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Flinging his colors onto the canvas, pouring and

dripping his paints in a quintessentially American

gesture, Jackson Pollock redefined the art of paint-

ing. It was the fate of Pollock’s gesture, which

reflected America’s largest, most optimistic ideas

of itself, to be mimicked, modified, and denied by

artists of immense stature, among them Willem

de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg,

Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson.

Drawing from twenty years of experience as an

art critic in New York, Carter Ratcliff maps the

Manhattan art world from Fifty-seventh Street to

SoHo, revisiting the world of studios, galleries,

and artists’ bars where those personalities met and

clashed. He follows the story of postwar American

art from the late 1940s through the triumph of

Abstract Expressionism and the sudden explosion

of Pop Art, all the way to the boom of the 1980s,

which brought stardom to an array of young

artists. Over it all looms the monumental and

tragic figure of Jackson Pollock, the measure of all

who have felt compelled to challenge him.

“WURYRILEY sTvLES PuBLICNIALIBRARY
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 Digitized by the Internet Archive
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FARRAR
Soi ReANUES
GIROUX
THE FATE OF A GESTURE
 ALSO BY CARTER RATCLIFF
Fever Coast (poetry)

Botero
Andy Warhol
Red Grooms
John Singer Sargent
Give Me Tomorrow (poetry)
Robert Longo
Pat Steir: Paintings
Komar and Melamid
Gilbert & George: The Singing Sculptures
THE FATE
OF A GESTURE

JACKSON POELOCK AND POSTWAR AMERICAN ART

CAR
WE RRA CREE

FARRAR + STRAUS + GIROUX

NEW YORK
 Copyright © 1996 by Carter Ratcliff
All rights reserved
Published in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
First edition, 1996

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ratcliff, Carter.
The fate of a gesture : Jackson Pollock and postwar American art /
Garter Ratchift;—— Ist ed:
» i.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Painting, American. 2. Painting, Modern—20th century—United
States. 3. Pollock, Jackson, 1912—1956—Themes, motives.
I, Title.
ND212.R38 1995 759.13'09'045—dc20 95-12081
(Ue
TO PHYLLIS
 ea

fi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted first to Thomas B. Hess and James Fitzgerald, the editors of

Artnews and Art International, who encouraged me to publish the essays and
reviews that led, years later, to this book. I am equally grateful for the en-
couragement I have received from Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in
America.
Writing could begin only after I had interviewed Rudy Burckhardt and
Robert Goodnough. I have relied heavily on their recollections and insights,
and on the help I received from many others in the art world. Annalee
Newman, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz, Michael Goldberg, and Irving Sandler
were especially helpful in illuminating the forties and fifties. I should mention,
too, how much I have benefited from Sandler’s accounts of the entire postwar
period.
Jasper Johns patiently answered my questions about his art and life. I am
also indebted to Riva Castleman and Calvin Tomkins for their commentary
on Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. Elizabeth C. Baker was an
indispensable source of information about the sixties, as were Leo Castelli
and Robert Rosenblum. The recent past is often the most elusive. For helping
me bring the eighties into focus, I am particularly indebted to Robert Longo,
Mary Boone, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel. I would also like to express
my thanks for the help and encouragement given by Nobu Fukui and Kwi-
soon Lee.
Art-world conversations seem endless, though of course they are not, and
I am glad to have talked to Andy Warhol and Lee Krasner before their
deaths.
Jonathan Galassi, my editor, provided crucial help in focusing my efforts.
I am very grateful to him, and also to his assistant, Aoibheann Sweeney. I
would like to thank Julie Garfield, Louise Weinberg, Sarah King, and Marisol
Martinez for their help in gathering essential documents and photographs,
and to express my appreciation for the sympathetic expertise with which
Karla Reganold attended to the manuscript.
CarTER RaTCLIFF
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ILLUSTRATIONS Xi

