Frank Crowninshield World of Ideas American Indian Art Vogue

abril 30, 2022 Postar um comentário

JOHN D. GRAHAM'S Proper name comes upwards whenever the origins of Abstract Expressionism are discussed, merely his role in its development has remained shadowy. His stature every bit an artist is just as obscure at this fourth dimension; nonetheless, the current show at the Museum of Modern Art, pocket-sized though it is, may prompt an overdue rehabilitation.¹ Although I believe that Graham's painting has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves, I volition refer to it only in passing, focusing instead on his contribution every bit an esthetician and connoisseur in the 1930s.

During that decade, vanguard artists organized themselves into groups such as the American Abstruse Artists and The Ten. A number, including Graham, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and, to a bottom degree, David Smith (who did non get along with Gorky but saw Graham often), besides constituted a grouping but in the loosest sense of that word. They met at each other's homes and studios and in diverse Greenwich Village hangouts, casually, although ofttimes enough to continue track of each other'south thinking. At that place was no leader; Davis was the best known, merely Graham was the greater intellectual forcefulness. His status was enhanced past his variegated activities as painter, connoisseur, polemicist, cosmopolite and slap-up.^two An ex-officer in the Tsarist cavalry and counter-revolutionary who escaped to America in 1920 subsequently the Bolsheviks took power, he later turned pro-Soviet (during the fourth dimension when Communism was in vogue amidst intellectuals), while remaining an aristocrat. Thomas Hess wrote that "Graham kept the pictures of three Nicholases past his bedside: an icon of the saint, a picture show of his tsar and the third of Lenin."³ Graham fabricated frequent trips to Paris and gained a reputation at that place every bit a painter, exhibiting at the Zborowski Gallery in 1928 and 1929; Waldemar George wrote a monograph almost his work, and André Salmon, a eulogistic catalog introduction. His shows away and the critical coverage they received helped impress his friends in New York. Here, he became well known as an artist (he was given shows at Duncan Phillips' Gallery, Washington, D. C., in 1929, and at the Dudensing Gallery, New York, in 1929, 1930 and 1931) and equally a connoisseur (he selected the Frank Crowninshield collection of African art). He also trusted his sharp centre in matters of contemporary art. He non only lionized Picasso, hailing him equally "the greatest painter of the by, present and hereafter," simply by 1937 had singled out for acclaim Milton Avery, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, Edgar Levy, Jan Matulka, Boardman Robinson, David Smith and Max Weber.⁴ "Some are just every bit good and some are better than the leading artists of the same generation in Europe." Later (by 1941), he was the first to recognize the quality of Pollock's painting.

In 1937, Graham published a volume on esthetics, titled Arrangement and Dialectics of Art, which was widely read past vanguard artists. Based on a Socratic method of question and answer, this small volume is chaotically organized, contradictory, repetitive and poorly written in Russianized English, notwithstanding it is total of bright and provocative insights, which can exist taken to represent much of what was on his and his friends' minds, particularly Gorky's and de Kooning'southward. (There was too much give and take in the formulation of ideas to determine who said what first.) Graham defined fine art as "a creative process of abstracting." He believed that art should reveal the essence of things, and therefore should be bathetic from nature—figurative similar Picasso's. Withal, this revelation could not exist achieved through copying visual reality merely only through "the evaluation of grade, perfectly understood," the creation of perfect, self-sufficient compositions of flat forms. To Graham, such painting was radical: "Revolution is the repudiation of traditional forms outgrown. Revolution is the change of methods and non of the subject matter. The change of methods means the change of forms." He added that a change of subject affair could not be radical, for "if cypher else, it is too easy."

