Jackson Pollock. Number 1A, 1948.1948. Oil and enamel paint on canvas, 68" x 8' 8" (172.7 x 264.2 cm). Purchase. © 2010 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image at MoMA site.
By Peter Plagens
That the Museum of Modern Art in New York practically owns—in a very literal sense—the great American art movement, Abstract Expressionism, should be a surprise to no one. After all, the institution opened its West 53rd Street doors in 1939, at about the time the artists who’d eventually become the most prominent AbExers were cutting their teeth in the New York art world. Which is to say, that via the easel painters’ program in the WPA, some odd jobs, a little (very little) welfare, considerable panhandling among friends (rent parties and the like), they were just barely managing to keep body and soul together. Though MoMA wasn’t as institutionally impoverished as the artists it would soon celebrate—American art museums are by their necessary nature playgrounds for the rich—it didn’t really hit its fashionable stride until after World War II, about the same time as Abstract Expressionism began to surface to the general public.
But MoMA bought Abstract Expressionist paintings comparatively early and fairly often. Its prescient board members, acquisition committee members and benefactors did, too. Enough of them were sufficiently philanthropically inclined so that, on Oct. 3, the museum opens “Abstract Expressionist New York,” which director Glenn Lowry calls “the largest and most comprehensive Abstract Expressionist exhibition ever”—composed entirely from its own holdings! Multiple and superb paintings (yes, Virginia, there are palpable differences in aesthetic merit among AbEx works of art) by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, et al., and—just to break up the boys’ club that AbEx mostly was—Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, occupy the walls surrounding 25,000 square feet of MoMA gallery space. Chief curator Ann Temkin calls the show “once in a generation,” which probably errs on the side of frequency. Even though the exhibition results from, as Temkin puts it, MoMA “shopping in its own closet,” it’ll probably be ages before the Modern clears this many decks again to show off the greatest trove of the greatest style of American art. It’ll probably be never.
And (we’re seguing to the academic connection here), the Abstract Expressionists were almost certainly the final generation of important American artists who, by and large, lacked college degrees. Pollock was a high-school exepellee who later studied at the proudly non-degree-granting Arts Students League in New York. DeKooning spent several years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Art and was way past undergraduate age when he finally managed (after some stowaway attempts) to emigrate to the United States. Franz Kline spent time at “Girard College” in Philadelphia, but the institution was actually an orphanage he was sent to after his father killed himself; Kline liked to say he attended Brown University, but probably didn’t. The precocious young Mark Rothko won a scholarship to Yale but soon dropped out, most likely because of lack of money. Robert Motherwell was the academic exception—a Stanford B.A. in philosophy and graduate study at Harvard and Columbia. And some of the women had degrees (Helen Frankenthaler a B.A. from Bennington and Joan Mitchell a B.F.A. from the largest and oldest American art school, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). But the Abstract Expressionists had been predominantly non-certificate students who studied art the old-fashioned way, directly under other artists—from such naysayers on abstraction as Thomas Hart Benton to fellow Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. (The famous old German painter-teacher, though, was born in 1880, which made him a year older than Picasso.)
By the end of the 1950s, when the U.S. Government tried to demonstrate the advantages that a democratic society enjoyed compared to totalitarian regimes behind the Iron Curtain by sending a big exhibition of Abstract Expressionism on a tour of Europe, the style had succeeded publicly beyond the wildest expectations of its practitioners. Inevitably, younger Pop and Minimal artists rebelled against it. But their rebellion took place in an art world that AbEx’s success had professionalized. Roy Lichtenstein—the inventor of Pop on this side of the Atlantic (Warhol quit painting cartoon characters and started painting soup cans because “a guy in New Jersey” was “doing them much better than I was”)—was a college art professor at Rutgers. The nonpareil Minimalist, Don Judd, earned a B.A. in philosphy at Columbia and made a stab at a graduate degree in art history before turning to sculpture full time.
From that situation in the mid-1960s, the contemporary art progressively academicized itself until, as MacArthur fellow art critic Dave Hickey put it in a 2001 interview in the online magazine zing, “Being an artist was a safe thing to do. You filled out forms, got your check, taught in classes, you flew to Berlin and put up press type on the wall, poured a bunch of leaves in the room, and a bunch of people came, and you had wine and cheese. Then you flew home, and taught your classes, and went to faculty meetings, and applied for a merit raise, which the university gave you because you had a show in Berlin.”
Although the day is probably irretrievably past when the best artists on the scene can educate themselves semi- by the seats of their pants, entirely outside academe, something has been lost. Perhaps it’s an idealistic—perhaps naive—soulfulness. Curator Temkin says, “It’s possible that a few generations of over-educated artists have been a little discouraged by the originality of these Abstract Expressionists who never went to college.”
Ah, there’s a dissertation subject!
Peter Plagens is an artist and critic in New York who has written for Newsweek, Artforum, and many other publications. He has taught art at several colleges, and was chair of the art department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