INTRODUCTION 3

PART | THE AMERICAN INFINITE 5

PART 2 THe Action PAINTER 97

PART 3 FRAGMENTS OF THE OrpDINARY 129

PART 4 A Dazziinc Continuum 173

PART 5 GLamour AND DeatH_ 185
PART 6 Tue Quest For Purity 217

PART 7 From Do.tprums to Boom — 267

EpitocuEe 303
Notes 309
ILLUSTRATION Crepits 337
InpEx 343
 ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOR PLATES following page 96:

he Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950, 1950
he Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950
Ill. Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954—55
IV. Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962

BEACK
AN D-WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS:

L Jackson Pollock, Cathedral, 1947 2

jap Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, 1950. Photograph by Rudy Burck-
hardt 6
Thomas Hart Benton, Self-Portrait with Rita, 192218
sy Thomas Hart Benton, The Arts of Life in America: The Arts of the South,
1932- 20
Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-35 36
Jackson Pollock, T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, c. 1934 38
Jackson Pollock, Flame, c. 1934-38 41
Jackson Pollock, Birth, c. 1938-41 42
André Masson, Meditation of the Painter, 1943 45
Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure, 1942 47
Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943 47
Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943 54-55
Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946 58
Jackson Pollock, One, Number 31 (1950), 1950 60-61
Clyfford Still, 1958. Photograph by Hans Namuth 72
Clyfford Stull, 1954, 1954 75
Barnett Newman, 1951. Photograph by Hans Namuth 78
Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948 83
Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm, 1950. Photograph by Hans Na-
muth 86
Jackson Pollock, The Water Bull, c. 1946 90
Jackson Pollock, Number 14, 1951, 1951 91
Jackson Pollock, Easter and the Totem, 1953 92
Jackson Pollock, Male and Female, 1942 93
Jackson Pollock, The Deep, 1953 95
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Willem de Kooning, New York, 1950. Photograph by Rudy Burck-

hardt 98
Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, c. 1940-41 102
Willem de Kooning, Queen of Hearts, c. 1943 103
Willem de Kooning, Painting, 1948 104
Hans Hofmann, Fantasia, c. 1944 110
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52 115
Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana, 1958 118
Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956 119
Grace Hartigan, New England, October, 1957 124
Alfred Leslie, Soldier’s Medal, 1959 125
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1958 126
Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955 130
Jasper Johns in his New York studio with Flag, 1955. Photograph by
Robert Rauschenberg 135
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955 138
Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59 141
Jasper Johns, False Start IT, 1962 143
Jasper Johns, According to What, 1964 154-55
Jasper Johns, Scent, 1973-74 157
Jasper Johns, Fool’s House, 1962 160
Jasper Johns, Flag on an Orange Field, 1957 166
Susan Rothenberg, Cabin Fever, 1976 171
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1964 174
Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (Soap Pads), 1964 174
Frank Stella, Conway I, 1966 174
George Segal, Man at Table, 1961 174
Robert Rauschenberg, Barge, 1963 180-81
James Rosenquist, F-111, 1965 182
Claes Oldenburg, Bedroom Ensemble, 1963, 1996 183
Andy Warhol, Yarn, 1983 184
Andy Warhol at the Factory, 1966. Photograph by Billy Name 186
Andy Warhol, Five Boys, c. 1954 188
Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola, 1960 190
Andy Warhol, Large Coca-Cola, 1962 191
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962 194
Andy Warhol, Large Triple Elvis, 1963 199
Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964 202
Andy Warhol at the Flowers show; Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris,
1965. Photograph by Harry Shunk 205
Andy Warhol, Leo Castelli, 1975 210
Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster, 1963 213
ILLUSTRATIONS xtLe

64. Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952 218

65. Morris Louis, Point of Tranquility, 1958 221
66. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969 224
67. Frank Stella, Avicenna, 1960 230
68. Frank Stella, Flin Flon III, 1969 232
69. Frank Stella, Nasielsk IT, 1972 233
70. Frank Stella, Nogaro, 1981 234
Ale Frank Stella, Lo sciocco senza paura (#1, 4X), 1984 235
a. Richard Serra throwing molten lead, 1972. Photograph by Gianfranco
Gorgoni 240
73: Robert Morris, Observatory, 1971-77 244
vas Robert Morris, Untitled, 1974. Poster for an exhibition entitled
Voice 248
7D. Lynda Benglis, advertisement in Artforum, November 1974 249
76. Lynda Benglis, Totem, 1971 250
ris Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979 256
78. Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977 257
79. Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 264
80. Miriam Schapiro, Black Bolero, 1981 268
81. Robert Longo, Men Trapped in Ice, 1980 278
82. Julian Schnabel, Portrait of Mary Boone, 1983 280
83. Julian Schnabel, Exile, 1980 285
84. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 286
85. Robert Longo, Tongue to the Heart, 1984 287
86. David Salle, Cigarette Lady: Blue and Yellow, 1979 290
87. David Salle, Melancholy, 1983 290
88. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Alert, GE), c. 1984—-
85° 293
89. Mike Bidlo, Jack the Dripper at Peg’s Place, 1982 296
90. Robert Longo, Heads Will Roll, 1984-85 299
Ae Brice Marden painting, 1990. Photograph by Bill Jacobson 302
OF Brice Marden, Presentation, 1990-92 305
D3: Robert Rahway Zakanitch, Big Bungalow Suite IV, 1992-93 306-7
j!
THE FATE OF A GESTURE
V7 Jackson Pollock, Cathedral, 1947. Enamel and aluminum
Canvas, ye | Va <3. if.
pain f on
 UNE CHDIGTIOUN

With imperiously graceful gestures, Jackson Pollock flings pigments through

the air. His technique is dramatic, it is astonishing, but it is not entirely
original. Hoping to exploit the raw force of the unconscious, the Surrealists
had poured and splashed their paints. There are dripped passages in certain
canvases by Hans Hofmann, the European maestro who introduced a gen-
eration of New Yorkers to the traditions of the avant-garde. David Alfaro
Siqueiros and Thomas Hart Benton are among those who dispensed with
brushes before Pollock did. Their experiments are nearly forgotten. Pollock’s
paint-slinging is remembered because it generated a power that overwhelms
understanding. Critics and historians describe him as a wrenchingly expres-
sive artist, a major formal innovator, a brilliant stylist. Pollock was all that,
as were others. What is unique about him has been elusive.
Surging to the edge of the canvas, sailing past it, Pollock’s loops and swirls
of color draw the imagination into a region of boundless space. Evoking a
sense of limitless possibility, the best of his canvases gave us—for the first
time—a pictorial equivalent to the American infinite that spreads through
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Depicting neither landscape nor figure, Pol-
lock pointed the way into a realm as vast as Whitman’s, and his gesture made
him one with it.
Pollock’s friend Barnett Newman did something comparable by different
means. So, on occasion, did Clyfford Stull, another member of their genera-
tion. Yet these painters did not form a school. They founded no tradition.
There can be no clear line of descent from artists who cultivated an ideal of
absolute self-sufficiency. Often, it was the fate of Pollock’s gesture to be re-
made by artists too independent to acknowledge any debt—Jasper Johns, for
a preeminent example.
Frank Stella, color-field painters, Minimalists, earthworkers, Julian Schna-
4 THE FATE OF A GESTURE

bel—these and many other artists of the postwar era reinvented Pollock’s
gesture. Yet many did not. While Pollock played the hero at home in a zone
with no boundaries, Willem de Kooning preserved the ideal of composition
as harmonious enclosure. A hero of measure and balance, he was the coun-
terforce to Pollock. This contrast resurfaced among the Pop artists.
From his obsession with glamour, Andy Warhol unfurled an image of
America as boundless as Pollock’s. Roy Lichtenstein does the opposite, ar-
ranging his bits and pieces of ordinary life in elegantly framed compositions.
Thus he makes only a fleeting appearance in this book, as do other major
figures, from Mark Rothko to Ellsworth Kelly and Alex Katz. For this is not
a survey of postwar American art. The Fate of aGesture concerns artists driven
by the unreasonable belief that to be American is to inherit an infinite.
 PAR Y=}

