The Painted Word

by Tom Wolfe

  Despite his huge reputation, his work did not sell well, and he barely scraped by financially—which satisfied his boho soul on the one hand but also made him scream (stuck, as he was, in the doorway): If I’m so terrific, why ain’t I rich? And this gets down to the problems that COLLECTORS were beginning to have with Abstract Expressionism and the abstract styles that followed, such as the Washington School. Most of early Modernism, and particularly Cubism, was only partly abstract. The creatures in Matisse’s Joie de Vivre, which seemed so outrageously abstract in 1905, may not have been nice concupiscent little lamb chops such as were available in Max Klinger’s The Judgment of Paris, but they were nude women all the same. For many COLLECTORS it was enough to know the general theory and the fact that here were nudes done in “the new [Fauvist, Cubist, Expressionist, Surrealist, or whatever] way.” But with Abstract Expressionism and what came after it, they had to have … the Word. There were no two ways about it. There was no use whatsoever in looking at a picture without knowing about Flatness and associated theorems.

  Jackson Pollock

  How manfully they tried! How they squinted and put their fingers under their eyelids in order to focus more sharply (as Greenberg was said to do) … how they tried to internalize the theories to the point where they could feel a tingle or two at the very moment they looked at an abstract painting … without first having to give the script a little run-through in their minds. And some succeeded. But all tried! I stress that in light of the terrible charges some of the Abstractionists and their theorists are making today against the COLLECTORS … calling them philistines and nouveaux-riches, status strivers who only pretended to like abstract art, even during the heyday of the 1950s. Which is to say: You were nothing but fat middle-class fakes all along! You never had a true antibourgeois bone in your bodies!

  Ah, ingratitude, ingratitude … ars longa memoria brevis … The truth was that the COLLECTORS wanted nothing more than to believe wholeheartedly, to march with the Abstract Expressionists as aides-de-cong through the land of the philistines. They believed, along with the artists, that Abstract Expressionism was the final form, that painting had at last gone extra-atmospheric, into outer space, into a universe of pure forms and pure colors. Even Cultureburg’s intellectual fringe, the journalists of the popular press, reported the news in good faith, without a snigger. In 1949 Life magazine gave Pollock a three-page spread, two of them in color, headed: “JACKSON POLLOCK. Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The whole piece was clearly derived from the say-so of Greenberg, whom Life identified as “a formidably high-brow New York critic.” Life, Time, Newsweek continued to follow Abstract Expressionism, in color, with the occasional 22-caliber punnery about “Jack the Dripper” (Pollock) who says little and “stands on his painting,” but also with the clear message that this was what was important in contemporary art.

  In fact, the press was so attentive that Harold Rosenberg, as well as Pollock, wondered why so little Abstract Expressionism was being bought. “Considering the degree to which it is publicized and feted,” Rosenberg said, “vanguard painting is hardly bought at all.” Here Rosenberg was merely betraying the art world’s blindness toward its own strategies. He seemed to believe that there was an art public in the same sense that there was a reading public and that, consequently, there should be some sort of public demand for the latest art objects. He was doing the usual, in other words. First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class multitudes by light-years of subtlety and intellect—and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of See-what-I-mean? outrage: look, they don’t even buy our products! (Usually referred to as “quality art.”) The art world had been successfully restricted to about 10,000 souls worldwide, the beaux mondes of a few metropolises. Of these, perhaps 2,000 were COLLECTORS, and probably no more than 300—worldwide—bought current work (this year’s, last year’s, the year-before’s) with any regularity; of these, perhaps 90 lived in the United States.

  There were brave and patriotic COLLECTORS who created a little flurry of activity on the Abstract Expressionist market in the late 1950s, but in general this type of painting was depreciating faster than a Pontiac Bonneville once it left the showroom. The resale market was a shambles. Without the museums to step in here and there, to buy in the name of history, Abstract Expressionism was becoming a real beached whale commercially. The deep-down mutter-to-myself truth was that the COLLECTORS, despite their fervent desire to be virtuous, had never been able to build up any gusto for Abstract Expressionism. Somehow that six-flight walk up the spiral staircase of Theory took the wind out of you.

  I once heard Robert Scull say, “Abstract Expressionism was a little club down on Tenth Street. There were never more than 100 people in on it.” Scull was a collector from a later, enemy camp, Pop Art, and he may have set the figure too low, but I suspect that he was, at the core, correct. As was the case with Swedenborgianism and Rosicrucianism, Abstract Expressionism’s makers and theorists and its truly committed audience seem to have been one and the same. Who else was there, really, but the old cénacles down on Eighth Street… unless you also count the interior decorators who did truly love to use Abstract Expressionist paintings with those large flat areas (O integral planes!) of bright color to set off the stark white apartments that were so fashionable at the time.

  But to say that Abstract Expressionism was a baby that only its parents could love is not to downgrade its theorists in the slightest. Quite the opposite. For a good fifteen years, with nothing going for them except brain power and stupendous rectitude and the peculiar makeup of the art world, they projected this style, this unloved brat of theirs, until it filled up the screen of art history.

