Reflections of American Modernism of the Mid-Twentieth Century: The Work of Rothko, Gottleib, Pollock, Oldenburg, and Warhol

Joshua Gale

December 2011

Page 2 Harold Rosenberg once said, The attempt to define is like a game in which you cannot possibly reach the goal from the starting point but can only close in on it by picking up each time from where the last play landed."1 Nearing the end of the nineteenth century, to the misfortune of such professionals as museum curators and professors of the academies, artists began targeting the bourgeoisie,2 to remove the paintbrush from the affluent hands of the rich and place them in the hands of workers from whom art had been stolen. As a result, the academic institutions that had formerly been training artists at an advanced level began losing their power and influence on society. As Rosenberg avers, Many of the painters were Marxiststhey had been trying to paint society. Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism)it amounts to the same thing. The big moment came when it was decided to paintjust to PAINT.3 By recognizing and addressing the psychological phenomenon art has always been, Marcel Duchamp4 said he wanted to put art back in the service of the mind.5 Duchamp, an immigrant from France, came to the United States with his readymades, such as the famous Fountain, and his unusual artworks, such as Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 and saw New York as a place more open to artistic freedom. He is an

Quoted in Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" from Tradition of the New, originally in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22. 2 A French word that the English began using that denotes the ruling class in which one owns capital. The original Dadaists were of European decent and aimed to disrupt the middle class from their everyday thoughts and paradigms. 3 Quoted in Jean-Christophe Agnew, Roy Rosenzweig, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell Companions to American History), Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (October 7, 2002). 4 The Cubist movement, Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the expressionist movement, Paul Czanne, and the futurist movement, Filippo Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni, heavily influenced Marcel Duchamp s artwork. 5 Quoted in Nan Rosenthal, "Marcel Duchamp (18871968)." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.

Page 3 excellent example of the type of thinkers who would set the pace for the redefining of art over the next forty to fifty years. Walter Benjamin writes about the Dadaists, of which Duchamp is considered a major part, The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion.6 This progressive era of renegade artists, who completely rebelled against traditional art forms, taking sense and making nonsense, took the task upon themselves to broaden the art world beyond what it had been previously. Artists, including Duchamp, all over the world banded together to erase the old artistic confines that had entrapped them, and with as much from within them as they could muster, they went to war over what was to be written on the next page of the history of art. This transgression from any previously established rules opened artists creative potential to places beyond their physical worlds; out of the subconscious, autonomously, just because, they began creating artwork at full capacity in a way very specific to them. The concepts that were in the early stages of development during that controversial time period and grew to full maturity and completion during the late 1960s could, altogether, be considered as a wonderfully sour gift, tagged From the Modernists, to contemporary society. The works of art that are now commonly considered the art of the mid-twentieth century are sometimes incredibly difficult to look at and interpret, but one does it anyway at the chance of gaining a satisfaction incomparable to any other sensation. Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottleib embraced the spirituality of the artist at work, and the phenomenon of an existential work of art being able to capture and motivate its

Quoted in Encyclopdia Britannica, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2011, Web. 24 December 2011, Page 10.

Page 4 viewers. Rothkos work is commonly related to as a religious metaphor because of this affect. He is famous for saying, The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.7 The patron of Rothkos last murals, Dominique de Menil, stated Rothkos paintings evoked the tragic mystery of our perishable condition. The silence of God, the unbearable silence of God.8 Rothko and Gottlieb believed that in order for the members of a society to express basic psychological ideas, they must face the same eternal symbols, such as emotions and identities, which were once defined in antiquity. Modern psychology points out that even today members of society find those symbols still persisting in our dreams, our vernacular and our art. They believed these symbols, known myths of the past, turn out not to be fantasy at all but, instead, the expression of something very real from deep within each person. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought, Rothko and Gottlieb, in collaboration with artist Barnett Newman, proclaimed to the New York Times. There is no such thing as good painting about nothingwe are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.9 According to Jackson Pollock, The modern artist, it seemsis working and expressing an inner worldin other wordsexpressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.10 The process of splintering art as an entity persisted throughout the life of

Quoted in Mark Rothko, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 93-4. 8 Quoted in Mrs. John de Menil, Address Made at the Opening of he Rothko Chapel in Houston, Feb 27, 1971, mimeograph distributed at the chapel. 9 Quoted in Letter of June 7, 1943 by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, in Edward Alden Jewell, The Realm of Art: A new Platform and Other Matters: Globalism Pops into View, New York Times (June 13, 1943) x9. 10 Quoted in Marianne Doezema, Reading American Art, Yale University Press; 1st Printing edition (June 16, 1998).