Accordingly, Graham castigated the Social Realists who were preoccupied with "communicating" political slogans and not with radical esthetic values. "Give the masses good art and do non worry nigh the masses understanding it. Even if the masses do not understand modernistic art information technology is no excuse for giving them bad art . . . To say that Picasso'southward fine art is just for the esthete is just as much as to say that Karl Marx's writings are only for higher professors." Around the same time, Gorky also condemned propagandistic illustrations as "a poor fine art for poor people."⁵ Despite his reservations concerning not-figurative art, Graham esteemed Neo-Plasticism for its "attempt to detect formal bases for a new plastic fine art, a new classicism . . . Mondrian had the vision and the heart to commencement anew." This mental attitude brought Graham shut to the members of the American Abstruse Artists, the leading organization of vanguard artists in the thirties, most of whom worked in geometric styles. (Notwithstanding, neither he nor Gorky nor de Kooning joined the group.)^{half dozen}

Graham'due south insistence that all meaning in fine art had to be expressed "in terms of pure class" led him to maintain that. "The aim of painting, equally of any pure art, is to exploit its legitimate assets which are limitless without encroaching upon the domain of the other arts. Thus painting that resorts to literature, sculpture, etc., to amend itself is a decadent art." The attitude of Hans Hofmann, the near influential art teacher of the period, was like; in 1931, he had written: "The departure between the arts arises considering of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression . . . Each ways of expression has its own order of existence . . . The key to understanding lies in the appreciation of the limitations, qualities and possibilities [of each]."⁷ These statements predictable Clement Greenberg's basic esthetic premise which he stated in his first major article on fine art in 1940: "Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific fine art."^viii

Graham's thinking was close to Hofmann's in other ways, the one betoken of view reinforcing the other in the minds of young artists. (The ii men had known each other in Europe and maintained contact in America.) Both believed in using nature as a signal of deviation, translating solids and voids into planes, all of which had to exist positive in the painting, and organizing the planes into entities. As Graham wrote: "Art is concerned primarily and finally with the . . . organic whole of a work of art and consequently [with] building it into a unit with particulars subjugated and tolerated merely in so far as they contribute inevitably to the structure of the whole." Graham considered cartoon more essential than color, as did Hofmann, whose teaching during the 1930s was largely based on Cubist design. According to Graham, "Color is an attribute of form and acquires significance only after it occupies a definite portion of space." This was the approach of Gorky; he would more or less fix the blueprint starting time and and so concern himself with color.^nine The emphasis on drawing by Graham and Gorky as well as de Kooning is indicated by the fact that they admired above all the great draftsmen in the history of fine art: Uccello, Ingres, Picasso.

The material flatness of the motion-picture show plane was so important to Graham that he disparaged the Renaissance as "the flow of the greatest decadence in fine art" (although that did non forestall him from adulating Uccello and other old masters). Painting at its highest and most difficult had to exist "planimetric," which, equally he defined it, "is essentially a two-dimensional painting. It tin be three-dimensional in so far as detail modeling is concerned simply remains within the plane neither protruding nor receding. This is achieved by a planimetric arrangement of limbs of the figure, by articulating them in the direction of the design, so to say, woven in. Ondulation [sic] within the operating plane means that the shoulders, arms, legs are thrust and aligned so as not to disturb by their ondulation [sic] the whole flatness of the plane." This is the best summary of i method of Graham, Gorky and de Kooning, many of whose pictures in the thirties comport marked affinities, and it shaped the two younger artists' subsequent organic abstractions.

American modernists in the 1930s generally esteemed Picasso as the most formidable genius alive, but none were as panegyrical equally Graham. He believed that all painting that postdated Picasso's diameter his imprint. Pictures that did not openly reveal that debt were either dishonest or unintelligent. His veneration of the Cubist pioneer raised troublesome questions, because he did prize uniqueness ("rarity") and surprise (produced past "the injection into the world of a new idea"). However, if, as Graham insisted, Picasso "has painted everything and meliorate [than anyone else], he has wearied all pictorial sources," what and then could an artist practise but copy the almighty master? This was Gorky's problem in the thirties, but information technology was not his (and Graham'due south) alone. Well-nigh of the American Abstract Artists did not place too much value on originality either, for their problem was to take hold of up with abstract art in Paris. Their mental attitude was summed upward in 1939 past George 50. Grand. Morris, a spokesman for the organization: "Information technology is in no way unnatural that any large group of artists oriented toward an internal expression should continue in the management of others whom they accept admired. The average conception of 'originality' usually denotes little that is important or profound . . . The greatest fine art . . . is frequently derivative . . . Intelligent derivation is to be recommended."¹⁰

