life magazine and the abstract expressionists, 1948-51: a historiographic study of a late bohemian...

Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948-51: A Historiographic Study of a LateBohemian EnterpriseAuthor(s): Bradford R. CollinsSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 283-308Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045794 .

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Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948-51: A

Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise

Bradford R. Collins

The general literature on the Abstract Expressionists presents them as archetypal bohemians: high-minded emigrants from an unsympathetic, materialistic culture. Life magazine is frequently cited for its insensitive antagonism to them and to modern art in general. A review of Life's writings on art around 1950 reveals, instead, the magazine's essentially supportive program on behalf of the vanguard tradition. Furthermore, an examination of the behavior of the artists at this time reveals that they were more accommodating toward prevailing cultural values than either they or their chroniclers have acknowledged. This article analyzes the motives behind both facets of this will to fit events to a mythic shape: the maneuverings of the artists and their critical supporters and the later participation of scholars.

In the forties and early fifties, artists like Gorky, Pollock, Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, and de Kooning still carried on the tradition of cultural distance. Since the advent of Pop Art, however, no influential Ameri- can art movement has been either overtly or tacitly hostile to the "majority culture... ." Today, both the alienation of the artist and the antagonism of public opinion to art have been successfully liquidated.'

-Harold Rosenberg The Abstract Expressionists still considered themselves as belonging to a spiritual underground in the heroic tradition of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mon- drian.... Now, of course, there is a decidedly open alliance between society as a whole and art's economic status ... our artists are now emerging from exile with arms outstretched to greet their old enemy: the market economy.2

-Suzi Gablik

The Abstract Expressionists are often considered the last of the genuine bohemian artists.3 The reciprocal antagonism between a headstrong artistic sector and industrial culture (an antagonism that had spawned and maintained bohemia) is thought to have ended in the early 1960s when American society embraced its creative rebels and when they, in turn, accepted certain of society's fundamental values.4 The sharp distinction between the

I wish to thank Peter B. Hales and Victor Margolin of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ann Gibson of Yale University, and Davis Baird of the University of South Carolina for their invaluable help in the

preparation of this manuscript. 1H. Rosenberg, "D.M.Z. Vanguardism," The De-Definition of Art, New York, 1972, 218. 2 S. Gablik, "Art under the Dollar Sign," Art in America, LXIx, Dec. 1981, 13.

3For a good introduction to the bohemian phenomenon, see D. Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art, London, 1980, 15-29. M. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France, Ann Arbor, 1985, provides the best history of the early phases of French artistic bohemianism. For more on 19th-century artistic and literary manifestations, see the works listed in Brown, 188, n. 13. Unfortunately, little has been written on 20th-century artistic bohemianism. R. Miller's Bohemia: The Protoculture Then and Now, Chicago, 1977, for example, includes references to Delacroix, Corot, and Manet but not to any artists from this century.

Throughout this essay I use "Abstract Expressionist" not to refer to the practitioners of a particular style but simply as a convenient, because conventional, synonym for "the first-generation" artists of "the New York School," a loose confederation of painters working in that

city in the late 1940s and 1950s. These painters came to be grouped under these rubrics by critics and historians who perceived in their art and lives a confluence of stylistic and philosophic concerns. The choice and general acceptance of the label "Abstract Expressionism," in

particular, was grounded in the conviction that there was a style or nexus of styles that warranted such a designation. Michael Leja has

recently questioned the legitimacy of this categorical term. See "The Formation of an Avant-Garde in New York," in M. Auping, ed., Abstract

Expressionism: The Critical Developments, New York, 1987, 13-33. Leja is

quite right, I think, in asserting that "certain apparent similarities in

[their] paintings rested upon very different sets of priorities, beliefs, and commitments" (p. 20). One basis for continuing, with reservations, to assert their collectivity (Leja tentatively offers others) was their shared bohemian ideology: their oft-stated antagonism to "bourgeois" values, which forms the basis of this essay. Perhaps the clearest statement of that collective stance is presented by H. Rosenberg, "Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art," Pt. 2, Art News Annual, Nov. 1958, 120-137 and 184-192.

4Art historians and critics have identified signs of the processes of accommodation at various points in the 19th and 20th centuries. See, for example, R. Jensen, "The Avant-Garde and the Trade in Art," Art Journal, XLVII, Winter 1988, 360-367; B. Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression," October, xvi, Spring 1981, 39-68; and T. Crow, "Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts," in F. Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, New York, 1985, 233-266. Observers

appear to agree that the dissolution of bohemia did not begin in earnest, however, until the early 1960s as the result of the almost simultaneous appearance of Pop Art and the new "vanguard audience."



284 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1991 VOLUME LXXIII NUMBER 2

bohemian era of the Abstract Expressionists and the

period of rapprochement ushered in by Pop Art is a

commonplace in writing on contemporary art.5 But this view is simplistic. First, the extent of artistic

submission to prevailing cultural standards has been

exaggerated.6 Second, the extensive reconciliation of

high art and common culture that did occur was not sudden but gradual. As one cultural historian has observed: "What we in hindsight call change is usually ... the unexpected swelling of a minor current as it impercep- tibly becomes a major one and alters the prevailing mood."' Important indications of the process of accommodation were already evident around 1950 in a series of

Life magazine articles that culminated in the famous

photograph of the "Irascibles" (Fig. 7), in which members of the New York avant-garde posed for the popular journal in 1950.

The photograph's implications have been ignored by both the artists and their historians as part of a larger program of selective disregard and willful distortion. The

discrepancy between what these bohemians often said and what they sometimes did has barely been noted.s

Conversely, Life's essentially positive attitude toward the modern tradition being developed by the New York School has also been consistently misrepresented by its historians, both early and recent. In short, the principals and their chroniclers have wished to create and maintain the image of the Abstract Expressionists as archetypal bohemians-sensitive and uncompromisingly ethical artists forced to the margins of a Philistine culture. This article examines the relationship between Life and the

emerging Abstract Expressionists during the years 1948-51 and analyzes the various motives behind the long- standing endeavor to mythicize those relations.

Without exception, the historians of Abstract Expression- ism insist that the popular press was consistently hostile to the movement around 1950. Henry Luce's Time and

Life are frequently singled out as leaders of this conservative faction.9 Time's art critic, Alexander Eliot, did in fact

step up his campaign against members of the New York School at this time.10 But Eliot's counterparts at Life had

For a definition of the very different and enlarged audience for innovative art that appeared at this time, see T. Hess, "The Phony Crisis in American Art," Art News, LXII, Summer 1963, 25. For a portrait of the

type, see T. Wolfe, "The Saturday Route," in The Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flake, Streamlined Baby, New York, 1965, 205-212.

During the 1960s and early 1970s some American and most German critics held that Pop itself was not accommodating but critical. See, for

example, R. Crone, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, and A. Huyssen, "The Cultural Politics of Pop," After the Great Divide, Bloomington, 1986, 141-148. Some observers continue to claim that Pop Art was initially, at least, a critical manifestation. See R. Hughes, "The Rise of Andy Warhol," New York Review, 18 Feb. 1982, 6-10, and T. Crow, "Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol," Art in America, LXXV, May 1987, 129-136.

S In addition to the remarks of Rosenberg and Gablik quoted at the

beginning of this article, see H. Rosenberg, "Then and Now," Partisan Review, XLII, 1975, 563-566; C. Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, New York, 1980, 184-185; R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, New York, 1982, 341-342; S. Stich, Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the '50s & '60s, Berkeley, 1987, 7-11; H. Kramer, "Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s," New Criterion, 1, Sept. 1982, 38; and A. Danto, "Postminimalist Sculpture," The Nation, 14

May 1990, 680. The cliche emerged in the early 1960s. See, for example, Hess (as in n. 4) and B. Rosenberg and N. Fliegel, The Vanguard Artist: Portrait and Self Portrait, Chicago, 1965, passim. 6 The artistic tradition of cultural resistance remains strong among contemporary artists. Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Sue Coe, and Krysztof Wodiczcko are but a few of those whose works aim to critique, and thus challenge, aspects of the current cultural landscape. Moreover, at least one Pop artist, Claes Oldenburg, belonged to this, and not to the Warholian, tradition. See B. Rose, Oldenburg, Greenwich, Conn., 1970, Pt. 1.

7M. Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, New York, 1977, 54.

s Michael Leja briefly discussed the discrepancy between the "strident, belligerent" tone of the New York School's many manifestos and the "conservative" substance of their arguments. He pointed out that unlike their European forbears, the Abstract Expressionists were willing to work within institutional frameworks and held ideas on tradition and individual freedom not unlike their middle-class countrymen. On

the subject of their manifestos, he concluded: "Unrelievedly serious, not to say pompous ... they seem to issue from the pulpit rather than from bohemia"; Leja (as in n. 3), 17. Leja's observations, as he

acknowledged (n. 8 on p. 31), owe much to Serge Guilbaut, the first historian seriously to call into question the old assertions about the

relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the dominant culture. See Sources. I, too, found Guilbaut's iconoclasm liberating, although I cannot agree with his conclusion that Abstract Expression- ism was a response to American postwar liberalism. My study of the socio-economic accommodation between these artists and the Ameri- can mainstream owes more to the gross caricature of the artist provided by another iconoclast, Tom Wolfe, in "The Apache Dance," chap. 1 of The Painted Word, New York, 1975.

9 One of Pollock's early biographers, for example, claimed that around 1950, "While many critics were becoming more friendly, Life and Time were adopting an attitude of increasing hostility, perhaps backlash, to Pollock and other avant-garde American painters"; Friedman, 1972, 144. Of the late 1940s and 1950s, Thomas B. Hess, the Art News editor who supported the Abstract Expressionists, wrote:

Such spokesmen as the poet Archibald MacLeish, the publisher [of Time and Life] Henry Luce, the director of the Metropolitan Museum, Francis Henry Taylor, and many others attacked modern art in all its forms as irrelevant to Great Human Needs and International Causes.... They attacked the new American artists as

pranksters trying to fool the public, as a self-promoting clique, as

delinquents, and they phrased their attacks with all the well-used

epithets that savage misunderstanding and fearfulness can evoke

(Barnett Newman, New York, 1971, 87).

o0 Eliot, committed to a "humanist" figurative art, was strongly antagonistic to all forms of abstraction, especially that "done in the latest, or

devil-may-care style." What particularly disturbed him, as he elaborated in his review of 22 May 1950, was the proliferation of the

approach: "Some weeks, four and five such shows were running at once. Serious and respected practitioners had taken to dribbling paint onto their canvases from buckets; others seemed to be painting blindfold, with bent spoons" (pp. 68-69). In opposition to the emerging Abstract Expressionists, he vigorously promoted more conservative

painters like Henry Koerner. In an unprecedented six-page article on Koerner that appeared on 27 Mar. 1950, Eliot pointedly insisted: "It is not in his yeasty, positive nature to spend his working hours making decorative arrangements of squiggles and blobs of color..." (p. 56). In addition to Eliot's reviews of Pollock's paintings discussed below in n. 24, see his insulting remarks on the works of Newman, Fritz Bultman,



A HISTORIOGRAPHIC STUDY OF A LATE BOHEMIAN ENTERPRISE 285

adopted a very different attitude and course. Like most observers of postwar American art, Life's editors saw a terrain dominated by two broad currents: native realism and European abstraction. Life's staff was well aware of the heated argument between the proponents of the two traditions, but they decided to keep the magazine above the fray by promoting quality art of both stripes."1 Celebratory profiles of contemporary American realists, such as Andrew Wyeth (17 May 1948) and Russell Cowles (9 Feb. 1948), were balanced by articles on artists, such as Philip Guston (27 May 1946), who had opted for non-naturalistic European modes.

In 1950, Life identified-and therefore appeared to promote-a compromise between the two traditions. To determine whether or not young American artists were

taking advantage of their "greater opportunities," the magazine solicited from museums and art schools the names of 450 young painters who they asked to submit a sample work. Life's art editors then selected nineteen works they considered the best of the submissions, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to exhibit them. The magazine's account of its investigation, "19 Young Americans," appeared on 10 Mar. 1950. It presented the artists in two distinct groups. The first, under the caption "Abstract approach has various uses," reported on seven artists (Hedda Sterne and Theodoros Stamos among them) who had "assimilated the theories of abstraction originated by the Europeans and ... turned them to their own purposes" (p. 86). More important, the article insisted that, "though these paintings are strong in modern influence, many of them have roots deep in American art of the past" (p. 87). After a section headed "They still paint the human figure," the article's conclusion returned to the theme of reconciliation: "All skilled technicians, they have assimilated both the technical innovations of the European moderns and the traditional American methods of factual reporting" (p. 93).

Life's tolerance and support for modern art are also evident in its educational articles on the tradition's roots and methods. On 2 May 1949 the magazine published an account of the development of Cubism by Picasso and Braque. Eight months later, on 2 Jan. 1950, Life chronicled the events of the Armory Show. Most revealing, perhaps, of its didactic policy was its 17 Feb. 1947 article on Stuart Davis: "Why Artists Are Going Abstract: The Case of Stuart Davis." The text not only acknowledged the trend "sweeping American art" (p. 78) but attempted to accli- mate "bewildered," "irritated" (p. 83) readers to the new art by familiarizing them with its basic theoretical premises. The writer argued that the layman's frustration was caused not by the art itself but by the unnecessarily difficult critical language often used to describe it:

The amount of complicated artistic jargon that is used by critics and by artists themselves to explain abstract art has even irritated this writer, who has always been greatly attracted by the art itself.... Fundamentally there is nothing very mysterious or difficult to understand about the work of an abstract painter like Stuart Davis. He goes about painting a picture in very much the spirit grandma had when she was making a patchwork quilt, placing squares and oblongs of color where they will contribute tastefully to the over-all pattern. Being a professional, he is somewhat more skilled and imaginative than grandma (p. 83).12

The author of these remarks, Winthrop Sargeant (a senior writer in the Art Department), also contributed to the magazine's major pedagogic effort on behalf of

Baziotes, George McNeil, and Lee Mullican in a review of 20 Feb. 1950 and on the works of de Kooning in a review of 28 June 1954.

