American Abstraction Abroad

Working its way through Europe this summer is one of the most explosive and controversial art shows in decades. Called "The New American Painting" and financed by the International Council at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition is the first long, mass look Europeans have had at the leaders of the abstract expressionist movement. Billed by its partisans as the first home-grown art movement to rate international recognition, "The New American Painting" is getting cheers from most younger painters, cries of outrage from many critics, nibbles from some collectors and a monumental amount of bafflement from the general public.

A fair sample was the show's opening last fortnight in Madrid's newly founded Museo de Arte Contemporaneo. On hand to do the honors was U.S. Ambassador John Davis Lodge, who tried his best to make polite noises as he was led from one sprawling canvas to the next, fled 45 minutes after he arrived. One distinguished Spaniard, steeped in the traditions of El Greco and Velasquez, asked: "If this is art, what was it that Goya painted? You certainly can't compare the two." The abrupt reply from a partisan of the show: "Why try?"

Limited Ecstasy. What was clear on that opening night was that the show appealed to a minority, primarily younger artists and critics. Their welcome was ecstatic. "This exhibition was necessary," exclaimed Madrid Artist Manolo Millares, 32. "We've been wanting it for years." The 200-odd aficionados who milled around the huge canvases at the opening rapidly began sorting out impressions. Jackson Pollock was the most important, they decided. Mark Rothko's shimmering panels of color were their favorites, followed by the works of Clyfford Still (TIME, Nov. 25), Franz Kline, Philip Guston. Sam Francis. The qualities most admired: "furious vitality," "unbiased liberty," "a renovating spirit." Cried Critic Eduardo Cirlot: "The most important show that Spain has seen in the last 25 years. There's no doubt that American artists are the vanguard of the world."

In Milan, where the show attracted 5,000 during the summer art season doldrums, the recognized critics took quite a different view. Wrote Carriere della Sera's Leonardo Borgese: "It is not new. It is not painting. It is not America . . . Droppings of paint, sprayings, burstings, lumps, squirts, whirls, rubs and marks, erasures, scrawls, doodles and kaleidoscope backgrounds. When will they send us a real American show?" The owner of one of Milan's art galleries took one look, snorted, "Droolings!" and departed.

In Basel a few critics tried to take a longer view, and delivered some hedged but daring predictions. German University Professor Wilhelm Boeck concluded: "An artistic event of intercontinental size that will surely affect the development of European painting. It places America next to Paris as a first-class power." Said Frankfurt Critic Albert Schulze Vellinghausen: "It's new and it's strong and it's important."

Compounded Enigmas. Just what it is and why it is important is as much a mystery to the broad-U.S. public as to puzzled Europeans. And not without reason. U.S. abstractionists discuss what they are doing in enigmas that would win kudos from a Zen master. Painter Franz Kline, asked what he was trying to express, replied: "When I was young, I was 19. Does that answer your question?" With few exceptions, critics do little better. Art News once described one of Mark Rothko's works as "haunted, like the shining skin of an opulent eggplant, by the clay-colored echo of a final and unbreakable promise." The point, as Louis Armstrong once said of jazz, seems to be: "When you got to ask what it is, you'll never get to know."

Nearly all the leading U.S. abstract expressionists painted realistically before they turned to abstraction. Nine of them got through the 1930s painting government murals. "The most important thing for all of us was the WPA," says Willem de Kooning, recognized leader of the movement since the death of 44-year-old Jackson Pollock in an auto accident in 1956. The WPA was important in more than one way. It enabled the larval abstractionists to live by painting, established them as professionals and helped to produce the reaction that turned them to, abstraction in the 1940s.

One of the pioneers in U.S. abstraction, John Ferren, says the movement began as an instinctive agreement on a set of negatives. The painters turned against regional painting ("The Iowa farms painted by Grant Wood seemed to us like dream fantasy images'"), against the rigid structure of cubism, the cliche-ridden images of surrealism--and against the Government-commissioned mural painting of WPA. Above all they were revolting against the awesome dominance of Paris painting and the long shadow of Pablo Picasso. They were searching for something new, not as a school, but as individuals following nearby paths in the same wood. Some are still searching. "It's not that I'm against anything," says De Kooning, "but I'm more for myself. I don't know who I am, but I am not THEM any more."

Empty or Vital? The seekers merged as a group in 1948, when they formed "The Club" for artists only, met in a loft in Greenwich Village, debated: "What is abstract art in the good sense?'' "How do you know when a work is finished?" "Why put a title on a painting?" Though no agreement was reached, each artist found his canvas recording a battle royal in which the brush strokes, drippings and splatter were visual records of his ordeal.

The first of them all--the transitional figure--was Arshile Gorky, who early imitated Picasso, then the surrealists, finally broke through to a style of his own combining strange anatomical images and fragments of observed nature. Emerging early as the most noted was Pollock, hailed by some European painters and critics as the first great innovator in modern art since the birth of cubism--and hooted at by others. Wrote Critic John Russell in London's Sunday Times after seeing a Pollock painting in 1956: "I will not say that I was prejudiced against Mr. Pollock's picture by the fact that he made it by pouring the paint onto a flat canvas out of a can and later slapping the huge canvas with his own paint-covered hands. An interesting work might be produced by these lowly procedures; but I don't think, in this case, it was the canvas that deserved the slaps."

From the splashes of Pollock and De Kooning to the finely executed color planes of Rothko. the movement has a wide range of identifiable styles. Each painter produces his own subjective expression without regard for what it communicates. The absence of any recognizable visual imagery has struck many critics and philosophers, like Theologian Paul Tillich, as a cult of meaninglessness, proof of "the emptiness of our existence in industrial society." Other critics have an entirely different perspective, see in the abstract-expressionist breakthrough the opening of a brave, new, unfettered world of art. Worcester Museum Director Daniel Catton Rich finds the movement producing "the most fruitful work being done in this decade ... a new, vital kind of American abstraction, pictures which in sweep, size and dynamics display typically American qualities. Beside them many European contemporaries seem weak and uninventive."

Empty or vital, art or droolings, U.S. abstract-expressionist painting has arrived and is not likely to be rubbed out. Most of the paintings submitted in art competitions in major U.S. art centers show strong abstract-expressionist influence. The interest and enthusiasm of young European artists or "The New American Painting" suggest that this influence is now being exported to Europe. Whether it will have force enough to break down the scorn of the unconverted critics and the bewilderment of the public is still to be seen.

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