[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: June 9, 2008]
If you will, regard this as an hors d'oeuvre preceding the more varied feast of the Jewish Museum's "Action/Abstraction" exhibit, which I hope to review shortly. As we shall then see, that show counter-poses the competing interpretations of Abstract Expressionism advanced by two influential critics, Clement Greenberg and Howard Rosenberg.
Adolph Gottlieb is not in the Jewish Museum show; yet he is always accepted as a member of the New York school of abstract expressionism.
The opposing views of Greenberg and Rosenberg can be summed up very crudely as follows: Greenberg held that abstract expressionism abandoned the easel-painting, a three-dimensional window on the world designed to be hung on the wall, in favor of an uncentered exploration of two-dimensional flat space; what Rosenberg found, on the other hand, was a rejection of the importance of what is depicted or suggested in the painting, in favor of a depiction of the very act of painting itself. Greenberg championed flat abstraction, Rosenberg flat-out action.
These positions deserve to be expressed with more care and examined in more detail. For the time being, however, a small show of Gottlieb "Paintings from Four Decades" at Pacewildenstein's midtown sanctuary, permits us to see how hard it is to fit either of those critical categories to one individual painter.
The Pacewildenstein show is hung out chronological order, a strategy which initially struck me as careless. On close examination, it turned out to be very smart, demonstrating the manner in which certain themes and assumptions stayed with the artist over forty years of his career.
The earliest painting here, "Inscription to a Friend"of 1948, is hung right alongside the latest, "Open Above" of 1972. It is immediately apparent that Gottlieb's personal stock of symbols, almost a secret language, evident in the more gestural, painterly canvas of 1948, remained available when he created the larger, cooler image nearly a quarter of a century later. The obsession with a private stock of hieroglyphs remains; what has changed is the material (oil in 1948, acrylic in 1972) and the pictorial space.
Where the background of the earlier painting is turbulent, in motion - clearly a background - the later painting is an arrangement of colored shapes on an utterly flat, monotonous plane. The Greenberg doctrine would valorize this plane and its arrangement as the state to which abstraction aspires. The Rosenberg doctrine would valorize the urgent physicality of the brushwork in the first picture.
To the left of the gallery space as you enter hang a series of Gottlieb's "Burst" paintings. It's hardly necessary to mention Rothko in this connection: Gottlieb too divides large canvasses into horizontal slabs of quietly pulsing color. His distinctive contribution is to suspend a shimmering orbin the top half of the picture - evidently a sun - or a sun-type symbol, although it's color changes from painting to painting.
As in Rothko's abstract works, Gottlieb's paint here is hardly stati, the shapes far from precisely defined. He paints a hazy aura around the globe. He encourages it to push out into the viewer's own space as the blocks of color seem to advance, then withdraw. The sense of action of the painter himself is not prominent here, as it's hardly prominent in Rothko. But the arrangement of the pictures celebrates anything but a flat pictorial space. The pictures come at you.
It can't be evident from such a small show, but these works are highly representative of Gottlieb's oeuvre. He worked systematically at creating long, thematically linked series of paintings. Here we have several of the "Imaginary Landscape" paintings; there are many more. Finally, we have two specimens from the series for which Gottlieb is perhaps best known: the "pictographs". In these works, Gottlieb arranges symbols, objects, small pictures in a frame - sometimes rigid, sometimes flexible - which fills the whole canvas. The canvas becomes almost a museum or library of ideas.
The pictographs, by and large, fulfil the Greenberg demand for all-over painting. Generally, no one symbol or group of symbols command the center. Eyes and heads and birds and squiggles and crosses are strung out across the frame, each given more or less equal weight. His palette - again generally - is restrained here.
Pictorial space is certainly shallow in the pictographs, but aesthetic pleasure isn't derived from a purely abstract inter-relationship of shapes, let alone colors. The excitement lies in Gottlieb's push toward barely figurative semantic content. His myth-making is largely private, but he does paint more than one pictograph of the Oedipus story. How can Greenberg's AbEx canon include a painter who so forthrightly re-introduces narrative and even psychology - however obscure?
Certainly, a work like "Chromatic Game" (1951) can represent the artist wrestling physically with paint and brush. But as far as the Rosenberg goes, the pictographs show the results of thinking as much as the process of acting.
Some of the works discussed will pop up at the Pacewildenstein site .
Summer Abstract Fun
In addition to this recommended show, and the Jewish Museum Action/Abtract show mentioned above, MOMA has a small, focussed exhibit of AbEx'sters Rothko and Rheinhardt - those strict formalists, and since history hasn't stopped, our contemporary Tomma Abts is showing some beautiful works at the NMCA on the Bowery. I'd like to talk about that show next week, if we are spared.