  FIVE

  Hello, Steinberg (Goodbye, Greenberg) (You, Too, Rosenberg) (Joy Returns to Cultureburg)

  Andy Warhol. Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois

  WE MAY STATE IT AS A PRINCIPLE AT THIS POINT THAT COLLECTORS of contemporary art do not want to buy highly abstract art unless it’s the only game in town. They will always prefer realistic art instead—as long as someone in authority assures them that it is (a) new, and (b) not realistic. To understand this contradiction is to understand what happened next: Pop Art.

  One day—in 1963, it must have been—I ran into a magazine editor, a culturatus of sorts, and I happened to bring up the subject of Abstract Expressionism, whereupon he told me with a tone that indicated I must be the only person in town who hadn’t gotten the inside news: “Listen, Abstract Expressionism is dead. It’s been finished off by a professor at Hunter College, a guy named Leo Steinberg.”

  I don’t know that Steinberg finished off Abstract Expressionism. It only needed a little push. But Steinberg was certainly one of the authorities who made it okay to like Pop Art.

  Leo Steinberg

  The Pop Art era is usually dated from the first one-man show of Jasper Johns at the Leo Castelli Gallery, January 20 to February 8, 1958, with paintings of American flags, letters of the alphabet, rows of numbers, and archery targets. Johns and his friend Robert Rauschenberg were the major figures in a cénacle of younger artists who in the 1950s began to react against the by-now sainted Abstract Expressionists. Young artists had started pouring into Lower Manhattan and heading, naturally, for legendary spots like the Cedar Tavern. They liked to pop into the Cedar with their toggle coats and corduroys and other proper boho gear on, like young recruits ready for the battle against the blind public, and they’d say, “Hi, Bill!” (de Kooning), “Hi, Franz!” (Kline), “Whaddaya say, Marko!” (Rothko). But the old boys didn’t exactly feel like being buddies and sharing the glow with these hideously chummy young nobodies. All right … So Johns and Rauschenberg started zapping the old bastards in their weakest spot: their dreadful solemnity and High Seriousness. The Tenth Street cénacle des cénacles was full o
f artists who were so spiritual that they never even got as far as Pollock had in double-tracking out of the Boho Dance and into the Consummation. They remained psychologically (and, by and by, resentfully) trapped in bohemia. Rothko refused to participate in a Whitney Museum annual show in order to safeguard “the life my pictures will lead in the world,” and refused (or claimed to refuse) to set foot in any Uptown art gallery unless some friend of his was having an opening. So Rauschenberg took to giving interviews in the art magazines in which he said that being an artist was no different, spiritually, from being a cargo humper or a file clerk or anything else. He exhibited oeuvres such as three Coca-Cola bottles, the actual bottles, surmounted by a pair of eagle wings. But all that was too easy to write off as mere Dada. Johns’s 1958 show was something else again. It wasn’t a coarse gesture; it was mighty cool … and something an ambitious young critic could fly with.

  Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the two early imps of Pop Art

  So Leo Steinberg, along with William Rubin, another theorist (and collector), depicted Johns’s work as a newer, higher synthesis. The central arguing point? But of course—our old friend Flatness.

  The new theory went as follows. Johns had chosen real subjects such as flags and numbers and letters and targets that were flat by their very nature. They were born to be flat, you might say. Thereby Johns was achieving an amazing thing. He was bringing real subjects into Modern painting but in a way that neither violated the law of Flatness nor introduced “literary” content. On the contrary: he was converting pieces of everyday communication—flags and numbers—into art objects … and thereby de-literalizing them! Were they content or were they form? They were neither! They were a higher synthesis. “An amazing result,” said Steinberg.

  Then Steinberg noticed something else. Johns had covered his flat signs in short, choppy Cézanne-like brushstrokes. Somehow this made them look flatter than ever … In fact, his flatness exposed once and for all the pseudo-flatness of Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning and Pollock. The jig was up! Steinberg was now ready to give the coup de grâce to Clement Greenberg.

  Greenberg had always argued that the Old Masters, the classic 3-D realists, had created “an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking,” whereas—to the everlasting glory of Modernism—you couldn’t walk into a Modernist painting and least of all into an Abstract Expressionist painting. (Too honest, too flat for any such ersatz experience.) Just a minute, said Steinberg. That’s all well and good, but you’re talking about a “pre-industrial standard of locomotion,” i.e., walking. Perhaps you can’t walk into an Abstract Expressionist painting—but you can fly through. Right! You could take a spaceship! Just look at a de Kooning or a Rothko or a Franz Kline. Look at that “airy” quality, those “areas floating in space,” those cloud formations, all that “illusionistic space” with its evocations of intergalactic travel. Why, you could sail through a de Kooning in a Mercury capsule or a Soyuz any day in the week! All along, the Abstract Expressionists had been dealing in “open atmospheric effects.” It was aerial “double dealing,” and it did “clearly deny and dissemble the picture’s material surface”—and nobody had ever blown the whistle on them!

