Lafayette, we are here: American art in the 20th century

ArtForum, Nov, 1993 by Thomas Crow

Their message of course is that no further development could proceed from such transcendence: in the wake of that moment, significant American art divides into the noisy clutter of borrowed commercial imagery on one hand and the obdurate reticence of monochrome painting and Minimalist objects on the other. No fewer than six early Roy Lichtensteins serve to sum up what I take to be the organizers' view of the normal content of the American mind. Three of Frank Stella's wall-hungry black paintings monopolize the moment shared in history with the absent Morris Louis' "Veils" and "Unfurleds," a choice that can be seen as an effort to divorce expressivity from the formal discipline of postwar abstraction, indeed to demonstrate that Americans lack no significant expressive gifts after the first generation of the New York School.(10) Given the organizers' well-established commitment since the later '70s to European modes of incorrigible neo-Expressionism, the unstated ending of their story is easy to complete. They frame their presentation of the same period in America (which requires a bus ride off-site to the Saatchi Gallery) in terms of fragmentation and incoherence, to which end they provide what is largely a selection of European dealers' favorites ca. 1985, good, bad, and indifferent works, all looking lost in an overlarge space.(11) The visitor will--and is meant to--come away feeling that the primary drive and life of art must have migrated elsewhere.

(1.)Though Edward Kienholz, for whom this is equally true, is left out entirely.

(2.)The very recent and conscientious study of the ideological formation of the New York School, Michael Leja's Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, contains no discussion of Mural, Peggy Guggenheim, or any of the circumstances of its making sketched below. Stephen Polcari, in Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge: at the University Press, 1991, contents himself (p. 248) with a few lines of free association on the painting before moving on to other topics.

(3.)See Pollock's letter to his brother Charles (July 1943) in Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, Jackson Pollock: Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978, IV:228. The various accounts of witnesses to the making of the painting are usefully summed up in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1989, pp. 866--87. Guests at the opening of Pollock's 1945 one-man show at Art of This Century were invited to inspect Mural in situ ("March 19, 1945, 3--6, 155 E. 61st Street, first floor," reads the invitation: see reproduction in O'Connor and Thaw, IV, pp. 234--35).

(4.)On Howard Putzel and James Johnson Sweeney, their backgrounds and relations with Guggenheim, see Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim, London: Bodley Head, 1986, pp. 194, 300, 330--32; also Melvin P. Lader, "Howard Putzel: Proponent of Surrealism and Early Abstract Expressionism in America," Arts LVI, March 1982, pp. 85--96.