Eliot was apparently not the only one at Time who was antagonistic to Modernist art. The most acrimonious attack on the tradition was made in the "Medicine" section on 9 Mar. 1959 in a report on the research of a French doctor who specialized in treating abstractionists: "The layman who knows nothing about art but suspects that abstract

painters are off their rockers won support last week from a Paris

physician who has treated about 70 abstractionists in the last ten years. Not only are they sick, said Dr. Elie Bontzolakis in the weekly Arts, but 'the more abstract, the sicker they are.'" The doctor noted that abstractionists could, in fact, be divided in two groups, the "passion- ately sincere," or truly sick, and "the poseurs, attracted by snob appeal, laziness, money or mere lack of talent" (p. 60).

That indirect attack on the Abstract Expressionists was unusual given its date. Eliot himself had by then come grudgingly to accept Abstract

Expressionism as a result of its growing reputation here and abroad. On 7 Apr. 1958, in "Boom on Canvas," he reported on the soaring prices for the work of Pollock, Rothko, Hofmann, Guston, Baziotes, and Gottlieb. He noted, with a certain nationalistic pride, that, "Among the buyers flocking to Manhattan galleries is a new and growing breed: European dealers and collectors bent on buying U.S. moderns." On Aug. 4 of that

year, he concluded his review of "The New American Painting" exhibition (which had toured Europe in the summer and fall of 1958 under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art): "Empty or vital, art or droolings, U.S. abstract-expressionist painting has arrived and is not

likely to be rubbed out" (p. 45). The most outspoken of Abstract Expressionism's detractors was John

Canaday, the art critic for the New York Times between 1959 and 1976. His uncompromising antagonism to their art was the more controversial because of its late date. At the time that he began his campaign against the Abstract Expressionists, most members of the New York art world had come to view their work in a favorable light. For examples of his reviews, see the two anthologies of his writings, Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art, New York, 1962, and Culture Gulch: Notes on Art and Its Public in the 1960s, New York, 1969.

1 The magazine aimed, in fact, to promote quality art of all types. One of the artists it most vigorously promoted in the late 1940s, Henry Koerner, belonged to neither the realist nor the abstract camp. His dreamlike scenes based on his personal history were closer to veristic Surrealism. Life's profile of Koerner in the issue of 10 May 1948 began by declaring that, "The best paintings to date that have come out of the aftermath of the war are the ones reproduced on this and the following pages" (p. 77). Although Life and Time agreed on Koerner's superiority, the difference in their treatments of him is revealing. In Eliot's review (as in n. 10), Koerner's approach is repeatedly contrasted with those

employed by abstractionists, to the detriment of the latter. Apparently Eliot was more interested in abusing abstractionists than in praising Koerner. Such negative partisanship is completely absent from the Life article.

12 Other manifestations of Life's educational approach to modern art around 1950 were articles on contemporary sculpture (20 June 1949) and the Venice Biennale (11 Dec. 1950).




modern art during this period: "A Life Round Table on Modern Art." In the fall of 1948, "fifteen distinguished critics and connoisseurs" were brought together by the magazine at the Museum of Modern Art "to clarify the strange art of today" (Fig. 1).13 With the collaboration of Winthrop Sargeant, the moderator Russell W. Davenport prepared an eighteen-page report on the one-day symposium, which appeared in the 11 Oct. 1948 issue.

Life organized the event to address the question: "Is modern art, considered as a whole, a good or a bad development? That is to say, is it something that responsible people can support, or may they neglect it as a minor and impermanent phase of culture?" (p. 56). Discussion began with the examination of certain "modern classics": Picasso's Girl before a Mirror and Ma Jolie, Mir6's Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird, Matisse's Goldfish and Sculpture, and Rouault's Three Judges. Only Mir6's painting created any real controversy. The participants then turned their attention to works by the "Young American Extremists." William Baziotes's The Dwarf, The- odoros Stamos's Sounds in the Rock, Adolph Gottlieb's Vigil, Willem de Kooning's Painting, and Jackson Pol- lock's Cathedral elicited a range of intensely subjective responses. The critic Clement Greenberg considered the latter "one of the best paintings recently produced in this country," whereas the Yale professor Theodore Greene dismissed it as "a pleasant design for a necktie." Other exchanges followed similar lines. Davenport, the moderator, observed that, "the discussion revolving around (such work) ... was notable for its lack of reliable standards of evaluation. While one or another member of the Table liked or disliked this or that one, few were able to state with any clarity the reasons for their likes and dislikes, or to reach agreement on the standards by which they drew their conclusions." He ended his report on this section of the proceedings by noting that, "whatever the values of modern art, the precise determination of them is a matter fraught with a great many difficulties. The critics, at any rate, leave us in confusion" (p. 62).

To help the "layman" deal with such difficult and problematic works, the panel then considered the nature of the "esthetic experience" (p. 65) and offered advice on how to approach nonrepresentational art. Davenport summarized their suggestions:

1. The layman should guard against his own natu- ral inclination to condemn a picture just because he is

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1 "Life's Round Table on Modern Art," Life, 11 Oct. 1948, 57. Life Magazine, ? Time Warner, Inc.

unable to identify its subject matter in his ordinary experience.

2. He should, however, be equally on guard against the assumption that a painting that is recognizable ... is no good....

3. He should look devotedly at the picture, rather than at himself.... If it conveys nothing to him, then he should remember that the fault may be in him, not in the artist.

4. Even though he does not in general like nonrepresentational painting, this open-minded attitude will very much increase the layman's enjoyment of artistic works, ancient or modern (p. 68).

The panelists warned that these guidelines could not guarantee a satisfactory understanding of even the better modern works, however, because of the "private" quality of that production. Greene observed:

The modern artist feels compelled to develop his own highly individual idiom. But he does not do this out of sheer cussedness. He does it because he feels compelled to express life as accurately as he sees it from a highly individualistic point of view. And why does he see it from a highly individualistic point of view?

13 Life, 11 Oct. 1948, 56ff. The panelists were Clement Greenberg; Meyer Schapiro; Georges Duthuit, editor of the French publication, Transition

Forty-Eight; Aldous Huxley; Francis Henry Taylor, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sir Leigh Ashton, Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum; R. Kirk Askew, Jr., New York art dealer; Raymond Mortimer, British critic and author; Alfred Frankfurter, Editor and Publisher of Art News; Theodore Greene, Professor of Philosophy at Yale; James J. Sweeney, author and lecturer; Charles Sawyer, Dean of the School of Fine Arts, Yale; H. W. Janson, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Washington University, St. Louis; A. Hyatt Mayor, Cura- tor of Prints, Metropolitan Museum of Art; and James Thrall Soby, Trustee and Member of the Committee on Museum Collections, Museum of Modern Art.




Because we are living in a highly individualistic age (p. 69).

Although a number of participants expressed reservations about reading modern art as a simple expression of the "Zeitgeist" (p. 76), all agreed that the difficulties of modern art "are in great measure the difficulties of the culture." In a civilization that had lost a sense of communal values, "the search for truth" would inevitably be

idiosyncratic, they concluded (p. 72). This perception of the modern artist's difficult quest

led Davenport and Sargeant to their conclusions concern-

ing whether "responsible people" should "support" or

"neglect" this art:

If the layman is to match this attitude of honest search, his task is to understand the real meaning of modern

art-why it is so difficult and strange and seemingly perverse.... The meaning of modern art is, that the artist of today is engaged in a tremendous individualistic struggle-a struggle to discover and to assert and to express himself. He has been stripped in this

struggle of many of the useful standards that sus- tained the artists of the past and helped to make them comprehensible-religious beliefs, moral codes, esthetic dogmas-the absolutes of other ages. He is on his own. And his one remaining criterion is a kind of personal honesty, a kind of integrity.... This tremendous, individualistic struggle, which makes modern art so difficult for the layman, is really one of the great assets of our civilization. For it is at bottom the struggle for freedom.... And in light of it the layman, who might otherwise be disposed to throw all modern art in the ashcan, may think twice-and may on second thought reconsider (p. 73).

This synopsis of the round table will surely surprise those familiar with the literature on the New York School. Although accounts vary, no historian or biographer who has treated the subject has reported accurately the magazine's deliberations and verdict. Irving San- dler's version in The Triumph of American Painting is closest to the truth. He cited the round table as evidence that while the public "remained generally hostile" to the

emerging Abstract Expressionists, "the antagonism of the popular magazines was beginning to soften." As evidence of Life's mollified stance, he offered only the observation-accurate as far as it goes-that, "The fifteen writers on art who participated were in the main critical of the new art, but dealt with it seriously."14

More representative of histories of the event is that provided by Serge Guilbaut in his contextual study of Abstract Expressionism, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, in which he stated simply and categorically: "Life insisted that it was hard to take such work seriously and answered the original question in the negative."'5

Dore Ashton, in her respected study of the New York School, further suggested that the magazine had no intention of pursuing an honest inquiry into whether modern art was "a good or bad development." After an unsubstantiated accusation that the magazine conducted its inquiry "with rather pompous pride," she analyzed the willingness of Meyer Schapiro, Aldous Huxley, and

Georges Duthuit, among the assembled critics, to submit themselves to Life's mock inquiry: "That so many distin-

guished experts ... could be gathered together by Life to consider an absurdly posed question on modern art, was in itself a measure of the need postwar America was feeling for the modern art experience.... Their willingness to deal with such a loaded question is some indication of their missionary intentions."16

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Pollock's most recent biographers, offered a more unflattering interpretation of Life's agenda. About the interchange between the critics of Pollock's Cathedral, they argued that such "boring journalism" must have disappointed those who conceived the project:

The problem was that the needs of magazines were not the needs of art. Experts could give them the veneer of expertise, but expertise wasn't enough. In art, as in everything else, the media cared about only "the story": Was it visual? Did it have impact? What was the "human interest" angle? They were looking not for ideas or movements, but for people-or, better yet, personalities: good looks, charm, charisma, or, in a pinch, idiosyncrasy. They were looking for contro-

versy..... Better to elicit anger, shock, or outrage from the reader than nothing at all."

Most writing on the topic credited Life with loftier motives. Deborah Solomon, in her biography of Pollock, claimed that the magazine was "perturbed to discover that the latest movement in the fine arts bore no resem- blance to the cultural renaissance that Henry Luce's publications had envisioned for the coming American century. Confounded by 'the strange art of today,' Life presented its readers... with a 'Round Table on Modern Art.' 8"" Ellen Landau, in her recent monograph on Pollock, offered a similar, more elaborate explanation of the magazine's negative verdict on modern art-one based on material drawn from the round table:

Life pointed out that at issue was the seeming intru- sion into the aesthetic framework of the "Classical- Christian" art tradition a newer tradition which im- plies, to the detriment of morality, that "esthetics stands alone as a part of human experience." Accord- ing to Life, such art (the implication is, sadly) purports

"4 Sandler, 1970, 212-213.

" Guilbaut, 186. '6 Ashton, 171-173.

17 Naifeh and Smith, 575.

8 D. Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography, New York, 1987, 187.




to be "good or bad purely in its own terms with no ethical or theological references."19

Landau was right to draw attention to this important section of the discussion. Davenport and the majority of

panelists, including the defenders of modern art, agreed that "art must have some moral reference" (p. 78). Unfortunately, Landau implied that the discussion concluded at this point, that Life found no ethical basis to modern art and therefore rejected its claims to serious attention. Although many of the participants would not have agreed with Davenport and Sargeant, they did conclude that modern art, however difficult and inacces- sible, had a profoundly ethical dimension.

Stephen C. Foster's brief discussion of the round table in The Critics of Abstract Expressionism is somewhat exceptional. In the context of his study of the disparate, unfocused nature of early New York School criticism, Foster mentioned that part of the symposium when "critics were reluctant to make positive assertions about the art. After the results were in, Greenberg's plea to the

contrary notwithstanding, editor Davenport concluded that the critics showed considerable confusion, even

among members of the same camp, and were unable to erect reliable standards of evaluation."' Foster was uncon- cerned with other issues raised by the Life report. That his brief mention of it might be interpreted as an indication of the magazine's general conclusions was apparently inadvertent.

Foster's account aside, the glaring misreadings of the

symposium are part of a larger pattern. In a recent

catalogue essay, for example, Sandler called Life "the

leading purveyor of Kitsch" around 1950.21 Although one can find examples of such art in the magazine at this time, given Life's positive pieces on the work of Picasso, Braque, Guston, Davis, Sterne, and Stamos, among others, the label "purveyor of kitsch" is hardly warranted.

In the same essay, Sandler also misrepresented the

publication's general posture by misquoting an article of 1949. As proof that "Life had long proselytized against new art and had actively promoted retrogressive representational styles," he stated that "characteristically, on February 21, 1949, Life condemned modern art as 'silly and secretive faddism' and lauded 'the main trends in U.S. art of this century which are rooted in native traditions that are romantic and realistic.' "22 The two

quotations came from a one-page report, "Revolt in Boston," on the Boston Institute of Modern Art's decision

to change its name. The first is drawn from the opening paragraph:

The U.S. art world is full of temperamental people who have been wrangling for years over whether modern American paintings like those at left [by Paul Burlin, William Baziotes, and George L. K. Morris] are works of art or unintelligible nonsense. Some find them fascinating experiments in design and in portray- ing man's subconscious life. To others these "modern"

experiments are not modern at all, but are imitations of contemporary European schools. By their imitative- ness they have diverted modern art into a silly and secretive faddism. The lid blew off the wranglings last week when Boston's Institute of Modern art decided it could stomach the word "modern" no longer. It

changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art and uncorked a bristling manifesto telling why (p. 84).