Graham's rejection of originality paralleled the Neo-Plasticists', but with a departure. Mondrian was optimistic; art as a special calling would wither abroad in a brave new world where art and life would get one. Graham was despairing; fine art had to pass up, for once anything reaches perfection, it naturally decays. Even Picasso'southward point of view was already a thing of the past. Equally a romanticist, he was no longer "modern"—as was Mondrian. "Picasso signifies the end of the old manus-made world . . . the romantic individualism, the welt-schmerz, the melancholy of isolation. Vulgarly speaking—time marches on and the machine historic period and consequently the collective age is asserting itself from the two opposite ends of the globe . . . The collective world (the The statesA. and the U.S.South.R. to wit) has no place for morbidity, which was the source of inspiration of the sometime art." Zip could stop the form of history; the "easel painting for individual patronage is dead." Greenberg was later to brand a similar prediction. In the forties, Graham himself every bit well equally his friends would reject his determinism and abnegate his prophecy. In the sixties, it may be fulfilled.

Graham anticipated the sensibility of the nowadays decade in other ways. Effectually 1929, he founded a movement called Minimalism, which as David Burliuk wrote in an introductory argument to his friend'southward show that twelvemonth, "derives its name from the minimum of operating means . . . Painting is a mathematical problem, co-ordinate to Graham (as well see Einstein's latest discoveries), and can be considered every bit a rigorous combination or arrangement, infinite, colour and texture organization performance together. For a given trouble, like in a shooting gallery, in that location is simply one perfect solution. Minimalist painting is purely realistic—the subject being the painting itself."¹¹

Graham was sympathetic to Jung and Freud. He maintained that artists had to "re-constitute a lost contact with the unconscious (actively by producing works of art and passively by contemplating works of art), with the primordial racial past and to keep and develop this contact in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind." Graham, who joined The Ten in 1939, probably helped straight the attention of Rothko and Gottlieb, 2 of the group'southward founders, to Jung'south theories, and to reinforce their earlier involvement in primitive fine art. In the early forties, Gottlieb and Rothko began to paint pictures whose themes, they said, were concerned with primitive myths and symbols that continue to have meaning today.¹²

Graham's influence in this management was probably strongest on Pollock. Well-nigh acquaintances of both men have recalled that Pollock at some betoken during the late thirties read Graham'south article, titled "Primitive Fine art and Picasso," which appeared in the Magazine of Art, Apr, 1937, and was so impressed past it that he searched out the author.¹³ The essay anticipates to a caste Pollock's subsequent creative evolution. Graham wrote of 2 basic traditions in art: the "Greco-African" and the "Perso-Indo-Chinese." "The Greco-African culture is based on geometric design; it is centripetal and constructed in principle . . . "The Perso-Indo-Chinese heritage "is based upon florid design; it is analytic and centrifugal in principle . . . In modern times nosotros can trace the two different approaches in the work of various painters. The Perso-Indo-Chinese tradition has influenced the Impressionists; its florid blueprint and its yellow and greenish colour schemes are constitute in the paintings of van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Soutine, Chagal [sic]; the Greco-African is exemplified by Ingres, Picasso, Mondrian." Pollock manifestly felt closer to the Perso-Indo-Chinese tradition, as indicated by his form and facture, and oftentimes by his color; yellows or greens dominate in such pictures as Eyes in the Heat, 1946, and Full Fathom Five, 1947. Simply in the great "classic" drip paintings, 1949–1951, he favored blackness, dark-brown and cherry, considered past Graham the Greco-African palette.

There is some likelihood that Graham's essay (and conversation) influenced Pollock'southward choice of color and design, simply the connection of the one to the other must not be overstressed. Pollock'southward evolution as an creative person was far also complex for any simplistic speculation. Nonetheless, his outlook was surely affected by the following passage in the 1937 article:

