Experiencing Abstract Expressionism

...A final sour note: 1 wish it were possible for museums, dealers and the artists themselves to eliminate titles with mythological or enigmatic references, for they falsify by giving pseudointellectual implications to art that comes straight from the guts...

...Even conventional materials such as fine oil paints, brushes and varnishes were sometimes abandoned for rags, rollers, sticks and house painters' buckets of color...

...Willem de Kooning's Pink Lady, an exaltation of pinks, greens and orange that reverberates through the gallery...

...Gorky vacillating between Cubism, free-form Arp and Miro-like abstractions, and finally arriving at his own poignant poetic images...

...Baziotes and Stamos emerging from Abstract and Surrealist influences with biomorphic forms floating in indeterminate space...

...Third, the works have no social significance-no meaning-beyond the explosion of energy and the free association of ideas on canvas...

...This artist-audience relationship can be compared to the situation in sailing...

...The pieces in this show that stand the test of time least well are those that are heavily laden with Cubist imagery...

...It is not a retrospective of a school of painting sprung full-blown upon an unsuspecting world...

...For all their outward disparateness, though, these works share certain fundamental principles that add up to the Abstract Expressionist creed...

...Gottlieb adopting a grid and pictograph form, borrowed from primitive societies, to his personal myth...

...It is, rather, a series of works showing the first steps toward a new philosophy of art...

...There were the Surrealists with their haunting, irrational dream symbols, and the Auto-mists with their doodles and free associations on paper...

...I must also confess to an aversion to the Gottlieb pictographs-not for esthetic-reasons, but because the wholesale appropriation of a primitive art form strikes me as affected and somewhat dishonest...

...and a series of untitled paintings by Clyfford Still with dynamic black shapes, fertile earth colors and fiery darts of red, orange and white that are seductively ominous...

...Yet actually, Abstract Expressionism, as we now call it, was not a provincial New York movement at all...

...So it is difficult to predict whether any of it will achieve the timelessness of, say, early Flemish art, whose Van Eycks, Van der Weydens, Bouts and Memlings remain undiminished in vitality, poignancy or charm after 500 years...

...Out of this bubbling cauldron came not one single homogeneous style, but a series of starts in different directions...

...To the Abstract Expressionist painter, the encounter and manipulation of his materials is of far greater importance than the finished product...

...And above all, there was the influence of the freewheeling abstractionists Miro and Kan-dinsky, liberating everyone from esthetic dogmas and moralism...

...For the guest aboard a boat, the experience is never the same as it is for the one who mans the tiller, manipulates the sails and pits his skill against the wind and water and tides...

...through December 3), I am happy to report that for the most part Abstract Expressionism is still alive and packing a kick...

...Included are pieces by William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollack, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodore Stamos, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin...

...Thus, when viewing the show at the Whitney we do not ask such questions as: "What does it mean...

...de Kooning, while still tied to the figurative, slashing away at the image and gorging himself on color...

...My own personal favorites, however, are two poetic elegies by Arshile Gorky, The Betrothal and The Limit, both painted in 1947...

...There was the moral imperative of the Social Realists and the Re-gionalists, who in the wake of the Great Depression's disasters insisted that art serve society...

...One may prefer the ebullient declaimers like Hofmann and de Kooning, the whisperers and singers like Baziotes, Stamos and Rothko, or the nervous energy of Pollack, Rein-hardt and Lee Krasner...

...For while formal paintings with their carefully chosen subject matter, structured composition and technical virtuosity sometime actually provide the viewer with more than the artist intended, Abstract Expressionism by its very nature shortchanges the viewer...

...Pulling in the other direction, there was Freudian literature challenging everyone, and particularly artists, to probe their unconscious...

...Nevertheless, even in our position as voyeur to the passionate excursion, there is enough overflow of sensation for us to enjoy...

...Nevertheless, having just attended a Whitney exhibit (organized in conjunction with Cornell University's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art...

...To fully appreciate the show, one must recognize what it is not...

...What does it represent...

...Second, there is no subject matter...

...The paintings are primarily subconscious and unconscious explorations related to deep primal experiences...

...It grew in response to a world-wide variety of conflicting social, economic and cultural forces...

...Rothko, dissolving Cubist forms in quiet other-worldly colors that have mystical connotations, and also beginning to introduce the strong horizontal bands of color that became the hallmark of his late work...

...To this end, many of the artists studied American Indian art and the rock and cave painting of other primitive societies...

...At the exhibition we can see: • Hofmann, Pollack and Pousette-Dart still hung over with Cubist imagery, but freeing themselves of the stranglehold of the grid...

...We are not expected, either, to stand at a distance and focus on a total picture, but to stand close and immerse ourselves in the agitation of the surfaces, the sensuality of the paint, the explosiveness of the bursts of color, the delicacy of the markings...

...Tomlin, too much the gentleman to pour his guts out on canvas, but affecting the loose calligraphic brush strokes associated with automatic writing: The color and grace of line turn his paintings into lyric poems...

...In short, we participate in an Abstract Expressionist painting as we do in the presence of a rainbow, a violent storm, an underwater excursion, or a dream...

...And there's the rub...

...First, they were not produced according to any rules-no "musts" about composition, space, color...

...There was the American artists' own experiences with WPA projects, large public murals that gave them a taste for huge statements on oversized canvases...

...Abstract Expressionism is, simply, a dialogue between the painter, his materials and the surface on which he works...

...There were the esthetic rules of the European "moderns," especially the strict Cubist code of the inviolability of the two-dimensional picture plane...

...These men-who congregated in New York City in the '30s and '40s-were the pioneers of the new movement that was referred to for a time as the New York School...

...One watercolor by Hofmann, Cataclysm (Homage to Howard Putzel), painted in 1945, appears to be among the earliest of the stain-drip-accident school...