The remarks Sandler attributed to Life were not meant to reflect its position but that of one segment of the art world. A reader could find in the magazine's greater attention to that point of view an indication of where Life stood in the debate, but it would hardly be substantial or sufficient evidence. Sandler's second quotation came from the article's concluding paragraph. After reporting on the Museum of Modern Art's "countermanifesto," wherein the New York museum accused its Boston

counterpart of "totalitarian" tactics, Life commented:

Neither the Boston Institute, however, nor any one else wanted anything like a totalitarian state. It was

proposing, in fact, that artists break away from the totalitarian formulas of diehard abstractionists and assert themselves as individuals. So it assembled an exhibition to show the main trends in U.S. art of this

century which they [italics mine] believe are chiefly rooted in native traditions that are romantic or realistic

(p. 84).

Life did not "laud" these native traditions, as Sandler said; it merely reported on the views of the Boston museum. The magazine appeared to side with the Boston Institute in its debate with the Museum of Modern Art, but for political, not aesthetic, reasons.23

Certainly the best-known instances of the misconstruc- tion of Life's corporate attitude toward modern art are the many references, usually brief, to Life's famous profile

19 E. Landau, Jackson Pollock, New York, 1989, 177.

20 S. C. Foster, The Critics of Abstract Expressionism, Ann Arbor, 1980, 40.

21 I. Sandler, "The Irascible Eighteen," The Irascibles, CDS Gallery, New York, 4-27 Feb. 1988, n.p. [3]. A French translation of the essay, "Les Irascibles," appeared in Art Press, cxxxII, Jan. 1989, 14-18. 22 Ibid. 23 Life, 21 Feb. 1949, 84. For a similar misreading of the Life article, see M. L. Corlett, "Jackson Pollock: American Culture, the Media and the

Myth," Rutgers Art Review, VIII, 1987, 82. Corlett argues that the black-

and-white reproduction of the paintings by Baziotes, Burlin, and

George L. K. Morris and the use of color for the works on view at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art demonstrated Life's preference for the former: "Through the discriminating use of color photography, Life thereby underscored the message delivered by the Boston Insti- tute's decision to change its name-that art in a democracy should be

intelligible and fully accessible to the widest possible audience. Ameri- can art should offer a democratic alternative to elitist, European modernism."




POLLOCK k he the grratest living painter in the United States?

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2 "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Life, 8 Aug. 1949, 42. Photo: Arnold Newman, Life Magazine, ? Time Warner, Inc.

of 8 Aug. 1949: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" (Figs. 2 and 3). Writers on the subject have insisted the magazine had the worst motives for choosing to focus on the painter.24 "Always alert for dramatic subjects for photojournalism," wrote one observer, "Life's editors sent a photographer and

reporter to interview him."25 Ashton sarcastically echoed this view: "By 1949 Life magazine was beginning to see

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the popular news value of artistic wildlife."26 Beyond its crass commercial motives, historians insisted that Life saw an opportunity to abuse the artist. Guilbaut declared, "The article heaped ridicule on Pollock."27 Eliza- beth Frank, in her study of Pollock, suggested, "The

magazine apparently needed to ridicule what it could not understand."'" Solomon claimed Life "poked fun at him."29 Landau stated that "Life's snide presentation of Pollock... invited reader indignation."30 And Mary Lee Corlett, in a longer study of the article, concluded that the piece had a "sarcastic, disdainful tone."" Only Corlett substantiated her claim with passages from the article. In particular, she relied on the caption for a photograph of Pollock at work, which stated: "Pollock Drools Enamel Paint on Canvas."32

24 During the late 1940s, Pollock had been vigorously promoted by the critic Clement Greenberg as the most important of the younger generation of American painters. In the British journal Horizon, Greenberg declared that "the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one ... is Jackson Pollock"; "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture," Horizon, XLIII-IV, Oct. 1947, 25-26. The art critic at Time apprised his American audience of the verdict in an eyebrow-raising little notice of 1 Dec. 1947 entitled "The Best?" Eliot, the Time critic, again reminded his readers of the exaggerated claim in the 7 Feb. 1949 issue when he reviewed an exhibition of the artist's recent work: "A Jackson Pollock painting is apt to resemble a child's contour map of the Battle of Gettysburg. Neverthe- less, he is the darling of a high-brow cult which considers him'the most

powerful painter in America' " (p. 51). This second reference seems to have convinced the art editors at Life that they, too, should devote a

story to the allegation.

25A. Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society, Ann Arbor, 1982, 89.

26 Ashton, 154.

27 Guilbaut, 186. 28 E. Frank, Jackson Pollock, New York, 1983, 75.

29 Solomon (as in n. 18), 195.

30 Landau (as in n. 19), 181.

3 Corlett (as in n. 23), 73. Corlett also claimed that Life and Time considered Pollock "insincere, a fraud, a hoax" (p. 88). 32 Ibid., 71.




Corlett was justified in describing the tone of this remark as "sarcastic" and "disdainful." Such adjectives do not apply as well to the body of the text, however, which I include below in its entirety:

Recently a formidably high-brow New York critic hailed the brooding, puzzled-looking man shown above as a major artist of our time and a fine candidate to become "the greatest American painter of the 20th century." Others believe that Jackson Pollock pro- duces nothing more than interesting, if inexplicable, decorations. Still others condemn his pictures as degen- erate and find them as unpalatable as yesterday's macaroni. Even so, Pollock, at the age of 37, has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon of American art.

Pollock was virtually unknown in 1944. Now his paintings hang in five U.S. museums and 40 private collections. Exhibiting in New York last winter, he sold 12 out of 18 pictures. Moreover, his work has stirred up a fuss in Italy, and this autumn he is slated for a one-man show in avant-garde Paris, where he is fast becoming the most talked-of and controversial U.S. painter. He has also won a following among his own neighbors in the village of Springs, N.Y., who amuse themselves by trying to decide what his paintings are about. His grocer bought one which he identifies for bewildered visiting salesmen as an aerial view of Siberia. For Pollock's own explanation of why he paints as he does, turn the page.

Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyo. He studied in New York with Realist Thomas Benton but soon gave this up in utter frustration and turned to his present style. When Pollock decides to start a painting, the first thing he does is to tack a large piece of canvas on the floor of his barn. "My painting does not come from the easel," he explains, writing in a small magazine called Possibilities I. "I need the resistance of a hard surface." Working on the floor gives him room to scramble around the canvas, attacking it from the top, the bottom or the side (if his pictures can be said to have a top, a bottom or a side) as the mood suits him. In this way, "I can ... literally be in the painting." He surrounds himself with quart cans of aluminum paint and many hues of ordinary household enamel. Then starting anywhere on the canvas, he goes to work. Sometimes he dribbles the paint on with a brush. Sometimes he scrawls it on with a stick, scoops it with a trowel or even pours it on straight out of the can. In with it all he deliberately mixes sand, broken glass, nails, screws, or other foreign matter lying around. Cigarette ashes and an occasional dead bee sometimes get in the picture inadvertently.

"When I am in my painting," says Pollock, "I'm not aware of what I'm doing." To find out what he has been doing he stops and contemplates the picture during what he calls his "get acquainted" period. Once in a while a lifelike image appears in the

painting by mistake. But Pollock cheerfully rubs it out because the picture must retain "a life of its own." Finally, after days of brooding and doodling, Pollock decides the painting is finished, a deduction few others are equipped to make.

Unflattering inferences are here, to be sure. Pollock's "frustration" with the requirements of realism tended to confirm the popular notion that abstract painters lack the talent to paint the figure.33 But other facts, including his professional successes here and abroad, cast the painter in a favorable light. The reference to him as "the shining new phenomenon of American art" is hardly abusive. On the whole, Life's essay seems a rather balanced account, perplexed but respectful.34 The discussion of the responses of his neighbors is, I think, characteristic. That he had "won a following" among these ordinary people- one of whom, a grocer, actually bought a painting- clearly was meant to recommend him to Life's readers. But the fact that even his buyers could not understand his works apparently reflected the writer's own di- lemma.35

The piece established a middle ground between the wholehearted endorsement that a vanguardist like Green- berg might have given and the condemnation that a conservative like Eliot would have wanted.36 Life's readers found no answer to the question of Pollock's rank in American art, but they were left, nonetheless, with the suggestive question and a fair amount of information about a radical cultural phenomenon. That Life's editors conceived the article not to ridicule Pollock but to educate their readers, to expand their awareness about an important cultural sphere, is confirmed not only by the round table of 1948 but also by the reference (in the opening sentence) to "a formidably high-brow critic." Although the adjectives might sound sarcastic to our ears, they would have alerted the magazine's regular readers to the fact that something difficult but elevating was at hand.

Four months earlier, in the 11 Apr. 1949 issue, Life had published an article announcing the end of the old class system determined by wealth or birth and the advent of one based on intelligence. "There are three basic categories of a new U.S. social structure," it declared: high- brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. The author noted that, "true prestige now belongs only to the scientists,

33In Pollock's case, however, the criticism was not gratuitous. His

ineptitude in rendering was both chronic and well known. See Naifeh and Smith, 124, 164, and 288.

34 Naifeh and Smith offer a similar reading of the article: "Beneath a

picture of Jackson looking particularly cocky, the article opened with

surprising evenhandedness" (ibid., 594).

35 The woman who interviewed Pollock and helped prepare the text, Dorothy Seiberling, was convinced that he "had some substance"; ibid. For more on the preparations for the article, see ibid., 593-597.

36 Seiberling, at least, dissociated herself from what she considered Eliot's reactionary negativism (ibid., 594).




writers, critics, commentators and thinkers. We have a society of the intellectual elite, run by the high-brows." Directly above the three labels that serve as the article's title, a representative of each "brow" type admires a sample of his taste (Fig. 4): "One, a tall man in a baggy tweed suit, likes paintings by Picasso. The shortest, a man in shirtsleeves, enjoys calendar art. The third likes Grant Wood reproductions suitable for framing" (p. 99). Only the high-brow is looking at an actual work of art. Furthermore, he is suggestively taller than the others and the object of his taste is hung higher on the wall. His superiority was also implied in the two-page chart that was provided "to help readers find their places" in this new hierarchy (Fig. 5). Here an important further distinction was made between upper middle-brows (linked with the high-brows) and lower middle-brows (associated with the low-brows). Under art, for example, the chart progressed upward from "Parlor sculpture" (a Venus de Milo clock) and "Front yard sculpture" (a birdbath with chipmunks and a cardinal) to a Maillol and a Calder. The difference between the abstract work, at the top, and the representational piece, just under it, is negligible compared to the gulf that separates these two from their kitsch counterparts below.

The distinction between the two upper categories and the two lower ones was explained in the little essay that followed the chart: "a spirited defense of the high-brow by Life's own high-brow, Winthrop Sargeant" (Fig. 6)- who had helped prepare the report on the round table several months earlier. Sargeant argued that,

What culture and civilized living we have today is provided by the interaction of two groups-the esthetically radical high-brows and the somewhat more conservative and stable upper middle-brows. Beneath the upper middle-brows there yawns an awful chasm peopled by masses whose cultural life is so close to that of backward children that the difference is not worth arguing about.

Sargeant admitted to some reservations about many of his type:

Most high-brows are ... soreheads, and nearly all of them lean over backward.

But look at what they are sore at and what they are leaning away from: ... the overwhelming flood of cultural sewage that is manufactured especially for the tastes of the low-brow and lower middle-brow.... I am not wholly uncritical of my fellow high-brows. Their opinions are sometimes preposterous.... But I find their opinions interesting even when they are wrong. I find them continually turning up new facets of culture that would never occur to their esthetically duller-witted contemporaries (p. 102).

The round table and the profile of Pollock were not examples of Life's hostility to modern art, then, but

HIGH-BROW, LOW-BROW, MIDDLE-BROW These are three basic categories of a new 1U.S. social structure, and the high-brows have the whip hand

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4 "High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow," Life, 11 Apr. 1949, 99. Life Magazine, ? Time Warner, Inc.

centerpieces in its programmatic attempt to lift the ordinary American "brow" and to overcome, through education, its readers' hostility toward modern art.

Not all of Life's writings on the modern tradition were favorable to its practitioners and supporters. An editorial condemning Jean Dubuffet's work appeared on 20 Dec. 1948,37 and the magazine's report on the controversy surrounding the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art's manifesto of 1949 against modern art (as mentioned above) appeared to favor the conservative viewpoint. But even these reflected Life's commitment to presenting the issues of high culture, to reconciling the masses and the art-world elite. This remained its mission throughout

37 Life, 26 Dec. 1960, 45. It must be noted, however, that Life condemned Dubuffet, not modern art. The article was careful to distinguish between the legitimate goals of modern painting, as pointed out in its recent round table, and the abuses of one individual. Dubuffet's art reflected not the deficiencies of modern art, "but the bankruptcy of the French critics who have taken their Dubuffetting seriously" (p. 22). The spirit of Life's critique is evident in the editorial's title: "Dead End Art: A Frenchman's Mud-and-Rubble Paintings Reduce Modernism to a Joke."




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5 "Everyday Tastes from High-Brow to Low-Brow Are Classified on Chart," Life, 11 Apr. 1949, 100-101. Life Magazine, ? Time Warner, Inc.

the 1950s. An editorial of 26 Dec. 1960 explained that the magazine's editors would continue to be committed to closing "the chasm between artists and democratic society" (p. 45).

In order to understand why art historians have consistently and thoroughly miscast Life in the role of the Philistine, we need to examine the other facet of the scholarly attempt to force the events of the late 1940s and 1950s to conform to a mythic shape: the presentation of the Abstract Expressionists as the archenemies of mainstream American values.