Primitive races and primitive genius take readier admission to their unconscious listen than so-called civilized people. It should be understood that the unconscious mind is the creative factor and the source and the storehouse of power and all noesis, past and future . . . Well-nigh people lose access to their unconscious at about the age of vii . . . This closure is temporarily relaxed past such expedients as danger or nervous strain, alcohol, insanity and inspiration. Amidst primitive people, children and geniuses this free access to the power of the unconscious still exists in a greater or lesser degree . . . The pre-Archaic Greeks with their painted warriors and maidens with duck-like heads, the Maori'south light-green jade Tiki in the form of the human foetus, the Eskimo and the Northward American Indian masks with features shifted around or multiplied, and the Tlingit, Kwakiutl and Haida carvings in ivory and wood of man beings and animals, these all satisfied their particular totemism and exteriorized their prohibitions (taboos) in order to understand them ameliorate and consequently to deal with them successfully. Therefore the fine art of archaic races has a highly evocative quality which allows it to bring to our consciousness the clarities of the unconscious mind, stored with all the individual and commonage wisdom of past generations and forms. In other words, an evocative art is the means and the result of getting in touch on with the powers of our unconscious. It stimulates us to move and act forth the intuitional line in our life procedure. Two determinative factors utilize to archaic fine art: start, the degree of freedom of access to 1'due south unconscious mind in regard to observed phenomena, and second, an understanding of the possibilities of the obviously operating space. The first allows an imaginary journey into the primordial past for the purpose of bringing out some relevant data, the second permits a persistent and spontaneous do of design and composition as opposed to the deliberative which is valueless. These capacities allow the artist, in the first identify, to operate in pure relevating form which means the nigh elemental components of course. In this process . . . superfluous components . . . are dispensed with . . .

In pictures executed from 1942 to 1947 (and once more occasionally after 1951), Pollock alluded to the kind of primitive and mythic images described in Graham's article. For example, he referred to Greek friezes in Untitled, 1943 (in the collection of Frederick R. Weisman) and to painted warriors in Pasiphae and Guardians of the Secret, both of 1943. He also jumbled anatomical features in Male person and Female, 1942, and many other canvases, and alluded to American Indian art in Moon Adult female Cuts the Circle, 1943. Lawrence Alloway wrote of this last painting: "The head of the effigy on the right is a fragmented profile [of a red Indian] wearing a feathered bonnet . . . Sir Herbert Read suggested, in a letter to me . . . that information technology can be compared with a tattoo pattern of the Adult female in the Moon fabricated by the N American Indian tribe, the Haida, and reproduced in C. G. Jung'due south Psychology of the Unconscious . . . Read points out that 'there is a reference on the aforementioned page to a Hottentot fable about "cut off a sizeable piece" of the moon'."¹⁴

In an interview in 1944, Pollock remarked: "I have ever been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians accept the true painter's arroyo in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject field matter. Their color is essentially Western, their vision has the bones universality of all real art." In the same interview, Pollock spoke of the importance to him of the Surrealists who emigrated from Paris to New York during Globe War 2. "I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of fine art being the Unconscious."¹⁵ Some critics have taken this now famous statement, 1 of the few by Pollock to have been recorded, to mean that the Surrealists-in-exile were responsible for introducing him to that thought. They did affirm it, but his thinking along that line predated the arrival of the Parisians later 1939 and diverged from theirs in its orientation to Jung rather than to Freud. Information technology was non fortuitous that when Pollock entered psychotherapy in 1939, he chose a Jungian analyst. To Pollock—as to Graham—art was a ways of scourging individual demons, an attitude understood by his doctors who used his drawings for therapeutic purposes.

Given his involvement in borer unconscious imagery, it is natural that Graham in his book should have stressed the importance of "automated 'ecriture'," and he directed the thinking of Pollock likewise as Gorky, de Kooning, Rothko and Gottlieb to that Surrealist technique. (The young New Yorkers learned near automatism from other sources prior to the emigration of the Parisians, although they rarely skilful it in the 1930s. Masson's and Miro'south paintings were featured repeatedly in Cahiers d'Art. This magazine was followed closely past the local vanguard.) However, Graham was unfavorably inclined towards Surrealism's literary symbolism, illusionism and condone of pictorial structure, and chosen this motion "troubling but frail." Graham valued the complimentary gesture—the "magic" of touch—for its ability to "confess" personality direct. "Gesture, like voice, reflects different emotions . . . The gesture of the artist is his line, information technology falls and rises and vibrates differently whenever it speaks of different matter . . . The handwriting must be authentic and not faked . . . [not] conscientious but honest and free." This business organisation with spontaneous gesture disposed him, every bit it did Pollock (who would carry it to an unprecedented extreme) and his other friends to painterly drawing.

