Abstract Expressionism is an art movement that prided itself on its lack of meaning, that its large canvases were displayed for themselves, for their own sake, for what they were. A canvas need have no meaning, representational or otherwise, which is what Jackson Pollock said when he gave one of his many interviews about his art. He parried the question about the meaning of his art with the question: you don’t ask a field of flowers what they mean, do you? Actually, it is possible to give an even more radical characterization of what came to be called Abstract Expressionism, the movement first called “action painting”, in that it was a set of actions perpetrated by the painters and also because the paintings were so kinetic, which is not really true either, because that is only true of Pollock, because Rothkos, for their part, just sit there, taking you inside them as you contemplate them some more.
The more radical explanation of Abstract Expressionism is that it was a school of painting that was not in any way a window onto the world rather than just a window where it happened that what was portrayed had no clear meaning. After all, even a field of flowers can be given meaning as a representation of God’s beauty or else as an accurate depiction of what a field of flowers looks like. Rather, these canvasses were just themselves, objects rather than in place of objects, a canvas with a swath of colors and lines created by heavy paints and so not representative of anything, the viewer simply experiencing the lines and the colors for what they are and that the object of attention: sometimes the paint thick, sometimes the juxtapositioned colors unlikely, sometimes colors superimposed on others and sometimes not. The viewer looks at the color scheme not at what it portrays.
Well, the search for meaning does climb back into the contemplation of Abstract Expressionism, despite what Pollock said. The title of the movement provides one meaning for the paintings done by that school. The original German Expressionists portrayed emotions of despair, lust, greed, and other largely unattractive emotions through the deployment of grotesque faces, lurid colors, people crowded together in urban settings. This was not a very pleasant view of life but a very powerful one. Abstract Expressionism, for its part, portrayed a much more serene and complex set of emotions in that every painting established a mood whereby the particular colors and shapes conveyed a distinct feeling. You felt one thing in the presence of one of these paintings and something else in the presence of another and so, supposedly, it was the colors and shapes that made you feel that way, even though it would be very difficult to trace how slightly shifted shades or shapes could reconfigure your emotional response, though there you have it, this movement in painting providing an avenue into a person’s soul that was more sensitive and underlay the ways in which merely representational paintings could get under your skin, this done much in the way that Whistler accomplished the same thing by showing abstracted bridges in London through the lens of one color scheme or another. The colors and the shapes matter, not the excuse for presenting them, and that has perhaps always been true of painting, even medieval paintings of the Holy Family conveying its true “motives” through its pattern of colors and shapes, whatever the obligatory choice of subject matter.
I want to try a different tack in assessing the meanings to be found in Abstract Expressionism, These paintings have meaning because they refer to something outside themselves, something in the world which is very difficult to otherwise access, but are not the set of human emotions. Rather, they evoke something metaphysical, something about the nature of the substratum of the universe, what creates the context for human life everywhere, and is beyond the merely social or biological. What they mean is that they evoke the experiences of time and space, of shape and distance and dimensionality, so as to generate an appreciation of those things. Moreover, this set of preoccupations makes sense during the cultural period of which Abstract Expressionism was a part, what I call “the age of anxiety”, after W. H. Auden and Leonard Bernstein, who adopted that even by then cliched phrase to describe the temper of their times, though they were more concerned about ubiquitous psychological distress rather than with the metaphysical situation. Actually, that cultural period can be said to begin in 1938 with Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” and to emerge as a movement popular with intellectuals who made much of Camus and the Theatre of the Absurd and to have proceeded through the Sixties with the novels of Bellow and Malamud, the late Mann (he of “Dr. Faustus” ) and the early Nabakov (he of “Pnin”). The period ends in the mid Sixties when Andy Warhol reimagines the artistic enterprise at the same time that a taste develops for Miami Beach architecture and for Phillip Roth as something more than a pornographer but rather a presenter of the complex ironies of identity.