Another of Life's informative articles on modern art was a report, published 15 Jan. 1951, on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's inaugural contemporary painting competition. Part of that coverage included a photograph, taken by a Life staff member, of fifteen avant-garde painters who had boycotted the exhibition3--the so- called "Irascibles" (Fig. 7). From left to right and back to front, the subjects are: Willem de Kooning, Adolph

Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Richard Pousette- Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. Only four of the group appear agreeable. The faint smiles offered by Sterne and Still, Motherwell's relaxed, kindly demeanor, and Reinhardt's benign expression are exceptional. Most of the artists, as Life pointed out in its caption, appear "solemn" (p. 34). Gottlieb, Baziotes, Ernst, and Brooks look particularly so. Pousette-Dart and de Kooning seem to glare almost menacingly at the spectator. Newman, Stamos, Tomlin, and Pollock play variations on a theme of stern noncha- lance. The latter, clearly posing, is most convincing because of his confidant, powerful stare. Rothko, too, confronts the viewer, but he looks uncomfortable, suspi- cious, almost embarrassed.

Perhaps the most consistent feature of the artists' appearance is their body language. Nine have their arms folded in front of them in attitudes that suggest self- sufficiency and inaccessibility. At least three have their hands in their pockets or behind their backs. Seated sideways to the camera, Pollock turns his shoulder to the

3 Eighteen painters actually participated in the boycott. Three of them were unable to attend the photo session, a matter to which I will return.




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audience. The combination of facial and bodily attitudes creates a psychological barrier, walling out the ordinary middle-class Life subscriber. The sense of exclusion is completed by the fairly tight, almost closed circle of their grouping. The overall impression is of a highly serious, unified front against the ordinary American.39

The photograph, reproduced in countless books and catalogues, has become the unofficial portrait of the New York School, partly because it seemed to illustrate and to confirm what so many of its members wrote and said. These painters were self-conscious bohemians, individuals who identified with a tradition of alienation and

antagonism that began in the previous century. Some of them had a romanticized view of their historical circumstances, based more on popular myth than fact. Gottlieb, for example, said in a lecture in 1954:

When I was a boy studying art, I became aware of and accepted the difficulties of the modern artist.... I clearly understood that the artist in our society cannot make a living from art; must live in the midst of a hostile environment; cannot communicate through his art with more than a few people; and if his work is significant, cannot achieve recognition until the end of his life if he is lucky and more likely posthumously.... Among the heroes of my youth ... were Cezanne, Van Gogh, and the many others who were the symbol of the defiant and heroic artist in a world of Philistines.40

Motherwell had perhaps the most accurate and thor- ough grasp of the history of their type. In 1944 he wrote:

The term "modern" covers the last hundred years, more or less. Perhaps it was Eugene Delacroix who was the first modern artist. But the popular association with the phrase "modern art" ... is stronger than its historical denotation.... The popular association with modern art is its remoteness from the symbols and values of the majority of men. Even before the social- ists, the artists recognized the enemy in the middle class. There is a break in modern times between artists and other men without historical precedent in depth and generality. Both sides are wounded by the break. There is even hate at times, though we all have a thirst for love.

The remoteness of modern art is not merely a question of language, of the increasing "abstractness" of modern art ... the crisis is the modern artists'

rejection, almost in toto, of the values of the bourgeois world. In this world modern artists form a kind of spiritual underground ... it is the artists who guard the spiritual in the modern world....

The artist's hostility for the middle-class is recipro- cated. This period, more than other[s], has detested its greatest creations, even when made by extremely conventional beings like Cezanne.41

Although Motherwell lamented the schism between artist and society-which may help explain his more cordial appearance in the photograph-the majority of his colleagues claimed to welcome it. David Hare, a sculptor in their circle, said that some artists "feel badly because they are not accepted by the public. We shouldn't be accepted by the public. As soon as we are accepted, we

39The art historian B. H. Friedman wrote that the artists project "sadness, grimness, anger, and anxiety"; 1978, 96. Another claimed that, "There's a great deal of mugging going on. Stamos, whose art is gentle, looks fierce, Newman properly insouciant, Rothko embarrassed and resentful.... One suspects that Motherwell has just parked a rumble-seat flivver of the Fitzgerald era outside. Still looks as intense, humorless, and transcendent as an El Greco.... De Kooning is as

good-looking and angelic as a movie hero who has learned to cooperate with his own face.... Ad Reinhardt ... is a dark, immobile, and

negative presence.... Pollock's immediate presence ... springs out. He is casual but intense, posed but convincing"; B. O'Doherty, American Masters, New York, 1974,114.

40 A. Gottlieb, "Artist and Society: A Brief Case History," delivered at the

College Art Association Annual Meeting in 1954 and reprinted in the

College Art Journal, xv, Winter 1955, 96.

41 R. Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World," Dyn, vI, 1944, 10-11.




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become decorators."42 Gottlieb, expounding on the subject of the artist's "war with society," unequivocably declared: "The Abstract Expressionist says to the public ...: 'You're stupid. We despise you. We don't want you to like us-or our art.' As for me, I'd rather be an artist

today, for all this lack of status, than at any other time in

history.... I'd like more status than I have now, but not

at the cost of closing the gap between artist and public. I'd like to widen it!"43 Being outside society, Gottlieb insisted on another occasion in the mid-1950s, was

actually beneficial for the artist: in a hostile situation, "the artist can at least display initiative, assert the pure values of art, and exercise his freedom." The "impressive body of creative work" created under these adverse

42 Cited in W. C. Seitz, Abstract Expressionism in America, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, 139. Hare's relationship with the painters is evident in the fact that he was one of the ten sculptors to co-sign their letter to the

Metropolitan. See n. 59.

43 S. Rodman, ed., Conversations with Artists, New York, 1961, 89-90. The interviews were conducted between January and July of 1956 (ibid.).




conditions "might indicate that art thrives not only on freedom, but on alienation as well."44 Rothko and de

Kooning both agreed with this assessment. In the winter of 1947-48 Rothko wrote: "The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artist to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation. Freed from a false sense of security and community, the artist can abandon his plastic bankbook, just as he has aban- doned other forms of security. ... Free of them, transcen- dental experiences become possible."45 A friend of de Kooning's, Robert Goodnough, insisted in 1950: "To those who bemoan the situation of the artist today ... [de Kooning] answers that he finds the artist to be in a fortunate position. There is no one to limit his freedom since few understand the frontiers where he walks."46

For those of the New York School, art was not a way to "make a living" but a vocation, a "calling."47 An anony- mous member claimed: "We became artists like entering the priesthood."48 Larry Rivers remembered that what most impressed him about these men when he began to associate with them at the end of the 1940s was "that no one was commercially successful. That was meaningless. It was like belonging to a church. Not receiving any rewards for making art somehow made the concerns even stronger. Art was not a career. Not yet."49 Shortly before his death in 1956, Pollock declared, "Painting is my whole life."" Five years earlier de Kooning had said: "Painting... is a way of living today, a style of living, so to speak ... [for] those artists who do not want to conform. They only want to be inspired."''51 These artists thought of themselves as withdrawn from the ordinary world and wholly devoted to their god-"the pure values of art," as Gottlieb had said. The artists' institutions, according to Reinhardt, should be like monasteries: "The one purpose of the art-academy-university is the education and correction of the artist-as artist, not ... the popularization of art. The art college should be a cloister- ivy-hall-ivory-tower community of artists...."52

Although the Life group portrait seemed to embody and communicate these high bohemian sentiments, its original distribution contradicted them. Appearing in a popular magazine was hardly an effective form of with- drawal, or a logical way to "widen" the gap between artist and public. The circumstances surrounding the photograph confirm the apparent discrepancy. A closer look at the events leading up to it suggests that the seamless screen of bohemian oratory maintained by artists of the New York School in the 1950s masked the fact that with them originated today's model of art as a career to be manufactured, in opposition to the older model of it as a vocation to be followed.

The Life photograph was the unexpected result of a public relations campaign aimed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the nucleus of artists who attended Friday evening lectures at Studio 35.53 One of the infor- mal topics of conversation there, as elsewhere, was the Metropolitan's reactionary stance toward avant-garde art. The Metropolitan's director, Francis Henry Taylor, had been particularly and vociferously critical, for example, of the abstract painter's preoccupation with his formal means. Taylor had bitingly insisted that, "the contemporary artist has been reduced to the status of a flat-chested pelican, strutting upon the intellectual wastelands and beaches, content to take whatever nourish- ment he can from his own too meager breast."'4

Members of the New York School were not the only ones upset by the Met's hostility to modern art. Life magazine noted, in 1951, that many in the New York art community had, in fact, "become alarmed over the museum's worship of art of the past to the almost total exclusion of art of the present. They complained that out of an average $400,000 spent by the museum each year on acquisitions, barely $10,000 went for contemporary art."55 In order to pacify these many critics, the museum's directors decided in 1950 to organize a large exhibition of contemporary American painting with prizes totaling $8,500. The works were to be chosen by an elaborate screening system consisting of regional and national juries.

The announcement of the jurors-professors and figure painters for the most partS6--convinced Adolph Gottlieb, one of the Studio 35 community, that even though he and many of his colleagues had been invited to submit

44 Gottlieb (as in n. 40), 101. " Possibilities, I, Winter 1947-48, in B. Rose, ed., Readings in American Art since 1900, New York, 1968, 143.

46 Cited in Sandler, 1978, 27, n. 49.

47 Rosenberg and Fliegel wrote that the analogy between the artist and the clergyman was commonly made by the New York School artists they interviewed in 1961-62; Rosenberg and Fliegel (as in n. 5), 50. Reinhardt commented that "Fine art is not a means of making a living," in "Twelve Rules for a New Academy," Art News, LVI, May 1957, 38.

48 Rosenberg and Fliegel (as in n. 5), 184.

49 L. Rivers, "New York in the Eighties," New Criterion, IV, Special Issue, 1986, 50.

50 Rodman (as in n. 43), 87.

51 The paper was presented at a symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art on February 5, 1951; repr. in H. Rosenberg, De Kooning, New York, 1973, 146. 52 From a talk given by Reinhardt at the church of St. Marks-in-the- Bouwerie, New York in Oct. 1963. Cited in G. Battcock, ed., The New Art: A Critical Anthology, New York, 1966, 202.

3 The program of lectures, held at 35 East Eighth Street, survived the closing in May 1949 of the cooperative school called Subjects of the Artist. The school had been founded by Motherwell, Rothko, Baziotes, and Hare in the fall of 1948.

54 Reported in Time, 5 June 1950, 54.

5s "The Metropolitan and Modern Art," Life, 15 Jan. 1951, 35.

56The New York area jury consisted of Charles Burchfield, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Leon Kroll, Ogden Pleissner, Vaclav Vytlacil, and Paul Sample. The national jurors were Robert Beverly Hale, Pleissner, Maurice Sterne, Millard Sheets, Howard Cook, Lamar Dodd, Francis Chapin, Zoltan Sepeshy, and Esther Williams (New York Times, 22 May 1950).




work for consideration, they had no real chance of acceptance. At the end of an unusual three-day session held at the Studio in late April 1950, Gottlieb suggested that the artists should protest the upcoming event. A brief discussion led to a collective decision to send an open letter to the Metropolitan's president, Roland L. Redmond.57

Over the next month, Gottlieb composed a letter in consultation with those who had agreed to sign it.58 On Saturday, 20 May, it was sent to Redmond. It read:

Dear Sir: The undersigned painters reject the monster na-

tional exhibition to be held at the Metropolitan Mu- seum of art next December, and will not submit work to its jury.

The organization of the exhibition and the choice of jurors by Francis Henry Taylor and Robert Beverly Hale, the Metropolitan's Director and the Associate Curator of American Art, does not warrant any hope that a just proportion of advanced art will be included.

We draw to the attention of those gentlemen the historical fact that, for roughly a hundred years, only advanced art has made any consequential contribu- tion to civilization.

Mr. Taylor on more than one occasion has publicly declared his contempt for modern painting; Mr. Hale, in accepting a jury notoriously hostile to advanced art, takes his place beside Mr. Taylor.

We believe that all advanced artists of America will join us in our stand.59

In strategic terms, the letter was brilliantly conceived. It argued that the artists deserved preferential consideration because of their lineage. It did not argue, as their supporters often had, that their kind of art was aestheti- cally superior to that done in other contemporary modes.60

The question of intrinsic worth was raised, but indirectly, via the art-world consensus that since about 1850, only avant-garde artists had produced work of any real significance or worth. Because these American artists and their critics, both friendly and hostile, considered them the heirs of that radical tradition, it seemed to follow that they automatically merited the kind of respect and status their forbears had won. The argument was problematic but compelling.

Something far more controversial and historically significant was also negotiated in the letter. Instead of using the terms "avant-garde" or "vanguard" to describe themselves and their precursors, the writers chose the cognate word "advanced." Terms like "radical" or "revolutionary" imply a bohemian hostility to mainstream American culture, a tradition of thought and values disdainfully outside it. "Advanced," however, does not. To ordinary American ears, "advanced art" would have had a comforting ring, suggesting subtly but undeniably the familiar pitch of commercial advertising. Although the word obviously was meant to connote the vanguard tradition, it also and obviously was a synonym for that most-familiar of capitalist refrains, "new and

improved.""6 In order to appreciate fully what the letter writers had done, we must understand that "advanced" was not yet part of the ordinary lexicon of American vanguard artists and critics.62 That the writers of the letter chose to argue their case with this accommodating adjective suggests a desire not to maintain or "widen" the gap between themselves and those in the dominant culture but to bridge it-at least in this instance.

Members of the public were introduced to the letter in the New York Times. On Sunday, 21 May 1950, the day

7 Friedman, 1978, 98. The idea of an open letter was no doubt suggested by the example of James N. Rosenberg, a wealthy lawyer and art

patron, who had sent several such letters to the Metropolitan. Gottlieb had copies of these letters (ibid., 100).