THE AMERICAN INEINITE

 \
Lee
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2. Jackson Pollock and lee Krasner, 1950. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt
One day early in June 1950, a photographer named Rudy Burckhardt rode
in a car from Manhattan to Springs, a village at the eastern end of Long
Island. There Jackson Pollock lived with his wife, Lee Krasner. The driver
was Robert Goodnough, a young painter who wrote about his older colleagues
for Artnews. At Springs, he would interview Pollock for an essay on his paint-
slinging method; Burckhardt would take photographs of the painter in action.
With the assignment came a ready-made title: “Pollock Paints a Picture.”
This was a variant on “Ben Shahn Paints a Picture,” “Lipchitz Makes a
Sculpture,” and half adozen others. The inventor of the formula was Thomas
B. Hess, managing editor at Artnews.
“Tom wanted to show the progress of a painting,’ says Burckhardt. “So
you’d go to the artist’s studio and take a picture of a canvas at various stages.
Hans Hofmann was delighted to paint in front of me and Elaine de Koo-
ning.” In “Hofmann Paints a Picture,” she described a virtuoso performance
by a seventy-year-old artist with a shock of thick white conductor’s hair.
Hofmann worked at “astonishing speed, never sitting down, constantly in
motion between his palette and his easel, applying his paint with broad, lung-
ing gestures.” A teacher since 1915, he welcomed an audience and may have
felt lonely without one. Onlookers made Pollock uneasy.
“He told me he couldn’t paint in front of the camera,’ Burckhardt re-
members. “But he was willing to pretend, so I took pictures of him making
the gestures he would make when he actually painted.” These are the large
motions ofa confident right arm. Burckhardt’s photos register Pollock’s mus-
cularity and his knack for concentrating his attention. Crouching, stretching,
thrusting, he never lets physical strength become mere force.
Burckhardt could record no gleam of pigment slithering from Pollock’s
brush, yet its absence isn’t obvious. The artist’s postures signal no falsity;
though he’s not painting, he is not acting. He is behaving and appears to be
8 Wale FANE Ole A Tele SINISE

at one with his behavior, like someone running not for form but to get
somewhere quickly. Burckhardt also showed the artist squatting to stir a can
of paint. The dome of his head is bald and his face is deeply creased. Its
features have settled heavily, so you can’t tell if he is frowning in thought or
keeping his expression blank. Only thirty-eight years old, he looks as if a
hard road has led him deep into middle age. Still, the arrangement of his
limbs is lithe and nonchalant. He has preserved the physical vanity of youth.

Goodnough recalls that “Pollock’s barn didn’t make a very big studio. He
had paintings tacked to the walls, and lying all over the floor. I went out to
Springs a couple of times. Once there were three or four people around, and
one of us stepped on a painting by mistake. Somebody said, “Be careful.’
Pollock said, “What do you mean, be careful? So what if he steps on it?’ It
didn’t bother him in the least.” Pollock painted on heavy canvas duck. His
works are not physically delicate, nor did he demand delicate behavior in
their vicinity.
Some of his colors were traditional oils packaged in tubes. Others were
commercial enamels sold by the gallon. Empty paint cans crowded the floor;
some held his tools—sticks and hardened brushes. Mixed with this clutter
were cardboard boxes, a few pieces of furniture, and a pair of old boots, all
spattered with paint, like the patches of floor left uncovered when Pollock
worked. Through the barn’s slatted walls came wide beams of silvery light
and, in winter, chilly drafts of ocean air. Pollock’s property fronted on Fire-
place Road. In back, the yard and a marshy verge led down to Accabonac
Creek, which runs slowly for half a mile to Napeague Bay. On the harshest
winter afternoons, he staved off the cold with a kerosene stove. This was a
clumsy piece of equipment; paint fumes are flammable and the barn was
made of tindery, weather-beaten wood. No mishap ever occurred, though
Krasner, also a painter, fretted whenever he lit the stove.

