theAbstract Expressionists being stridently opposed

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to third world interventionism during the 1960sand therefore, in his view, distant from the vitalcentre, vital centre ideology was from itsinception simply protectionist regarding foreignpolicy, and above all concerned with the civicresponsibilities of the individual, and particularlythe intellectual, within democratic society. Thesewere described by him as cultural criticism, andthe pervasive concerns in Schlesinger's politicalthinking from this time were largely trained uponredefining what Graven refers to as the 'classicliberal values' of civil rights and responsibilitiesas democratic socialism. It was this slippagebetween classic liberalism and the welter ofsocialisms afoot within liberal and independentleftist circles in New York, all of which pointed tothe empowerment and also the increasing respon-sibility of the individual, that helped to redefinethe left in the 1960s around the idea of partici-patory or direct democracy, which would extendto the anti-war effort in the United States. I takethis to be the fundamental liberalisation ofdemocratic socialism in that country; Craven seesit as the other way round, citing Mill and Deweyas pre-eminent examples of classic liberal thinkerswho in the end supported democratic socialism(p. 43). As far as the broader scholarship onDewey is concerned, however, the verdict is stillout as to whether he should be seen as a liberal ora socialist;' to label Mill, arguably the progenitorof liberalism, as a democratic socialist can be seento underscore the compatibility of the two. Yet ifsocialism necessarily entails intervention in theeconomic sphere as well as the political, thedisappearance of the former into critical theory, tomy mind, weighs against the survival of socialistdemocratic practice during the period in question.

Putting this difference of opinion aside, anotherof the great strengths of this book is that itundermines the idea that the Greenbergianmodernist paradigm, which celebrated thepositivism of the western Enlightenment traditionand privileged European modernism, was theonly modernism in town during the period inquestion. Instead, Craven presents AbstractExpressionism as an 'alternative modernism'which drew, in certain instances, upondeliberately non-western sources, and alwayscritiqued the bases of western, technocraticculture, primarily through opposing automatedlabour and the instrumental thought systemunderlying it His account of the relationshipbetween Meyer Schapiro, whom he usesthroughout the book as a spokesperson for theAbstract Expressionists, with the Frankfurt Schooland particularly Theodor Adorno, is both newand illuminating. The application of Adorno's

theory of the negative dialectic to AbstractExpressionism demonstrates why it was ideolog-ically, if not practically, necessary for thismovement to sustain a critique of an entire socialsystem on an abstract level, for to addressparticular contradictions or injustices would be aconcession to piecemeal tinkering, leaving 'thestructural contradictions of the systemunresolved' (p. 94). The ambiguity, the possibilityof multiple interpretations which the absence ofspecific political commentary invites, however,was Abstract Expressionism's strength, inCraven's account. For if it can be seen on one levelto relinquish practical politics in favour of criticaldetachment, it not only kept the possibility ofsystemic critique alive in a period of decliningradical activism; Craven shows that it alsoprovided a model for dissident art internationally,a possibility which had been precluded by arthistorians who have subscribed to the model ofdominant ideology that requires a reading ofAbstract Expressionism as necessarily imperialist.

In summary, this book is a timely contributionto Abstract Expressionist studies, given thecurrent renewal of interest in Cold War culturewithin both scholarship and the media, andprovides a refreshing challenge to the stockinterpretations of this movement as working inideological lockstep with the US government, andimposing the values of the latter uniformly andglobally.

1 See, for example, Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tideof American Liberalism, Norton, London, 1995, pp 28, 30-32,64, 80, on the difficulty of locating Dewey on the liberalleftist spectrum.

David Craven's Abstract Expressionism as CulturalCritique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period, ispublished by Cambridge University Press, 1999,ISBN 0-521-43415-7.

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