S5Newman and Reinhardt apparently contributed the most to its

shaping. In addition to the fourteen who had been present when the idea was first discussed, four other painters, not regulars at Studio 35, were also asked to help write and sign the document: Pollock, Rothko, Still, and Bultman (ibid., 98). Pollock, Rothko and Still were apparently invited because of their connection with the Betty Parsons Gallery. Six of those involved in the project from the start were members of Parsons's close-knit stable of artists: Hofmann, Newman, Reinhardt, Stamos, Pousette-Dart, and Tomlin. Bultman seems to have been included because of his close friendship with Hofmann, his former teacher.

59 At the bottom of the letter, after the signatures of the eighteen painters, this was added: "The following sculptors support this stand. Herbert Ferber, David Smith, Ibram Lassaw, Mary Callery, Day Schna- bel, Seymour Lipton, Peter Grippe, Theodore Roszak, David Hare, and Louise Bourgeois."

60 Clement Greenberg, in particular, liked to argue the abstractionist's case in these terms. His characteristic authoritative judgment appears

in his first piece of art criticism, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," Partisan Review, vII, July-Aug. 1940. In his opening paragraph he states matter-of-

factly that "the best of contemporary plastic art is abstract" (p. 296). 61 Webster's New International Dictionary of 1951 offered the following for "advanced": "1. Moved or set in the van or front; in advance as to time or place of what is in course, use, etc.; 2. Far on, as in life, time, or course; 3. In the front or before others, as regards progress or ideas; 4. 'Educ.'

Beyond the elementary or the introductory." "Abstract Expressionism: 'New and Improved' " was the title ironi-

cally chosen by Stephan Polcari for his review of the literature on the

subject in the Art Journal, XLVII, Fall 1988, 174-180. 62 Although I sometimes found the verb form of the word in the

writings on and by the emerging Abstract Expressionists before this date, I could find no examples of the adjective. It was apparently little used before the emergence of Post-Painterly Abstraction, that is, until after the publication of Greenberg's edition of his collected essays, Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), wherein it appeared frequently as a result of revisions the author carried out in 1958-59." 'American-Type' Painting" in the anthology, for example, opened with the following: "Advanced

painting continues to create scandal when little new in literature or music does ..." (p. 208). When the article first appeared in the Partisan Review, however, the opening sentence was quite different: "The latest abstract painting offends many people ..." (xxII, Spring 1955, 179). The term is used later in that article to describe the American painters and their work, but in the mid-1950s it did not have the kind of importance for Greenberg that it would have in his later writing and in that of the school of criticism he inspired.




after the letter was mailed, Barnett Newman, dressed in a conservative suit and tie, hand-delivered a copy of the letter to the newspaper's city editor.63 Newman, who had run for mayor of New York in 1933, understood not only how to deal with the press but when. He knew that Monday was traditionally a "soft" news day. Newman's strategy was rewarded when the Times ran the story on the front page: "18 Painters Boycott Metropolitan; Charge 'Hostility to Advanced Art.' "

Newman, Gottlieb, and the others should have been delighted with the newspaper's account, not simply because of its placement but because in it the prestigious journal had accepted as fact their "advanced" status. The article opened with a simple declaration: "Eighteen well-known advanced American painters have served notice on the Metropolitan Museum of Art... ." Regard- less of how the newspaper may have felt about the artists' explicit claim-the hostility of the jurors-it had clearly accepted their more important implicit claim to leadership of the avant-garde tradition. The article therefore was an important moment in the history of the rise of the New York School.

The Metropolitan never responded to the letter, probably because its principals felt they could add little to what the New York Herald Tribune wrote on their behalf in an editorial that appeared the following day (Tuesday 23 May). A strongly worded condemnation of the artists' actions appeared under the rubric, "The Irascible Eighteen." The writer, probably the journal's art critic, Emily Genauer,64 accused the painters of "misrep- resentation" and questioned "the fairness or wisdom of condemning a jury before it has even started to consider the evidence."65

The letter, and the controversy it stirred, suggested to the editors at Life magazine that they should include a reference to the boycott as part of their planned coverage of the Metropolitan's competition-the results of which were to be announced 5 Dec. 1950 at the exhibition's opening. Soon after the Time account of the incident, one of Life's art editors, Dorothy Seiberling, contacted Gott- lieb about the possibility of getting a photograph of the group. Gottlieb apparently asked Newman, Motherwell, and Tomlin to assist him with the negotiations. Since there were no satisfactory photographs of the entire group, it was decided that Life would take one. While these discussions were in process, a meeting of the entire group was called to discuss the matter. Not surprisingly, many of the artists were uneasy about the prospect of cooperating with a "popular" magazine. Rothko and Pousette-Dart, in particular, argued that they would be collaborating with the enemy. Most in the group considered Life the very epitome of that mass culture to which they were all rigorously and unequivocably opposed. The majority felt, however, that their appearance in the magazine would not be improper if the photograph were "honest"-by which they apparently meant unslanted.66 They were worried that the magazine would make them appear ridiculous; thus it was agreed that the group would sit for a dignified photograph. Newman, at least, had a very specific idea of what that meant. His widow, Annalee, remembered that "Barney kept insisting the group be photographed like bankers.""67 Assuming that this was seriously meant, it was an odd stipulation for an avowed enemy of middle-class preoccupations with money-another indication, perhaps, that the old hostil- ities between bohemian and bourgeois were dissolving.

Life's original idea for the photograph, which would have shown the artists with their paintings on the steps of the Metropolitan, was rejected by the group's negotiat- ing committee. They suggested instead a photograph on "neutral territory."68 The magazine had a studio on 44th Street, just west of Sixth Avenue, and both sides agreed that the artists would go there on the afternoon of 24 Nov. for the photography session. Only fifteen of the eighteen signatories could attend. Fritz Bultman was in Rome; Weldon Kees was in San Francisco; and Hans Hofmann was in Provincetown.69 All of the men showed up in conservative dress, eschewing what Larry Rivers described as their everyday wear-"a combo of corduroy and army-navy-store rejects used for working-class associations.'"7 Most of them, as was their custom for

6 Friedman, 1978, 98.

64 Genauer, however, does not remember having written it. For the

complete text of the editorial, see the New York Herald Tribune, 23 May 1950, 100.

65 Time also came to the museum's defense, in its 5 June issue. The title of its critic's report, "The Revolt of the Pelicans," suggested its slant. The author of the piece, Alexander Eliot, attempted to exonerate the Met by suggesting that whatever abuse these artists had received from that quarter was well deserved:

Dean of the protesting group is 70-year-old Hans Hofmann, a

compelling teacher for whom painting means "forming with color.... At the time of making a picture, I want not to know what I'm doing; a picture should be made with feeling, not with

knowing....' " William Baziotes, who recently sold a painting called Dragon to the Met, also signed the letter. Less abstract than

many in the group, he too works entirely from "feeling." Among the most vocal of the signers was Ad Reinhardt, who paints as abstractly as possible. "Anyone who would sit down to paint grass today," says Reinhardt, "is just an illustrator. What we see isn't real; everybody knows that."

That Eliot's readers should interpret these quotations as a litany of

ingratitude and nonsense is confirmed by his concluding paragraph, which begins: "Though some critics and museums take such notions

seriously, the Met is not likely to. Its witty director, Francis Henry Taylor, has never concealed his dislike of the Moderns" (p. 54). The article ends with a citation of Taylor's denunciation of the pelican-like modern artist, "strutting upon the intellectual wastelands." The artists

received written support only from the art column in the 3 June issue of the Nation, penned by one of them, Weldon Kees.

66 Sandler (as in n. 21), n.p. [3].

67 Friedman, 1978, 102.

68 Ibid. The artists did not want to appear to be trying to get into the

Metropolitan. Ibid.

69 Hofmann sent Newman a telegram: "Sorry not to be with you all on the foto. with my sympathy for our cause" (ibid). 70 Rivers (as in n. 49), 50.




more formal occasions, wore light suits and sports jack- ets.71 Only Newman, Reinhardt, and Still wore dark suits, "like bankers."

The artists were met at the studio by Nina Leen, a staff photographer, who asked them to arrange themselves in front of the camera, using the bench, stools, and chairs that were available. Newman grabbed a low stool and sat himself front and center. Stamos and Rothko took seats flanking him. Pollock positioned himself on a higher stool behind Newman, while the others, a little slower to act, filled out the composition around this nucleus. Leen took eight quick shots of this grouping and then asked the artists to rearrange themselves in the anteroom, where she took four more shots (Fig. 8). The whole session took about an hour.72 Leen said, "I posed them as fast as I could. I was bothered by the background but there was not time to do another." She acted quickly and allowed them to pose themselves because she was afraid they might bolt: "They were never in a good mood. People with a cause are the most difficult to take. I put out the chairs and left the positions up to them. I did not dare tell them who should be in front and who should be in back-I might have put the biggest genius in the back. If I had moved an artist, he might have walked out. I just made sure all their faces could be seen.""73 All the images on the contact print reflect the standoffishness that Leen felt. Motherwell recently explained, "If some of us look angry, the anger was probably at the photographer."74 Leen had a different explanation for their behavior: "I think they loved having their pictures taken, but they seemed to be afraid to be nice-they didn't want to appear too commercial."7"

Leen's observation highlights what was at stake in this photograph: the pursuit, through popular exposure, of critical and financial success. When the artists first conceived the boycott of the American exhibition, they certainly had no idea that it would take them into America's living rooms. They had thought only of exert- ing pressure on the museum in order to promote their acceptance in the highest echelons of the art world.76 The use of the New York Times against the museum's hostility was consistent with this goal and, furthermore, was not inconsistent with their stance vis-a-vis the public-at-large since the newspaper's readership was both limited and

sophisticated. The group's readiness to appear in Life magazine, however, suggests a collective desire for a kind of status and success that far exceeded acceptance by the Met or the art community, a kind of acceptance, in fact, incompatible with their bohemian dogma. They understood that having their photograph in Life magazine would increase their chances of showing at New York museums, but the method by which this would be achieved was one that these purists claimed to disdain: popular fame. The artists knew full well that Life coverage could provide something far different from the kind of status-among-peers that many claimed was all that mattered to them.7 The results of Pollock's appearance in the popular magazine were obvious to all in the New York art world.

Before the extensive coverage of his work by the Luce publication, Pollock had achieved a certain level of critical and even financial success. Peggy Guggenheim had vigorously promoted him in the early 1940s at her gallery, Art of This Century; in 1944 the Museum of Modern Art had purchased Male and Female (1942); and the reviews of his shows in the professional journals were often favorable." But the attention he received from Life in 1949 elevated Pollock into an entirely different sphere. It made him famous, the first American art celebrity. B. H. Friedman, in his biography of the artist, wrote that after the mass-media attention, "he was aware now as he bought gas, groceries, or paint and hardware supplies that whatever he had been-among fellow artists and to some extent critics, dealers, and collectors- now was lifted, blown up, distorted into ... public celebrity. People stared, looking for signs of 'the greatest living painter in the United States.' "79 Naifeh and Smith offered additional evidence of the powerful impact that the magazine article had on popular attitudes toward Pollock-from fan mail to the sense of one visitor that, "Entering his studio was like entering a shrine.""80

Surprisingly, and more importantly, the Life article dramatically increased Pollock's stature within the profes-

71 Sandler (as in n. 21) insisted that although "they did resemble businessmen more than bohemians... they did not dress up for the Life portrait; that was how they generally appeared in public." He adds that, "they did not want to be taken for Greenwich Village bohemians who lived the life of art without creating much of it" (p. 3). 72 Friedman, 1978, 102.

73 D. Bourdon, "Sitting Pretty," Vogue, CLxxV, Nov. 1985, 116.

74 Friedman, 1978, 102.

7 Bourdon (as in n. 73), 116.

76 Leja (as in n. 3) perceptively argued that such actions reveal the

"conservative" nature of this avant-garde: "They mounted no critique of the institutional framework of art evaluation and promotion to which they were subject; their complaints were aimed at the aesthetic

judgment of those in control of the existing institutions" (p. 17).

77 Sandler, 1978, who knew these painters well, claimed: "For the older

generation and generally for the newcomers, public recognition in the forms of museum shows, coverage in the art and mass media, or sales of art was not as important as the opinion of fellow artists" (p. 17). 7" See Friedman, 1972, chaps. 3 and 4, and Naifeh and Smith, 463-464 and 515. The reviews of Pollock's show at Betty Parsons's gallery in

January of 1948 were, however, with the exception of Greenberg's, quite harsh. The Art News reviewer, for example, called the work

"lightweight" in its "monotonous intensity." Robert Coates of the New Yorker wrote that paintings were the "mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless" (ibid., 555).

79 Friedman, 1972, 139.

so Naifeh and Smith, 596 and 610. See, also, chap. 36, passim. Friedman, 1972, stressing Pollock's discomfort with his new status, reported that he complained that he could "no longer walk into a gallery and look at a show the way I used to." He elaborated to his wife: "I feel like a clam without a shell" (p. 14). Naifeh and Smith claimed that although Pollock was "embarrassed" by the new attention, privately he "reveled" in it (p. 597).