Mark Rothko’s paintings are very illuminating because they give the viewer a sense of the existential dimensions of life, as if you are looking directly at the nature of color and how one bit of space creates a boundary for another. In “Orange and Red” (1955), for example, there is the juxtaposition of colors that are not ordinarily related to one another, the orange and yellow not “matching” or “contrasting” with one another, but somehow avoiding clashing with one another so that the viewer enters a universe made up of just orange and yellow as if they belong together not because they are a pleasing match but because that is what there is. Moreover, the edges of the square-like orange segment of the painting and the edges of the yellow segment of the painting are not hard lined and do not constitute perfect squares. Rather, the two colors overlap a little bit, the edges are not clean, part of the boundary created by a dash of white, and the shade of color is not uniform within the putative squares. So this is not a picture made up of geometrical figures. Rather, it is what philosophers would call a “swath” of color as opposed to a patch of color, the latter referring to some color already apprehended as a distinct thing. The swath refers to what we see before the categories that our mind uses to organize our experience into ideas is yet present, as if we could actually ever experience that precognitive state-- except that Rothko does, and so offers something very liberating to a viewer: the perception of reality in its precognitive stage, before squares are squares and orange is orange but is just there, hanging out, devoid of our preconceptions, our conventionalized ways of understanding even something so rudimentary as a color or a shape.So we have learned something about reality by being transported into its elemental condition, just as Sartre tries to make us understand how the gnarled limbs of a tree are there independent of the concept of tree however ready we are to provide that experience with a label and so make it into an object and so a comfortable experience.
Pollock is up to the same thing, except that in his case, he is interested in the issue (one of many that preoccupy him) of the experience of dimensionality. Consider his “Number 14 (Gray)”, from 1948, when he was embarking on his most productive period. (Remember that he had been painting since the mid-Thirties and it took a while for him to liberate himself from representationalism. Tell that to those who claim any child could do a Pollock. Try it and what you produce will turn out very flat both representationally and visually.) This painting is one of his simpler or, if you prefer, less cluttered, paintings. It has swirls of black dropped on a white canvas like chocolate fudge on top of vanilla ice cream. The dark lines sweep and swoop and are thicker and thinner, the thinner ones less curved into the pleasing parabolas of the darker lines. Most important, the thinnest lines seem to be in the background, somehow behind the thicker ones which are “in front” and so creating an illusion of distance as if one were looking into an endless galaxy of stars, except here they are fields of force, or something akin to that.
This is quite an accomplishment in that Pollock has created a sense of distance or depth, a three dimensional effect, without any resort to the conventions of perspective whereby art has understood distance since the Renaissance. A third dimension grows out of two dimensions, the canvas no longer flat even if its resources are, deliberately, only the flat canvas. How does distance suddenly get created? Is it the thickness or thinness of the lines or the swirls versus the straights, or which lines are created first? I don’t know, and maybe the artist doesn’t know either, but the viewer senses the third dimension popping out when it wasn’t there before the contemplation of the painting began. Maybe that was how God created the dimensions: one after the other rather than all at once. So Pollock puts you into a metaphysical reverie.
Then turn to Ellsworth Kelly, who seems to me, as one of the later Abstract Expressionists, to have pushed the metaphysical program perhaps the hardest, even if he does not have the acclaim that now greets Rothko and Pollock. Look at his “Red Yellow Blue ll” from 1966. At first, this seems a derivative Rothko in that it is a set of blocks of hard edged and uniform color. The canvas on the far left is red and blue, the next to the right is yellow and blue, the next over is red and yellow, the next black and white, and the farthest right canvas is blue and green. So we might think of the set of five as a tribute to the color spectrum, including white and black. Or we might think of each of the canvases as the juxtaposition and alteration of sets of colors so that blue looks different when it is to the right of the yellow with which it shares a canvas than when it is to the right in the canvas it shares with red. Or, if the imagination fails, it is easy enough to think of these as essential flags, as of nations, which also juxtapose colors for no apparent reason.
But that is to neglect that the viewer is required to jump over from one canvas to another so as to make comparisons. What is between the canvasses? Only the wall of the gallery or museum, and so the viewer is referring himself outside the convention of the canvas being each one a world of its own. So as to restore order to the viewer’s mind, the space between the canvasses is merely nothing, a discontinuity, and that means that distance itself is a discontinuity, something that appears everywhere where there are no limits imposed by a canvas itself. So Kelly has redefined the idea of distance as something other than a dimension. It is a discontinuity and that means that any distance can be redefined as a discontinuity, as when one crosses the street to get to the other side and is in a different world, on a different street corner, and within a different perspective rather than a continuation of the old one.
That is why Kelly seems so liberating. He pulls off the same trick of making discontinuous oppositions even in his single canvases by altering shape sizes or the dimensions of the canvas. It is liberating because the world becomes open, distance between its characterizations and as wide and different as one cares to make it rather than cluttered with tons of representational objects in the confines of a living room, as would be the case, for example, in the Late Victorian, James Tissot’s “Hide and Seek”.
All the Abstract Expressionists are liberating in the same way. They toy with our sense of the dimensions and of shape and color so that what is real is malleable and no less the stable fundament of existence, a paradox for all of us to ponder as we liberate ourselves from conventional thinking even about matters where we do not know we have been subject to conventional thinking.