Working with a brush in the usual way, Pollock had been clumsy. Now, as
he flung his paints into the air, he became elegant. This is puzzling, though
almost everyone remembers moments when a sudden cessation of doubt per-
mits an utterly graceful gesture. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine how Pollock
could make gestures like that one after another, as the texture of a painting
grew dense. In the best of the poured paintings, this density is airy and
luminous, and the tangles of paint are splendidly legible. You can see how
the texture weaves itself. Not every canvas was a success, yet Pollock wrote
in 1947, “I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc.,
because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It 1s
only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess.”
“Pollock said he liked to be in the painting when he worked,” says Burck-
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 9

hardt. “He was submerged, in a way. To see everything he had done, he had
to hang the canvas on the wall. Or if he wanted a quick look, he would leave
it on the floor and get up on a ladder.” By climbing Pollock’s ladder, the
photographer could see what the painter could not: artist and artwork en-
tangled. In Number 32, 1950, the canvas Pollock pretended to paint for Burck-
hardt’s camera, spidery strands of black enamel loop over a large field of
white duck canvas. Shot from above in black and white, the poured pattern
engulfs the arm that made it. Pollock’s dark T-shirt is the largest of the
blotches that gather filaments of paint into crossing points like synapses.

When Burckhardt was done taking pictures, Krasner invited him and Good-
nough to stay the night. They accepted the offer. It was late in the afternoon;
they were more than a hundred miles from Manhattan; and, anyway,
Krasner’s wish felt more like a command. Her charm resided in the force of
her will. Pollock had let himself be seduced by it almost immediately. He
doted on her strength, though he sometimes complained to friends, with
childish cruelty, that she had a homely face. Mouth, chin, nose, eyes—each
was large, and she could arrange them in an expression of iron hauteur. In
command of art theory and art gossip, she knew how to survive and prevail
in the impatient debates that had given the New York art world its ragged
unity ever since the early days of the Depression. Acquainted with the scene’s
leading contenders, Krasner had counted as one of them.
Toward the end of 1941, a painter and occasional impresario named John
Graham asked her to lend work to a show called American and French
Paintings. The exhibition was to open the following January at the McMillen
Gallery. Krasner was pleased. Her pictures would appear in the company of
works by Old World masters: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri
Matisse. Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, and the other American names
on Graham’s roster were less illustrious but just as familiar, save one: Jackson
Pollock. Assuming that she “knew all the abstract artists in New York,” she
felt “simply furious because here was a name that I hadn’t heard of.” None
of her close friends could tell her anything about him. Stubbornly digging,
she learned that he lived on East Eighth Street, not far from her studio on
Ninth. She found his building and, five flights up, knocked on his door.
Hung over, Pollock let her in and showed her his work.
Then, in her repeated telling, came a moment of revelation: Krasner saw
the light of Pollock’s greatness. “To say that I flipped my lid would be an
understatement,” she said in one version of the tale. “I was totally bowled
over.” What she didn’t say was that Pollock, not his pictures, impressed her.
Only with the help of friends whose eyes she trusted did she learn to see
promise in the rough, desperate pictures Pollock was painting. Later she
convinced herself that her love for him and for his art had been identical
10 Tite Weenie <Gle BY Were
Sil UiNe