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8 Contact sheet for "Irascible" photograph by Nina Leen, Life Magazine, ? Time Warner, Inc., from Friedman, 1978, 99




sional art community. Rivers remembers that among the younger artists he became "a star painter all right ... people at the Cedar took him very seriously; they would announce what he was doing every single second- 'There's Jackson!' or 'Jackson just went to the john'!"8' Pollock's peers, too, granted him new respect, as is evident from the fact that the Studio 35 group invited him to sign their letter to the Metropolitan, although he rarely attended their functions.82

The critics also suddenly became more impressed with his oeuvre. As one biographer stated: "The general tone of Pollock criticism changes ... it becomes considerably more respectful. For the first time, whether critics like the work or not, they all take it seriously."83 Naifeh and Smith amply documented this claim. The attitudes of many formerly hostile critics, in fact, underwent a star- tling conversion." The most surprising was probably that of Parker Tyler, who in 1945 had likened Pollock's work to baked macaroni. In the March 1950 issue of Magazine of Art, those loops now seemed "beautiful and subtle patterns of pure form" filled with cosmic profundity: "Pollock's paint flies through space like the elongating bodies of comets.... What are his dense and spangled works but the viscera of an endless nonbeing of the universe? Something which cannot be recognized as any part of the universe is made to represent the universe in totality of being.'"85

For his public esteem, Pollock was indebted solely to Life magazine. The magazine's essay was the ultimate cause of his elevated status among critics and fellow artists, but it was not the direct one. To be precise, Pollock's peers and critics seemed less impressed by the Life article than by the impact that it had on the attitudes (and buying habits) of haut bourgeois collectors. For his peers, the decisive moment was not the appearance of writing about Pollock on their local newstand, but the appearance of certain collectors at the opening of his November 1949 exhibition. That reception, three months after the Life profile, was unlike anything he or any other American in his circle had experienced. Instead of the usual small gathering of "downtown" friends and associates, the opening was crowded with "uptown" collectors and socialites."6 Milton Resnik, who attended the event with de Kooning, recalled their reaction: "The first thing I noticed when I came in the door was that people all

around me were shaking hands. Most of the time you went to an opening, all you saw were other people that you knew, but there were a lot of people there I'd never seen before. I said to Bill, 'What's all this shaking about?' And he said, 'Look around. These are the big shots. Jackson has finally broken the ice.' "87 Roy Neuberger, the collector and financier; Burton Tremaine, a wealthy collector; Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., Director of the Depart- ment of Design at MoMA; Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar; and Happy and Valentine Macy were some of the more notable guests. Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, welcomed these and the other attend- ees with reprints of the Life article.88

That this new fascination with Pollock was more than passing is evident from the sales record. Many of the uptown collectors who attended the opening bought pictures." As a result of the new market, Pollock's sales during the ensuing year were excellent-the first indication of what would become a steadily growing phenomenon. In that year his dealer Betty Parsons sent Pollock checks totaling $6,508.23 on the basis of gross sales of over $10,000.9 At a time when two-thirds of American families lived on less than $4,000 per year, this was a considerable sum.91

Whether the other members of the New York School were fully aware of Pollock's new prosperity is inconse- quential. What matters is that the artists in his circle could not have ignored the distinctive constellation of changes in his status that occurred shortly before 1950: the new signs of prosperity,92 the new critical respect, the attention of wealthy collectors, and the adulation of public and professionals alike. When de Kooning saw "the big shots" at Pollock's 1949 opening, he knew immediately that something fundamental had changed- for himself as well as for Pollock. Whether he, Resnik, or any of their colleagues understood all the factors that had made it possible for Pollock to "break the ice," we cannot know. We may safely speculate, however, that these changes, coming as they did in the immediate wake of the Life article on Pollock, would have been connected, if not identified, with that piece-even if Lee Krasner had not stressed that relationship by distributing

81 A. Warhol and P. Hackett, Popism: The Warhol '60s, New York, 1980,14.

82For other evidence of this new respect, see Naifeh and Smith, 601-602.

83 Friedman, 1972, 143. " For the transformed views of Robert Coates (New Yorker), Amy Robinson (Art News), Carlyle Burrows (Herald Tribune), Stuart Preston

(New York Times), and Henry McBride (journal not named), see Naifeh and Smith, 600-601. 85 Cited in ibid., 603-604.

86 The terms, common to the vocabulary of the New York School, were meant to distinguish between those who lived below 34th Street- around 10th Street, in particular-and those who lived in the vicinity of the fashionable 57th Street galleries. See, for example, Greenberg's remarks cited in this text (p. with n. 127).

87 Recounted in Naifeh and Smith, 597-598.

88 Ibid., 597-599.

89 For a list of these and others of this group who bought paintings by Pollock during and shortly after the exhibition, see ibid., 600.

90 Ibid., 624. 91 Guilbaut, 243. There is considerable disagreement about both the level of Pollock's financial achievement at this time and the role played by Life's coverage. Ashton suggested that he enjoyed only modest success around 1950: "He could begin to think about living on his

paintings" (p. 211). Tomkins (as in n. 5) wrote that the article "did

nothing for his sales" (p. 46). Guilbaut gave a picture of events closer to that of Naifeh and Smith: "In 1949, shortly after the publication of the

Life article on Pollock... sales increased at an incredible pace" (p. 243).

92Pollock, who continued to plead poverty, probably said little to indicate the improvement in his fortunes. He did, however, broadcast the change in a thoroughly middle-class fashion: in 1950 he traded in his Model A for a 1947 Cadillac. Naifeh and Smith, 624 and 627.




copies at Pollock's opening. Clearly Pollock's popular fame was a central factor in the radical developments of his career around 1950.

The hypothesis that Pollock's fellow artists associated his new success with his appearance in Life is crucial for our investigation because it helps us understand their willingness to appear in the magazine. We may ask, quite simply, what does it mean, in the context of Pollock's recent experience, that an avant-garde artist should want to appear in Life magazine?93 The answer suggests that the portrait of the Irascibles was not a simple, "honest" act as the participants wanted to believe, but a knowing, opportunistic one-an act calculated, at some level of consciousness, to promote their own careers. Theirs was not the crass, blatant form of merchandising identified with Warhol and with many of today's artists and dealers, but it was merchandising nonetheless.94

The nature of the working relationship between the New York School artists and the popular media that was heralded by the Life articles on Pollock and his circle directly contradicted, and thus undermined, the system of values by which the artists had previously worked. None had gone into art in search or with expectations of either notoriety or a comfortable living. In fact, they had made their career choices partly out of a desire to spurn such "bourgeois" ideals. And as long as art provided neither fame nor wealth, they could remain outspokenly indifferent to both-untempted and uncorrupted. The new terms and conditions of success changed things; a fairly close-knit community of highly ethical men and women was split asunder. Rivers described how the "brotherhood of artists" crumbled during the early 1950s:

You would go down to the Club and someone would come over and say: "Did you hear, Jackson Pollock sold a work for nine thousand dollars!" "Nine thousand dollars! Really? Who bought it?" Discussions on the virtues and problems of figurative art as opposed to abstract art began mingling with the news of artists

getting shows and selling their work and appearing in newspaper and magazine articles. How much longer did the Club go on after people started selling their work? I'm not sure. Not very long. You began to hear the word "career" more often in relation to what began taking place-the scene, so to speak. You were able to use the word with a greater degree of reality. I still remember not long afterwards Bill de Kooning saying to me: "Well you know, it's a good living!" It sounded shocking.95

Mercedes Matter, the daughter of Arthur B. Carles and a member of the artists' circle since the 1930s, lamented: "The minute success entered into the art world and it became a business, everything changed. It was all ruined.""96

The changed expectations, and the effect they had on behavior, can be gauged from a proposal that Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and Still made in 1951 to their long- time dealer, Betty Parsons: they wanted Parsons to drop the other artists in her gallery and concentrate her energies on promoting their work.97 "They said they would make me the most famous dealer in the world," Parsons recalled. "And they were probably right. They really were paying me a great compliment."98 The proposal was not made as a tribute, of course, but as a way of more vigorously pursuing the fame and (possible) for- tune that seemed to the four now within their reach.99 We should observe that the four were willing to sacrifice the well-being of a number of colleagues to these selfish

93 Robert Hughes, voicing the conventional wisdom, wrote that, "Public-

ity had not been an issue with the artists in the forties and fifties"; "The Rise of Andy Warhol," in B. Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York, 1984, 48. The historian Harry F. Gaugh claimed that publicity was "thrust on" these artists: "In the long run this publicity [from Life] boosted the prices of paintings, but it also

compounded Pollock's personal problems. It made him a New York star. Like de Kooning's later in the 1960s, Pollock's privacy was wrecked

by his celebrity status. This was a serious problem thrust on several New York artists who became financially successful after years without

recognition except from close friends, fellow artists, and a few intrepid collectors"; "Reappraising the New York School," in S. Hunter, ed., An American Renaissance: Painting and Sculpture since 1940, New York, 1986, 36. 94 In this context, it should be noted that during the next decade Rothko

privately referred to those paintings he turned out quickly as "merchandise," according to Fritz Bultman, who at the time lived in the same building as Rothko. Naifeh and Smith, 763 and 901.

95 Rivers (as in n. 49), 51-52.

96 Naifeh and Smith, 763.

97 Naifeh and Smith list Parsons's "inadequacies" that rankled both Pollock and his wife: "She took on too many artists, especially from among her amateur friends ... didn't push sales, had no long-range plans, treated artists cavalierly, kept slipshod records, and ultimately cared more about her own art than about selling"; ibid., 657.

98 C. Tomkins, "A Keeper of the Treasure," New Yorker, LI, 9 June 1975, 52-53.

99 At issue is a new set of expectations. D. Robson, in her important study, "The Market for Abstract Expressionism: The Time Lag between Critical and Commercial Acceptance," Journal of the Archives of American Art, xxv, 3, 1985, 19-23, documented the fact that the Abstract Expres- sionists did not achieve significant market success until the mid-1950s, although they received considerable critical success earlier. By 1950-51, I would argue, the artists had some sense of the possibility of commercial success, although they could not have foreseen how much of it they would enjoy by mid-decade. This is clear not only from de Kooning's comments at Pollock's 1949 opening but from the proposal under discussion made to Parsons by Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and Still. They would not have asked Parsons to market them more vigorously if they had not been convinced that it was possible. In short, I think we must distinguish between the achievement of significant financial success, which occurred in the mid-1950s, and the quest for it, which preceded it and was a factor in it. For more on the development of the market for Abstract Expressionist works, see D. Robson, "The Avant-Garde and the On-Guard: Some Influences on the Potential Market for the First Generation Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and Early 1950s," Art Journal, XLVII, Fall 1988, 215-221.




goals."00 Parsons refused the tempting offer to forsake her other artists: "I did not want to do a thing like that."'"' She remained committed to uphold purely artistic values. As her assistant, Richard Tuttle, explained: "It's not true that she's a bad businesswoman.... But that's not her real interest. Betty cares about growth ... she cares

mainly about your growth as an artist."102 Rebuffed, Pollock, Rothko, and Still decided that Sidney Janis (who represented Picasso and other famous Europeans) could better serve to realize their aspirations.103

In a sense, these artists were justified in making their offer to Parsons and in their subsequent move to Janis. They had suffered significant deprivations for their art and felt entitled to some rewards. From a practical standpoint, greater success in the marketplace would have meant that Rothko and Still could quit teaching.104 Who can blame them for wanting to profit from the new situation-especially if those rewards and the pursuit of them did not compromise their art. That a new system of rewards would produce certain changes in conduct is not surprising. What is curious, however, is that their behavior changed but their uncompromising rhetoric did

not. De Kooning's frank admission that painting had become "a good living" was exceptional; the others refused to acknowledge that their painting no longer was the pure, disinterested calling it had been. Many of the quotations that appear earlier in this paper were made in the mid- to late 1950s and 1960s. Gottlieb's declaration, for example, that he would like more status "but not at the cost of closing the gap between artist and public" was made six years after his participation in the Life portrait.

A sense of the altered situation does emerge from the artists' writings around 1960, in which purist rhetoric was used to accuse others of having fallen from the way. In 1963, Still-in his distinctively egocentric and melodra- matic style-indicted his early associates: "The few whom I had invited to walk with me in those first years in New York quickly abdicated in favor of fear or ambition or, in two conspicuous cases, proved themselves to have been already dedicated to the machine of exploitation, only posing as men of integrity until their goals of success had been achieved."'1s Reinhardt, a great champion of unadul- terated art at this time, was undoubtedly the most outspoken critic of his fellow artists' appetite for publicity.106 For example, although he had participated in the protest letter delivered to the Times in 1950, he decried a similar letter sent to that newspaper in 1961 by forty-nine well-known artists, critics, collectors, and scholars in response to the reactionary views of its art critic, John Canaday:'07 "The most barefaced, half-assed, sham battle in the marketplace in recent years was the unprincipled 'Action Painters' Protest Against the Critic of the New York Times,' with artists listing themselves shamelessly with their customers, mouthpieces, devotees and agents.,"108

Why did men like Gottlieb, Still, Rothko, and Rein- hardt continue to present themselves as pure bohemian exiles? Perhaps, at one level, their purist rhetoric was a way of papering over or countering the embarrassing fact of their accommodating behavior, or a way of reminding themselves of just those principles at stake and of fighting temptations. Many artists actually re- sisted the powerful enticements thrown in their paths. Still, for example, refused four separate invitations to

100 Pollock's role in the proposal directly contradicts the implications of a well-known story about the supposed solidarity of the Abstract

Expressionists. During a heated argument, de Kooning struck Pollock in the face, and he would not reciprocate because his antagonist was a fellow painter: "What? Me hit an artist?" Pollock explained to his

surprised friends. Cited in Tomkins (as in n. 5), 47. This was an uncharacteristic refusal to respond to the aggressive actions of another.

101' Tomkins (as in n. 98), 53. 102 Ibid., 58-59.