  Jasper Johns’s Flag, 1958. Born to be flat

  Well, it was all now blown for Abstract Expressionism. Steinberg, with an assist from Rubin and from another theoretician, Lawrence Alloway, removed the cataracts from everybody’s eyes overnight. Steinberg put across many of his ideas in a series of lectures at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. The auditorium seats only 480, but with Cultureburg being such a small town—and the Museum looming so large in it—that platform was just right: his ideas spread as fast as Greenberg’s had fifteen years before. Steinberg’s manner was perfect for the new era. Where Greenberg was a theologian always on the edge of outrage and hostility, like Jonathan Edwards or Savonarola, Steinberg was cool, even a bit ironic. He was the young scholar, the historian; serious but urbane.

  Franz Kline’s Painting Number Two, 1954.

  Can a spaceship penetrate a Kline?

  As soon as he realized what John’s work meant, said Steinberg, “the pictures of de Kooning and Kline, it seemed to me, were suddenly tossed into one pot with Rembrandt and Giotto. All alike suddenly became painters of illusion.” Later on, Steinberg changed that to “Watteau and Giotto”; perhaps for the crazy trans-lingual rhyme, which, I must say, I like … or perhaps because being tossed into the same pot with Rembrandt, even by Leo Steinberg, was a fate that any artist, de Kooning included, might not mind terribly.

  This may have been the end of Abstract Expressionism, but for Art Theory it was a fine, a rare, a beautiful, an artistic triumph. With that soaring aerial aperçu of Leo Steinberg’s, Art Theory reached a heavenly plane, right up there with Paracelsus, Meister Eckhart, Christian Rosenkreutz, Duns Scotus, and the Scholastics … “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” That was once a question of infinite subtlety. Ah, yes! But consider: “Can a spaceship penetrate a de Kooning?”

  Jasper Johns’s show was the perfect exhibition for the new age of Theory. He had intentionally devised it as an art lecture in pictures. It was like one of those puzzles in the 59-cent play-books on sale in the wire racks in the supermarkets, in which you’re invited to write down the sentences that the pictures create:

  But wasn’t there something just the least bit incestuous about this tendency of contemporary art to use previous styles of art as its point of reference? Early Modernism was a comment on academic realism, and Abstract Expressionism was a comment on early Modernism, and now Pop Art was a comment on Abstract Expressionism—wasn’t there something slightly narrow, clubby, ingrown about it? Not at all, said Steinberg, whereupon he formulated one of the great axioms of the period: “Whatever else it may be, all great art is about art.” Steinberg’s evidence for this theory was far more subtle than convincing. Sophistry, I believe, is the word. He would cite Renaissance paintings with figures in the frames pointing at the main picture. (See? They’re commenting on art.) But never mind … Steinberg’s axiom was another one that inspired the profound “That’s … right!” reaction throughout the art scene. Steinberg’s own qualifier was dropped, and the mot became simply: “All great art is about art.” That was like DDT for a lot of doubts that might otherwise have beset true believers over the next few years.

  Meanwhile, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg made a grave tactical error. They simply denounced Pop Art. That was a gigantic blunder. Greenberg, above all, as the man who came up with the peerless Modern line, “All profoundly original work looks ugly at first,” should have realized that in an age of avant-gardism no critic can stop a new style by meeting it head-on. To be against what is new is not to be modern. Not to be modern is to write yourself out of the scene. Not to be in the scene is to be nowhere. No, in an age of avant-gardism the only possible strategy to counter a new style which you detest is to leapfrog it. You abandon your old position and your old artists, leaping over the new style, land beyond it, point back to it, and say: “Oh, that’s nothing. I’ve found something newer and better … way out here.” This would dawn on Greenberg later.

  Steinberg could attack Abstract Expressionism precisely because he was saying, “I’ve found something newer and better.” But one will note that at no time does he attack the premises of Late-Twentieth-Century Art Theory as developed by Greenberg. He accepts every fundamental Greenberg has put forth. Realism and three-dimensional illusion are still forbidden. Flatness is still God. Steinberg simply adds: “I’ve found a new world that’s flatter.”

  So that was how Pop Art came in: a new order, but the same Mother Church.

  Within a few years the most famous images of Pop Art were Roy Lichtenstein’s blowups of panels from war comics and love comics and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo boxes. But wasn’t that realism? Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Alloway, the Englishman who coined the term Pop Art, provided the rationale: the
comics, labels, and trademarks that the Pop artists liked were not representations of external reality. They were commonplace “sign systems” of American culture. By enlarging them and putting them on canvas, the artists were converting them from messages into something that was neither message nor external image. “Pop Art is neither abstract nor realistic,” said Alloway, “though it has contacts in both directions. The core of Pop Art is at neither frontier; it is, essentially, an art about signs and sign systems.” That may have been a bit hard to follow, but the stamp of approval came through clearly to one and all: “It’s okay! You are hereby licensed to go ahead and like these pictures. We’ve drained all the realism out.”