Interesting piece by Louis on Pollock. At least it was for me, as I am currently reading (and writing) about similar things. The book I am winding up now is an excellent one called _How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War_ by Serge Guilbaut, a French-Canadian art historian. He is particularly lucid in describing the splits in the intellectual and artistic left during the 30s, after Stalin's purges became known to the west.
Anyway, Louis quotes Pollock's biographers...
><startquote>
>Inevitably, Jackson's preoccupation with new buyers and marketing
>strategies followed him into the studio. There, despite Greenberg's
>rhetoric [...]
The Greenberg here is Clement Greenberg, art critic for The Nation and perhaps Pollock's biggest cheerleader. Guilbaut, methinks, summarizes both Greenberg and Pollock's politics and reinforces some of Louis's thoughts, particularly regarding "success":
<quote> In the August 1948 issue of Partisan Review, Greenberg and Leslie Fiedler described the literary avant-garde, which in many ways resembled the painting avant-garde [ie, Pollock, Rothko, the whole Abstract Expressionist crew], as a bearer of hope and an important cultural asset for the atomic age and its dangers. Fiedler emphasized the importance of the individual, his aloofness, his independence of ideology, and his new vocabulary of "freedom, responsibility, and guilt." He attacked writers such as James T. Farrell, the proletarian novel of the thirties, and the omnipotence of the "subject matter." Fiedler's article is interesting for its analysis of the road traveled since the Depression, when, in order to be "modern" and up-to-the-minute, artists had to be Marxists. But when writers saw that the works that came out of this school left "art" in an abject position, the abandoned it, though not without anguish and uneasiness over the break [...]
Just as Guggenheim had argued in 1944, when the world was fighting fascism, that merely to do modern painting was to take political action against Hitler, so now in 1948 Fiedler argued that modern artistic expression served to defy communism. In the same article Greenberg complained that the literary avant-garde was too well accepted. He therefore had more faith in the painting avant-garde, which, owing to its long tradition of isolation, was capable of arousing greater hostility. But the avant-garde was in danger, Greenberg said, because it was constantly under attack from two sides: "On the one side it is faced with political crisis, on the other hand [sic] with the increasing aggressiveness and the expansion of middlebrow culture."
In fact, the avant-garde had to stay close to the center, precariously balanced on a razor's edge, if it wanted to survive. This was what gave it its vitality, creative tension, and quality and what made certain things clear to artists. But all this was a myth, as we have seen: success and recognition would have been impossible for the avant-garde to achieve had the "avant-garde code" not been accepted. In other words, this code must in some ways have contained values that corresponded to the dominant ideology. Thus it was clear to Greenberg, for example, that in order to save "high culture" artists must be fiercely anti-Communist. <endquote>
> In my next post, I will
>examine the work of Ben Shahn, who came from a similar place socially and
>politically as Jackson Pollock but who stayed true to his roots.
I am especially interested in this: Ben Shahn is my new favorite hero, and I'd like to hear what Louis has to say about him.
eric beck