103 Pollock and Rothko went to Janis in 1952. Still followed the next year. M. Bystryn, "Art Galleries as Gatekeepers: The Case of the Abstract Expressionists," Social Research, XLV, Summer 1978, 401. Newman left the Parsons Gallery at the end of 1951 as the result of hostile critical

response to his exhibition of that year. He vowed never to show in New York again. Tomkins (as in n. 98), 58. Greenberg brought him out of his New York retirement in 1958 when the critic curated exhibitions for French and Company. Of Newman's earlier decision, Greenberg said: "He had this childlike expectation that with one or two shows he'd be famous and sell"; Naifeh and Smith, 689. Naifeh and Smith argue that "Newman, furious over the fate of his shows, [then] tried to transform the sour grapes of failure into the wine of Philosophy." They cite his

oft-repeated pure bohemian sentiments, including: "It doesn't matter if

anything sells," and "Anonymity is the truest heroism" (pp. 689 and

703). After the opening of Frank Lloyd's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in

1963, a number of the Abstract Expressionists, including Rothko, Motherwell, Gottlieb, and Guston as well as the estates of Pollock, Kline, and Baziotes, joined the gallery for similar reasons. The gallery's worldwide connections, its aristocratic aura, and its owner-director's commercial acumen offered the prospects of both greater fame and more money. Lloyd was the first of a new breed of art middlemen who considered art a "big business"; "Marlborough Country," Newsweek, 25 Nov. 1963, 75. "If it sells, its art," Lloyd told his "salesmen." Cited in L. Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko: An Expose of the Greatest Art Scandal of Our Century, New York, 1979, 56. An artist who was not asked to join admitted: "Most of us would have given our eye-teeth to join Marlbor-

ough then. The glamor was catching" (ibid., 59).

04 Rothko was not able to do this until 1958 when he had his first big commercial success at Janis; ibid., 34 and 38. Still gave up full-time

teaching in 1953. J. P. O'Neill, Clyfford Still, New York, 1979, 185-193.

"05 From "An Open Letter to an Art Critic," Artforum, Dec. 1963, repr. in ibid., 46. Although he does not mention any of these associates, he was

probably referring to Pollock and Rothko.

106 Reinhardt felt that this was typical of the artist in this century: "The

portrait of the artist in America in the twentieth century shapes up into a figure resembling Al Capp's 'Available Jones,' who is always available to anyone, any time, for anything at all, at any price"; Reinhardt (as in n. 47), 38.

107 Signers included James Ackerman, John Cage, Stuart Davis, Gottlieb, De Kooning, Motherwell, Newman, Harold Rosenberg, Robert Rosen- blum, David Smith, and Meyer Schapiro. For a complete list of those who signed and a copy of the letter, see Canaday, 1962 (as in n. 10), 219-223.

08 A. Reinhardt, "The Next Revolution in Art," Art News, LXII, Feb. 1964, 48.




show at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale because of the political aura that surrounded the event.1" In 1952, Rothko refused to sell two paintings to a museum he considered a "junkshop," despite his very real poverty. Six years later he returned a Guggenheim award for $1,000 because he viewed contests among artists as demeaning. Two years later, however, when he backed out of a lucrative commission to "decorate" the new Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagrams' building-an event that received considerable media attention-he was accused of grandstanding.110

We must understand, too, that the artists' participation in the new machinery of success seemed to have had little effect on their art."' As men, they may have been susceptible to the temptations of the American marketplace; but as artists, they apparently remained committed to the notion that art could elevate a spectator to a higher, finer realm of experience. On the one hand, this new desire for public acceptance was an expression of the underlying missionary purpose that had motived most of them from the first: the unspoken hope that an ethical art might have a positive effect on general patterns of thinking and acting. For many artists, the desire to withdraw completely from a tainted culture into an untainted art was founded on the paradoxical hope that their principled action might serve as an example to others outside the arts.112

On the other hand, it was crucial to their success that they did not admit to wanting success. These artists understood, probably instinctively, that maintaining their bohemian credentials was necessary to their acceptance both within and outside of their profession. By this point the myth of the alienated modern artist was common among the American public. Almost anyone familiar with art knew the story of "the defiant and heroic artist in a world of Philistines.""113 Furthermore, the artists knew the public had embraced the notion, as George Sugarman admitted at a symposium organized by the Club in 1959:

The porte maudit is the daddy of us all: the artist with no roots but his own subconscious, the cult of the primitive, of the immediate, of anything that will shock, of the need to be different.... These values were fully defined by the early twentieth century. Our present masters ... have only added to their implications, not changed them. Once so frightening, the values are now so domesticated that even the best homes will admit them. Indeed, the best homes will admit none but them. They are tried and true; they are safe.114

Indifference to success and popular opinion was an essential element of the popular caricature. Crass concerns belonged to enemies of honest art, to artists who would pander to popular taste and expectations. The inherent irony of the situation was that artists wanting public acceptance had to appear antagonistic to the public."'15 An artist who refused to fit the bohemian stereotype risked the very neglect that the myth promised.

The American public accepted the Abstract Expression- ists as the leading practitioners of their time largely because the artists fit this bohemian mold. Americans

109 The first offer was made in 1957. O'Neill (as in n. 104), 194. The voting for the prizes was often conducted along national lines.

no Seldes (as in n. 103), 27, 39, and 42-45. Rothko claimed that he

thought the restaurant was to be an employees' commissary. Philip Johnson said that "Rothko knew from the start what it was to be" (ibid., 45). In the end, however, Rothko's old convictions were badly eroded

by his growing celebrity status. For his dealings with President

Kennedy, see ibid., 46-47 and 50. At a party attended by a number of well-known actors and actresses, Rothko was apparently jealous of the attention lavished on them. One of his friends reported that, "He wanted to be treated like a movie star" (ibid., 83). Seldes suggests that the guilt he felt over the betrayal of his old standards may have been a factor in his suicide (ibid., 111). .' There is some evidence to suggest that market conditions did affect the procedures of some of the artists. Naifeh and Smith argue that

throughout his mature period, Pollock made small paintings because

they were more saleable than his large ones. Such concessions, however, do not seem to have fundamentally compromised his work or that of others (p. 587 and passim). There may have been compromises among the group, but at this point, I do not see evidence of it.

112 Such paradoxes are, in fact, typical of avant-garde thinking, as H. M.

Enzensberger pointed out in his ground-breaking essay of 1962, "The

Aporias of the Avant Garde," trans. in M. Roloff, ed., The Consciousness

Industry, New York, 1974, 16-41. David Smith, on the subject of the Abstract Expressionists, observed that an "indirect moral effect ... is not incidental to their aims ... their communication objective would be

something like: if I am to paint in the most ethically good way possible, this striving has a metaphorical consonance with other men attempting to act ethically in their form of life, and may have an actual effect on their lives, but I cannot sacrifice my individual struggle to the kind of

generalization required for guaranteed direct moral effect on their lives"; in Sandler, 1978, 27. That seems to be what Hofmann meant when he said that it will be "through the constructive forces of creative art and human development that a better world will evolve"; in Seitz

(as in n. 42), 144. Still claimed to have "made it clear that a single stroke

of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and

implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for subjugation"; in O'Neill (as in n. 104), 47. And Newman insisted in 1970 that if his work "were properly understood it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism"; in E. de Antonio and M. Tuchman, Painters Painting, New York, 1984, 159.

"'3 From the speech by Gottlieb cited in n. 40.

114 "Is There a new Academy?" Pt. II, Art News, LVIII, Sept. 1959, 60. Cox observed that, "In modern times the public expects genuine artists to rebel. To be authentic an artist must follow the example first set forth in Henri Murger's Scones de la Vie de Boheme and be an outcast, a misfit, and a drunk"; Cox (as in n. 25), 90. B. O'Doherty called these "romantic

postures ... dear to the bourgeois soul"; (as in n. 39), 109. "' Tom Wolfe (as in n. 8) wrote that this "art mating ritual developed early in the century." He called it, "The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of his home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn't care about

anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown" (p. 19). Wolfe's caricature of this process as it was played out in the 1950s and 1960s is inaccurate with respect to the

public's role. He claimed that, "The public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The public is not invited (it gets a printed announcement

later)" (p. 25).




were attracted to bohemian personas, not their art. Pollock became the leading figure of the era partly because he best embodied the Vie-de-Boheme stereotype. As both Annette Cox and Barbara Rose have pointed out, the photographs by Hans Namuth of the artist (as well as those taken by Life) provided the vehicles by which the

public came to embrace the troubled revolutionary."6 Cox contended that Pollock "permitted [the photographs] to be made because they allowed a wider

comprehension of his artistic intentions.""7 Although this may have been part of Pollock's motivation, he no doubt also recognized the publicity value of the pictures."8 He and his associates may have understood, at some level of consciousness, that their eventual success would depend not simply on their being the heirs of

nineteenth-century bohemian artists but on their appearing to be so.

Michael Leja observed that these artists, in the process of "securing an identity as 'avant-garde,' " employed "strategies characteristic of the avant-garde, for example the production of manifestos, public controversies, and

protest exhibitions.""'9 One revealing instance of calculated maneuvering for public identification as victims of Philistine insensitivity was the response of Newman, Gottlieb, and Rothko to a tepid review in the New York Times on 2 June 1943. The newspaper's art critic, Edward Alden Jewell, had admitted that he could not understand Gottlieb's and Rothko's entries in the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors third annual: "You will have to make of Marcus Rothko's The Syrian Bull what

you can; nor is this department prepared to shed the

slightest enlightenment when it comes to Adolph Gott- lieb's Rape of Persephone."

In his column of Sunday 6 June, Jewell reported that on the day the review appeared, "one of the artists

phoned in and promised a statement that might help disperse [my] confessed befuddlement.... When it ar-

rives the statement, you may be sure, will be eagerly shared with our readers." Rothko and Gottlieb, with the help of Newman, wrote a letter to Jewell, dated 7 June 1943, which Jewell included in his column the following Sunday, the 13th, along with reproductions of the two paintings in question. The opening paragraph of the letter was quite courteous:

To the artist the working of the critical mind is one of life's mysteries. That is why, we suppose, the artist's complaint that he is misunderstood ... has become a

commonplace. It is therefore an event when the worm turns and the critic confesses his "befuddlements... ." We salute this honest, we might say cordial, reaction toward our "obscure" paintings.... And we appreciate the opportunity that is being offered us to present our views.

After this, the letter became combative:

We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative

power. We refuse to defend them not because we cannot. It

is an easy matter to explain to the befuddled that The Rape of Persephone is a poetic expression of the essence of myth; the presentation of the concept of seed and its earth with all its brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth. Would you have us present this abstract myth, with all its complicated feelings, by means of a boy and girl lightly tripping?

It is just as easy to explain The Syrian Bull as a new

interpretation of an archaic image, involving significant distortions. Since art is timeless, the significant retention of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full validity today as the archaic symbol had then. Or is the one 3000 years old truer?

But these easy program notes can help only the

simpleminded. No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and on- looker. The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is grounds for annulment.

The point at issue ... is not an "explanation" of the paintings but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within the frames of these pictures have significance. We feel that our pictures demonstrate our esthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list ...

Following a lengthy explanation of their collective principles,'20 the letter concluded: "Consequently if our work embodies those beliefs, it must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the

"6 B. Rose, "Hans Namuth's Photographs and the Jackson Pollock

Myth: Part One: Media Impact and the Failure of Criticism," Arts

Magazine, LIII, Mar. 1979, 112-116, and Cox (as in n. 25), chap. 5: "The Aura of the Primitive: The Photographs of Jackson Pollock," 83-94.

117 Cox (as in n. 25), 84.

"s Naifeh and Smith argued that these photographs had a number of functions. That someone would want to photograph him offered "further proof of his claim to greatness." The photo sessions also offered him the opportunity of solidifying his own fantasy of himself as "the macho kid." The writers further contended that "under Namuth's direction, he was creating the role of the great American artist." They stressed the American component of that role, the "fence-post cowboy" (p. 621). 119 For an excellent discussion of these and other strategies, see Leja (as in n. 3), 16-18. Leja nicely defined the avant-garde as "a structural

phenomenon of modern Western artistic production involving both a social organization and a broad aesthetic orientation." The orientation, he remarks, "denotes a set of progressive, experimental commitments"

(p. 16). Bohemian sentiments were also essential to it. Specifically, bohemia was the social sphere that spawned and supported progressive artistic "movements," as Greenberg argued in his seminal essay of 1939, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," repr. in Art and Culture, Boston, 1961. See pp. 4-6.

'20 These, along with some of the other major sections of the letter, are included in Ashton, 127-128.




home; pictures over the mantel; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art; prize-winning potboil- ers; the National Academy; the Whitney Academy; the Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes; trite tripe; etc." After insisting that no "program notes" could substitute for

genuine understanding, the artists proceeded to give fairly extensive ones. Obviously, they wanted to be understood and they believed that their written remarks could promote that understanding. More important for our purposes is the combative tone of the letter. Jewell's "befuddlement" scarcely warranted this injured, abusive

response. It can be best explained, I think, in terms of the artists' desire to position themselves and Jewell in certain conventional roles.

The artists' success in this regard may be judged from the fact that although Jewell did not fit the part of the hostile Philistine critic in the first place, and refused to play it in the end,121 various historical accounts of the incident cast him in the role. Diane Waldman, in her

monograph on Rothko, mentioned "Jewell's largely negative review."'22 Guilbaut characterized the critic's remarks on the works of Rothko and Gottlieb as "a direct attack."'" By referring to Jewell's initial review as "lengthy and somewhat derogatory,"'" Ashton, too, suggested that the artists' defensive response was justified-that the old avant-garde scenario was dictated by the conservative critic.'25

In this and in the later incident that led to the Irascibles photograph, the artists were attempting to shape the art world's perceptions of them to accord with the legend of the modern artist from Courbet to Picasso. Their 1950 letter to the Metropolitan, wherein they laid claim to that heritage, offers clear evidence of this. Their strategies in that instance, too, were rewarded, not only by the Times's account of their protest, discussed above, but by Life's caption to their photograph, which noted: "Their revolt and subsequent boycott of the show was in keeping with an old tradition among avant-garde artists. French painters in 1874 rebelled against their official juries and held the first impressionist exhibition. U.S. artists in 1908

broke with the National Academy jury to launch the famous Ashcan School."