Page 5 Pollock and his action painter and New York School colleagues. Drawing inspiration from the work of past Surrealists and the contemporary avant-garde, Pollocks approach to art can best be expressed in examining the process of which he painted. He would begin by laying the canvas with its back to the ground. In a autonomous state of mind he would pick up his paintbrush and paint bucket and as if a part of a choreographed dance he would drizzle, splatter, and dump globs of paint onto the canvas, never knowing where his next stroke would go, completely forgetting where his last drop had landed. He allowed that involvement, the action that sprung up from deep within his conscious, to guide him throughout his career as innovative artist, and with it, art, as if it were a kind of social organism, reacted and spun off into yet another new direction. Andy Warhol of the pop artists, taking into consideration the technological influence of the industrial age and the affects of commercialism on art, makes his retort: No. The reason Im painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do11 Warhol attempted to completely remove spirituality, the mystery, and any physical or psychological connection from his artwork. Walter Benjamin, who makes a more precise breakdown of what it means for something to be replicated, clearly influenced Warhol with his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin states, even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to beThe presence of the

11

Quoted in Andy Warhol, in gene Swenson, What is Pop Art? Part I, Artnews 62 [Nov. 1963], 26.

Page 6 original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.12 By utilizing repetition and machine-like products and processes, he wanted, much like the minimalists did, to remove the artists authorial mark from their creations. History books are being rewritten all the time. It doesnt matter what you do.13 Finally, Oldenburg blatantly states, I am for an art that is political-eroticalmystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.14 Oldenburg, to capitalism what Warhol is to commercialism, makes an obvious statement about seeing something magnificent in ones day-to-day reality. Mark Rothko, working twenty years prior to Oldenburg once said that art must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decorationpictures for over the mantle.15 Oldenburg, as one might suspect of an artist to be after such extremes had presented themselves, was a hybrid of the artists before him. His heightened awareness of the objects of his surroundings, those interior decorations and pictures for the home, is what inspired him. Though his monumental sculptures of everyday life were not authorial, they were autobiographical and therefore, inherently, metaphysical; What I see is not the thing itself butmyselfin its form.16 With this, the period of modern artwork came to a close. Oldenburg and his colleagues marked a time of transition that would bridge the gap opened by various artists of the twentieth century and allow the next generation of people to utilize the knowledge assimilated from the modernists. Warhol embraced commercialism. It could be said he Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Page 2. Ibid. 14 Quoted in Encyclopdia Britannica Online, s. v. Realist Manifesto, Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2011, Web December 25 2011. 15 Quoted in Andy Warhol, in Andy Warhol, exh. Cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968), unpaginated. 16 Claes Oldenburg, notebook entry, Dec. 1-7, 1960; cited in Claes Oldenburg and Emmet Williams, Store Days (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 65.
13 12

Page 7 martyred himself for arts sake. He did this to overwhelm the viewers with so much obvious imitation and fabrication that the viewer is forced to step back and look within him or her self to fully appreciate his artwork. Rothko and Gottleib despised anything that was commercial, but also persuaded viewers to look within him or her self. Pollocks work hangs in museums, but standing in front of a Pollock could give one the sensation of standing anywhere while Oldenburgs sculptures stand tall outside of various museums, but his work, permanently immobile, finds its strength in its environment. Warhol had begun to play with the notion that many artists have approached the same goals from his or her own various angles and were ultimately headed in the same direction while being completely unaware that they might end up in a similar place. He said this on the subject, Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.17 The contradictions, theories and works of art of the mid-twentieth century prove that one can only close in on [a definition] by picking up each time from where the last play landed."18 Some argue that art during that time period was liberated while others contend that art as a sanction was destroyed, but everyone must face reality and accept that the current, post-modern perception of art is unique to its own place in time. Whether one likes it or not, art is evolving, and really it always has, into something completely fresh. Through much discovery, artists of the mid-twentieth century did nothing but embrace the time and etch their own initials into the course of art historys development.

17

Quoted in Andy Warhol, in gene Swenson, What is Pop Art? Part I, Artnews 62 [Nov. 1963], 26. 18 Quoted in The American Action Painters

Page 8 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Roy Rosenzweig, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell Companions to American History), Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (October 7, 2002). Marianne Doezema, Reading American Art, Yale University Press; 1st Printing edition (June 16, 1998). Encyclopdia Britannica, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2011, Web. 24 December 2011. Encyclopdia Britannica Online, s. v. Realist Manifesto, Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2011, Web December 25 2011, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/493121/Realist-Manifesto. Mrs. John de Menil, Address Made at the Opening of he Rothko Chapel in Houston, Feb 27, 1971, mimeograph distributed at the chapel. Claes Oldenburg, notebook entry, Dec. 1-7, 1960; cited in Claes Oldenburg and Emmet Williams, Store Days (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 65. Colin Painter (Editor), Contemporary Art and the Home, Berg Publishers; First Edition edition (October 1, 2002), page 41. Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" from Tradition of the New, originally in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22. Nan Rosenthal. "Marcel Duchamp (18871968)." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/duch/hd_duch.htm (October 2004). Mark Rothko, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 93-4. Letter of June 7, 1943 by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, in Edward Alden Jewell, The Realm of Art: A new Platform and Other Matters: Globalism Pops into View, New York Times (June 13, 1943) x9 Andy Warhol, in Andy Warhol, exh. Cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968), unpaginated. Andy Warhol, in gene Swenson, What is Pop Art? Part I, Artnews 62 [Nov. 1963], 26.