from the first dazzling instant. “I was terribly drawn to Jackson,” she said
in the late sixties. “I fell in love with him—physically, mentally—ain every
sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he had some-
thing important to say. When we began going together, my own work became
irrelevant. He was the important thing. I couldn’t do enough for him. He
was not easy.”
In truth, Pollock was nearly impossible, a brutal and infantile drunk. The
point of moving from Eighth Street to Springs was to extract him from the
swilling, brawling routines he had developed in downtown Manhattan. Of
course he developed new ones in his new setting. Too poor to afford a car,
he rode a secondhand bicycle to a restaurant called Jungle Pete’s. After an
excess of beer, he sometimes failed to find his way back to the house on
Fireplace Road. Yet Pollock drank less in the country than in the city, and
painted more. At the time of Burckhardt’s visit, he had touched no alcohol
for nearly two years.

“After dinner,’ the photographer recalls, “there was an evening to get

through. Pollock was pleasant but he didn’t talk much. He hardly said any-
thing. Goodnough wasn’t a big talker either, so things got a little boring. But
Lee Krasner made it pleasant. In fact, she did all the talking and she was
very gracious.” It was more usual for her to be pugnacious, and Pollock’s
silences could have the sullen force of temper tantrums. That evening, Kras-
ner behaved well and Pollock did the best he could. Their effort was strongly
motivated; as Burckhardt says, “Artnews was a big deal in those days.”
The art world had begun to honor Pollock. In return, he could muster
only the most awkward civilities. The economy of his psyche encouraged no
exchanges of any sort—courtesies, feelings, thoughts. Ordinary patterns of
reciprocity baffled him, and the memory of his bafflement returns us to the
small living room at Springs, where he and Krasner entertained the emissaries
from Artnews. As the minutes inch by, Pollock tries to be pleasant and Kras-
ner succeeds, her every word—her every lively inflection—driven by a sense
of mission. They are an intense and dreary couple.
Though the aura of Pollock’s importance was brightening in the summer
of 1950, it still seemed patchy and thin. A year before, Life magazine had
shown him standing before the eighteen-foot-long Summertime: Number 9A,
1948 (1948). A headline asked: “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the
United States?” The article that followed left the question open. Illustrated
by three color reproductions of poured paintings, Life’s report had the look
—if not the tone—of an accolade. Pollock was delighted. True to the form
of familiar, avant-garde legend, he had aroused the popular press. The time
had come for the art magazines to announce his greatness. Over the past few
seasons they had taken brief and sometimes respectful notice of his shows at
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 11

New York galleries, but there had been no prospect of a full-length essay, in
Artnews least of all.
Now, with “Pollock Paints a Picture” in the works, he was being fitted to
one of the art world’s major formats. Krasner saw in Goodnough’s article a
necessity dictated by Pollock’s importance. Yet editorial policy can be touched
by caprice, sometimes at the last moment, as Krasner knew. She behaved
nicely to Goodnough and Burckhardt in a chatty effort to prevent a cruel
surprise. Writer and photographer counted only as the means to an end, yet
we should hear no false notes in her cordiality. Because she truly believed
that Pollock’s career was a transcendently worthy cause, anything she did to
serve it, no matter how calculated, blazed with a righteous sincerity.
 y.
Ashamed of his family background, Pollock glamorized it, mentioning often
that he was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912. Maybe he liked the allusion
to Buffalo Bill Cody, the founder of the town. At the Art Students League
in Manhattan, he wore western boots and a cowboy hat, though he never
rode herd on cattle. Few Westerners did. Most were farmers or laborers or
pursued small-town lines of work. For a time, Jackson’s father, Roy Pollock,
hauled boulders in a horse-drawn wagon from riverbanks to a crushing
plant.
Roy was born in 1877 to a couple named McCoy, who had migrated
three years earlier from Ohio to a homestead in southwestern Iowa.
When he was two, his mother died and his father gave him to James
and Lizzie Pollock, the proprietors of a poor farm in the same corner of
the state. Though they didn’t adopt him formally until he was nineteen
years old, Roy always went by his foster parents’ name. Studious enough
to graduate from high school at a time when most Iowans did not, he none-
theless lacked gumption. After a few haphazard attempts to escape the place
of his birth, he drifted through half a decade of unambitious work, then
married Stella McClure, the daughter of a mason in the nearby town of
Tingley. Stella was a year older than Roy, and came from a more respectable
family.
In those late Victorian times, pious and market-driven, the need to be good
was indistinguishable from the hope of betterment. To become a proper sort
of person—an upstanding American—you had to improve your lot in life,
tangibly and otherwise. As much as money, you needed gentility. That Roy
Pollock was incorrigibly countrified, a tobacco chewer who found dull con-
tentment in slopping livestock, disappointed his wife more deeply than his
failure to earn a good living.
14 WHE eA tE sO ANCES Ui