The artists' successful campaign to sell themselves as the heirs of the embattled giants of modern art was

greatly assisted by the work of their critical supporters. In particular, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg repeatedly wrote about them in the language of the bohemian myth. Rosenberg, for example, wrote in 1947:

These painters experience a unique loneliness of a depth that is reached perhaps nowhere else in the world. From the four corners of their vast land they have come to plunge themselves into the anonymity of New York, annihilation of their past being not the least compelling project of these aesthetic Legion- naires. Is not the definition of true loneliness, that one is lonely not only in relation to people but in relation to things as well? Estrangement from American ob- jects here reaches the level of pathos.'26

That same year, Greenberg echoed these inflated claims:

The morale of that section of New York's Bohemia which is inhabited by striving young artists has de- clined in the last twenty years, but the level of its intelligence has risen, and it is still downtown, below 34th Street, that the fate of American art is being decided-by young people, few of them over forty, who live in cold-water flats and exist from hand to mouth. Now they all paint in the abstract vein, show rarely on 57th Street, and have no reputations that extend beyond a small circle of fanatics, art-fixated misfits who are as isolated in the United States as if they were living in Paleolithic Europe. .... The foresee- able result will be a collection of peintres maudit.... Alas, the future of American art depends on them. That it should is fitting but sad. Their isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning. That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this situation is highly improbable. What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million?127

Romanticized accounts such as these, the artists' participation in the machinery of popular fame, their refusal to

acknowledge it, and the claims that they were the targets of a crass public and their spokespersons may be seen as manifestations of a single enterprise: the selling of the Abstract Expressionists on the basis of the bohemian legend. The process was begun by the Abstract Expres- sionists and their supporters and completed by their historians. Why the latter have participated and continue to participate in this enterprise is an interesting question.

Certain chronicles, notably Ashton's The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning and Sandler's The New York

121' Jewell, apparently more surprised than annoyed, refused to rise to the bait. Instead of reacting with heavy-handed abuse, he responded to the letter with gentle mockery: "The foregoing, I think, had best not be picked to pieces, especially by the simple-minded, for it might explode. And besides, I doubt whether it could be explained any more than (as stated by the artists themselves) the picture can be explained. There must be a 'consummated experience' between the text and the reader. And when the reader has participated in that consummation, then he should be able to decide whether the framed 'intrinsic ideas' have any 'significance' "; New York Times, 13 June 1943.

22 D. Waldman, Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1978, 39.

12 Guilbaut, 72.

'" Ashton, 127.

lZ The only exception is Sandler's account in The Triumph of American Painting. Although he misquoted Jewell, he accurately reported that their letter "was written in response to a review of their work by the Times critic Edward Alden Jewell, in which he said he was left in 'a dense mood of befuddlement' " (p. 62).

'6 H. Rosenberg, "Introduction to Six American Artists," Possibilities, I, Winter 1947-48, 75. 127 Greenberg (as in n. 24), 29-30.




School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, may be seen to reflect, in the first place, their authors' close relation-

ships with the artists. Sandler headed the committee that

organized the Friday programs at the Club from 1956 until its demise in 1962.'28 Ashton, too, was friendly with

many of the Abstract Expressionists and regularly supported their activities and functions.129 That is to say, neither was a disinterested third party. The writers'

apparent identification with the artists-an identification that comes through more clearly in Ashton's work-

suggests they shared the bohemian convictions and

prejudices of their subjects, and were therefore no more

likely to see the differences between the facts and the communal rhetoric than the artists themselves.

Furthermore, consider what happened in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. By the end of the 1960s, when both of these accounts were written, it was apparent to Sandler and Ashton, as it was to all observers of the

contemporary art scene, that a great many artists were no

longer boycotting capitalist culture. The behavior of the

Pop artists displayed this most clearly, although even strict Greenbergians like Frank Stella were willing to

ingratiate themselves with the wealthy middle-brow "readers" of fashion magazines.130 There was increasing evidence that the artist had, in Allan Kaprow's words, become "a man of the world." Warhol and others were

demonstrating that "if the artist was in hell in 1946, now he is in business."131 Ashton addressed this development in her "Afterword":

Ever since the Civil War the swift development in technology fostered the idea that Art was a commod-

ity. The consumer society was born in the United States, and generated problems for culture long before

Europe had to face such anguishing conflicts. The American artist early learned to resist mass culture.... Rothko and Still ranted against art appreciation and art museums, while Rosenberg and Greenberg upheld the idea of "high art" in defiance of mass culture. Both of them, for instance, felt compelled to deal with the idea of "kitsch" more than once, and implicit in their

condescending attitude toward "kitsch" (which later critics defended as "popular art") was their fear of the encroachments that technological marketing devices made upon the image of art.

In view of the present situation, it seems that their fears were well founded.

Her book ended with the hopeful observation that "the myth of the artist as disaffiliated ... seems vital enough to be reborn out of the cyclical purifying fires. The existence of the idea of a New York School bears this out."132 If the

"myth" of the Abstract Expressionist were to serve as a

regenerating instrument, it would have to remain intact and unsullied. The Abstract Expressionists had, therefore, to be completely disassociated from what had occurred in their wake. Thus Ashton carefully insisted that even though the artists attained significant success in the early 1950s, "nothing had changed in the deepest

rr133 sense. One of the first academic historians of the Abstract

Expressionists, William C. Seitz, also found the bohemian "idea" of these artists useful in combatting the new

accommodating spirit of the early 1960s.'3 In an article written in 1963, Seitz lamented "the dissolution of the

avant-garde," evident in the mutual embrace of popular culture and innovative artists. He contrasted the new situation with the "marvelous" era of the Abstract Expres- sionists:

And no group of artists was ever more pointedly committed to art for its own sake, to serious art, to

"high" art, than the first generation of New York School painters and sculptors. Art for them was a commitment not subject to the compromises of common business and social life. Some publicized artists of the newest movements, on the contrary, seem to have

scrapped these standards and aims. We have bred new types: the artist wit, the artist punster, the artist vaudevillian, and the canonized commercial illustrator. 35

In drawing this sharp distinction, Seitz hoped, as he admitted in his conclusion, to encourage a return of the

original avant-garde type via "an epidemic of personal integrity."'36

The nostalgic and potentially corrective appeal of the old image of the Abstract Expressionists also helps to

explain its persistence in more recent writing. Suzi Gablik's jeremiad of 1981, "Art under the Dollar Sign," offered evidence of both motives.'37 They are apparent, as

128 I. Sandler, "The Club," Artforum, 4 Sept. 1965, 29.

129A photograph of Ashton with Philip Guston at an art opening is included in her book (p. 221), obviously to suggest her intimate connection with the artists.

130 Stella, without his upper dental bridge, smiled happily out at the

readership of a leading fashion magazine in 1966; G. Trotta, "Not To Be Missed: The American Art Scene," Harper's Bazaar, July 1966, 81. The article also featured portraits (by Diane Arbus) of Larry Bell, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and

James Rosenquist.

131A. Kaprow, "Should the Artist Become a Man of the World?" Art News, LXIII, Oct. 1964, 34.

'32 Ashton, 233.

133 Ibid., 211.

34 Seitz's book (as in n. 42) was based on his 1955 Ph.D. thesis for Princeton University. 135 W. Seitz, "The Rise and Dissolution of the Avant-Garde," Vogue, CXLII, 1 Sept. 1963, 230 and 232.

'136 Ibid., 233. 137 See the second quotation at the beginning of this article (n. 2). See, also, B. Rose, "New York in the Eighties," New Criterion, iv, Special Issue, 1986, 56-58.




well, in the outraged responses to Guilbaut's recent study, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Guilbaut argued that during its emergent phase, Abstract Expres- sionism gradually became the embodiment of the political ideals of the American majority.'13 Although objec- tions to Guilbaut's thesis are numerous and varied,139 many of his harshest critics, such as Harry F. Gaugh, were most annoyed by his "challenge" to the "ethical foundations of Abstract Expressionism."'4 After dismiss- ing Guilbaut's "presumptive thesis" as "the sheerest rubbish,"'141 Gaugh reasserted the image of the New York artists as archetypal bohemian vanguardists, men who "pushed art beyond visual concerns to a rigorous way of life demanding total dedication with no guarantee of critical or financial reward," artists whose credo was "summed up best" by Pollock's assertion, "Painting is my whole life." Gaugh's "reappraisal" of the Abstract Expres- sionists was grounded not only in a nostalgia for the "glory days" of Abstract Expressionism, but also in a conviction about its continuing "legacy." "What is the legacy of Abstract Expressionism?" he asked. How is it "relevant to young artists in Manhattan, Newark, Chi- cago, Los Angeles, or for that matter, in Tokyo and Berlin?" He answered by citing the case of Newman: "Newman's unflinching ethical standard, against which both the artist and the viewer must measure their personal and professional raisons d'etre, has had significant impact on younger visionary artists. To name only one: Brice Marden. Like.Abstract Expressionism, Mar- den's painting affirms a complete meshing of moral/ artistic attitudes" (p. 30). Like Seitz and Ashton before him, Gaugh maintained the established "idea" of the Abstract Expressionists because he, like they, considered it a corrective force in an art world now characterized by a "frenetic synergism of music, light, dance, sex, fashion and.. . glamor."

Evidence such as this suggests that the exaggerations, omissions, and misreadings that characterize the histories of the Abstract Expressionists' relationship with mainstream American culture around 1950 may be explained not by sloppy scholarship nor the weight of tradition-although these were no doubt involved in certain cases-but by a pronounced collective bias. Al- though one can identify elements within the individual writings that bespeak the projections of personality, personal outlook, or other shared perspectives, what is striking about these accounts is their fundamental similar-

ity: a will to see and make events conform according to the bohemian legend. At stake for these scholars, as it was for the artists and their critical supporters, was the course of a certain narrative-the story of noble, inspira- tional men at the edge of an ignoble society. That many of the Abstract Expressionists, with the aid of their critics, used this narrative in order to promote their careers does not mean that they were not dedicated to it. What I have tried to demonstrate is that events were simply more complex, more paradoxical in fact, than earlier accounts would have it. Evidence, some of which I have included, clearly indicates that the artists, however imperfectly, subscribed to the bohemian legend, to the "progressive" values it inscribed. Furthermore, their critics and historians chose to write about them because those observers subscribed to the same values. I am suggesting that, broadly speaking, Abstract Expressionist art, criticism, and scholarship constitute a single ideological enterprise: the promotion of the bohemian doctrine of two separate cultures, a high culture operated by an elite dedicated to the loftiest values and a low culture inhabited by Philis- tines.

The Abstract Expressionists were simply one of the many Modernist movements grounded in the bohemian ideology. Although it would be impossible here to characterize the complex nexus of philosophical, social, and artistic ideals that we subsume under the heading of Modernism, it is fair to say that bohemianism was an important element therein. Over the past quarter century all Modernist assumptions and ideals have become increasingly problematic, to the point that experts now often refer to the period after about 1970 as Postmodern or Postmodernist.142 The latter term, especially, seems to describe our era accurately. While it does not tell us what has supplanted the Modernist paradigms, it nonetheless suggests that they are no longer operative.'43 I would contend that it was this broader cultural transition-and not the end of Abstract Expressionism as such-that has

138 See n. 8.

139 For reviews of Guilbaut's book (both pro and con), see B. Buchloh, Art in America, LXXII, Mar. 1984; Choice, xxI, May 1984; L. Abel, Commen- tary, LXXVIII, July 1984; T. Bender, New York Times Book Review, 1 Jan. 1984; and D. Rosand, Times Literary Supplement, 12 Oct. 1984. My own chief objection to Guilbaut's book is that he interpreted a fascinating parallel as a causal relationship.

140 Gaugh (as in n. 93), 28-30.

141 Ibid., 29. As Gaugh acknowledges in the text, the latter words are from H. Kramer, "American Art since 1945: Who Will Write Its History?" New Criterion, III, Summer 1985, 4.

42 The premises of Modernism are no longer in the ascendant, but it is not dead of course, as can be seen from the tone and substance of the writings of certain critics, notably Hilton Kramer and Suzi Gablik. Relatively little has been done on how, why, and precisely when Modernism lost its dominance, partly because scholars and critics have been preoccupied with whether or not this has taken place. I will analyze the question in my forthcoming history of contemporary art, a work in progress. 143 The notion of historical progress, like the bohemian insistence on two separate cultures, is another of the philosophical tenets of Modern- ism that the majority of contemporary artists, critics, and historians no longer trust. The concept of progress was essential to both sides of Modernist production, the purely formalist and the socially revolutionary. It is clearly evident in the term "avant-garde" that we use for artists of both camps. That the term is still used to describe contemporary art is not an indication that Modernism itself has survived in any significant sense, for the term now has quite a different connotation than it did. Whereas it used to imply a significant newness, a newness that represented an advance on earlier practice, it now simply means the new. For an ironic demonstration of this, see D. Davis, "The Avant Garde is Dead! Long Live the Avant Garde," Art in America, LXX, Apr. 1982, 11-19.




permitted us to see that the latter's critics and historians were not so much describing an objective truth as

proclaiming a cultural ideology. If I am correct, we may expect to see similar reassessments of the historical literature on Modernist movements.

Frequently Cited Sources Ashton, D., The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, New York, 1972.

Friedman, B. H., 1972, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, New York.

, 1978, "The Irascibles: A Split Second in Art History," Arts

Magazine, LIII, Sept., 96-102.

Guilbaut, S., How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract

Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago, 1983.

Naifeh, S., and G. W. Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, New

York, 1989.

Sandler, I., 1978, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the

Fifties, New York.

, 1970, The Triumph of American Painting, New York.

Bradford R. Collins has published articles on Manet, Mother- well, and Warhol. His reviews of general art survey textbooks have appeared in the Art Journal (Spring 1989, Summer 1989, and Fall 1990). He is currently working on an anthology of methodological approaches to Manet's Bar at the Folies- Bergere and a history of contemporary art [Art Department, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C. 29208].



life magazine and the abstract expressionists, 1948-51: a historiographic study of a late bohemian...

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