During the belatedly 1930s, Pollock submitted increasingly to the influence of School of Paris modernists, particularly Picasso. Graham'southward admiration of the Cubist master was probably one cause of Pollock's change in orientation. In his commodity of 1937, Graham wrote: "Picasso'southward painting has the same ease of access to the unconscious equally take primitive artists—plus a conscious intelligence." Pollock was impressed past this quality in Picasso's work as well as by its discipline affair, which Graham related to primitive fine art. Indeed, Picasso's subject affair engaged Pollock as much and most likely more his Cubist design (a signal ignored by formalist critics and historians). In Graham's opinion, Picasso had "visions or insights into the origins of plastic forms and their ultimate logical destination"—"origins" imbedded in "the deepest recesses of the Unconscious, where lies a full record of all past racial wisdom." These were the visions and insights that Pollock tried to embody in his painting, and they have yet to be adequately dealt with by his biographers.

In the forties, Graham turned against Picasso with the aforementioned passion with which he had earlier worshipped him. He so took as his models Raphael, Poussin and other "classical" masters. But Graham did not simply re-create his prototypes. Instead, he transmuted them, inflicting cruel wounds on his subjects (human sacrifices), crossing their eyes and superimposing on them symbols derived from arcane number systems—astrological, alchemistic, arcane—symbols that presumably "lived" in the collective unconscious, nearly which Graham wanted to supply information, to "convey a message."¹⁶ In this, he was alike to the Pollock of Male person and Female, or Guardians of the Secret. Graham's "retrogressive" belatedly way offered few possibilities for younger modernists, a reason for the eclipse of his reputation. But his paintings after 1943, featured in the Museum of Modern Fine art show, are so highly personal, felt and masterly every bit to deserve evaluation on their own merits, apart from the rise and fall of creative manners.

—Irving Sandler

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NOTES

1. The show at the Museum of Modern Art was arranged past Eila Kokkinen, Banana Curator for Drawings, who is writing a monograph on Graham.

2. Thomas B. Hess, "John Graham, 1881–1961," Art News, Sept. 1961, p. 46.

3. Hess, op. cit., p. 52.

four. All quotes of Graham unless otherwise indicated are from his book, System and Dialectics of Art, New York, 1937, 154 p., and from his article, "Primitive Art and Picasso," Magazine of Fine art, Apr, 1937, p. 236–239. The italics are Graham'south.

5. Rosalind Browne, interviewed past Irving Sandler, Feb. 11, 1968, said that Gorky made the remark in a speech before the Artists Matrimony in the spring of 1936.

6. Carl Holty, interviewed by Irving Sandler, Baronial 12, 1968, said that Graham was proposed for membership in the AAA but was rejected past one vote. Holty thinks the vote was 21 to xx, but he is not certain of the exact totals.

vii. Hans Hofmann, "Painting and Culture," Fortnightly, Sept. 11, 1931; reprinted in Hofmann, Search for the Existent, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, p. 57.

8. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," Partisan Review, July–Aug., 1940, p. 305.

9. Elaine de Kooning, "Gorky, painter of his own legend," Art News, January., 1951, p. 64.

ten. George L. K. Morris, Introduction to American Abstract Artists 1939, New York, 1939, northward.p.

11. David Burliuk, Introduction to the catalog of the John Graham show at the Dudensing Gallery, 1929, due north.p. In System and Dialectics of Art, p. 33, Graham divers Minimalism every bit "the reducing of painting to the minimum ingredients for the sake of discovering the ultimate, logical destination of painting in the procedure of abstracting. Painting starts with a virgin, compatible canvas and if one works ad infinitum it reverts again to a plain uniform surface (dark in colour) merely enriched past procedure and experiences lived through. Founder: Graham."

12. Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, "Letter to the Editor," New York Times, June 13, 1943, sec. 2, p. 9.

xiii. Acquaintances of Graham and Pollock practise non agree on the date when the two men met. Nearly recall that it was prior to 1939, but a few call back that it could accept been every bit late as 1941, shortly before Graham included Pollock in a evidence he organized at the McMillan Gallery.

xiv. Lawrence Alloway, Jackson Pollock, London, 1961, north.p.

xv. Jackson Pollock, "Jackson Pollock (a questionnaire)," Arts and Architecture, Feb., 1944, p. xiv.

16. John Graham, "Excerpts from an unfinished manuscript titled 'Art'," Fine art News, Sept., 1961, p. 57.