Weakened by six years of hauling rocks, he took a job managing a sheep

ranch. Four years later, the family doctor found he had rheumatic fever and
recommended a warmer climate. He set out for California, with Stella and
their five boys. Jackson, the youngest, was less than a year old. Not long after
the family’s arrival in San Diego, the unforeseeable—a freak blizzard—de-
flected Roy from his plan of raising citrus fruit. The Pollocks settled on a
thirty-acre truck farm near Phoenix, Arizona. Jackson grew up as a farm
boy, not a cowboy.
In photographs of the Arizona and California farmhouses where
Pollock spent his childhood, you see at first a cluttered dreariness. Another
look turns clutter into a Victorian plenitude of textures, patterns,
and overwrought shapes. Stella Pollock plucked her notions of elegance
from ladies’ magazines and department-store catalogs. With her loud voice,
abrupt manner, and strong hand with a team of horses went dreams of
refinement. Entranced by a domestic ideal, she surrounded herself with fur-
nishings as fancy as her husband’s income would allow. No one now has her
taste, though many still believe, as she did, that an ever more sophisticated
sense of beauty must guide the acquisition of material things. When she was
old and three of her five sons had become painters, Stella Pollock told a
daughter-in-law that as a girl in Iowa she wanted to study art but never
found the chance.

When Jackson was eight, his father bought a hotel in Janesville, a small
town on the northern slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. For
half a year, Roy Pollock helped his wife run the establishment.
Then, frustrated and restless, he joined a team of surveyors on its way
through town. Though he never returned for good, his desertion was
not complete. As Stella Pollock moved their five boys from town to farm
to town, Roy occasionally visited or sent money. In 1928, after years
of uncertain scrabbling in the Southwestern countryside, Stella Pollock
settled the remnants of her household in Los Angeles. Two years earlier
her eldest son, Charles, had gone to study with Thomas Hart Benton
at the Art Students League in New York. Now sixteen years old,
Jackson entered Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles as a sopho-
more.
There he found a substitute father of sorts in Frederick John de St. Vrain
Schwankovsky, an art teacher with a mustache, a goatee, and flowing hair.
His shoes were sandals and he wore a velvet jacket. Schwankovsky was a
bohemian with a teacher’s license who took seriously his mission of bringing
aesthetic enlightenment to young men. Pollock learned from Schwankovsky
an unfocused awe of art but no facility with a pencil. Writing to his brother
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 15

in New York, Pollock said his drawings were “rotten.” They lacked “freedom
and rhythem.”
When Pollock was suspended from Manual Arts for distributing subversive
broadsides, Schwankovsky arranged for him to keep attending art classes.
The handouts had proclaimed that varsity letters should be awarded to
artists and musicians, not football players. This theory drew Pollock into
a scuffle with a gym teacher. He was suspended again, and again
Schwankovsky intervened. His earliest drawings may indeed have been
rotten. Still, some quality in them or their maker impressed Schwan-
kovsky, who went far out of his way to encourage Pollock in the one hope
for himself that he had ever expressed: to become “an Artist of some
kind.”
When Jackson came to Manhattan in September 1930, he moved in
with his brother, who lived in a walk-up apartment on Union Square,
just north of Fourteenth Street. At the Art Students League, he signed
up for the course Charles had taken from Benton: Life Drawing,
Painting, and Composition. Charles enjoyed that knack for likenesses
which makes drawing instructors look better than they are. Because
the flattery is unintentional, it is usually accepted, and Benton
found it particularly gratifying. A pugnacious personality, constantly
on the counterattack, he recruited allies when ever he could. Likable
and talented Charles became a close friend of Benton and his wife,
Rita, and a nearly always available baby-sitter for their young
son, T.P.
After Charles left the Art Students League to scrape a living as a free-
lance illustrator, Jackson took over his baby-sitting chores. He made a bit
of money by posing for Benton’s America Today (1930), a mural
commissioned by the New School for Social Research on West Twelfth
Street. Also, his teacher arranged for him to receive small grants from
the Art Students League. In Benton, Jackson found a second substitute
for his weak and absent father, this one wearing a jacket of sportsman’s
leather instead of bohemian velvet. Benton’s wife saw in Jackson a
fragile creature who needed mothering. Tending the four-year-old T-.P.,
Pollock became an imaginary big brother. Helpful sometimes, he was
more often underfoot. Yet the Bentons always welcomed him to their
Hudson Street apartment, and he soon felt like an adopted member of the
family.
Pollock was grateful, though the happiness of an invented kinship is
always a carefully devised illusion. Rita’s motherly warmth prompted in
Pollock a violent and baffling infatuation. Benton was an unsatisfactory
father figure. He didn’t want a son so much as a sidekick, a young
16 Tle AE Or ST UIs
VANGiE

and manipulable version of himself. The painter George McNeil, who at-
tended the Art Students League in the early thirties, recalled the affinity
between Pollock and Benton. “There was a rhythm, a flow, between them
from the beginning to the end of their lives,” he told Jeffrey Potter, whose
biography of Pollock appeared in 1985. “It was a physical, gestural rhythm;
teacher and student were bonded, you might say.” In his western costume,
Pollock played out a fantasy of youth and America. This was Benton’s fantasy
as much as his own.

Pollock stood two inches under six feet tall. Wide through the shoulders,
with large hands and head, he was a hulking, uneasy presence. Often he
could defeat his shyness only with belligerence, sneering at a bit of art jargon
or echoing Benton’s slurs against “wops,” Jews, and homosexuals. Benton
insisted on seeming tough. In boots and blue jeans, Pollock imitated him with
ease. Struggling to draw in Benton’s manner, he shamed himself. Faced with
a task as simple as transferring an image to a sheet of tracing paper, Pollock
could not make his pencil obey.
There is comfort in the belief that schooling is an orderly process of
conveying knowledge from teacher to student. Historians have argued
that Pollock must have learned something from Benton, maybe an
idea about visual structure which guided him years later as he poured
his colors onto canvas. This is not so. Beneath his eccentric surface, Benton
was a thoroughly academic teacher. His students learned from him how to
arrange their imagery in tight patterns of the kind Pollock flooded and swept
away with his currents of paint. Nothing in Benton’s pedagogy accounts for
the billowing immensity of the poured paintings. Yet his reminiscences tell
us much about his best-known student’s eventual need to abandon traditional
techniques.
Several years after Pollock’s death in a car crash, Benton wrote that his
student’s talents had been “of a most minimal order.” He displayed no grasp
of the outlines, the volumes, the proportions of things; nonetheless, Benton
added, Pollock “found their essential rhythms.” Another time, he declared
that “it was obvious from the very beginning that Pollock was a born artist.
The only thing I taught him was how to drink a fifth a day.” Pollock didn’t
learn even that from Benton. The biographies tell of him drinking heavily
in his teenage years, out West. His brother Frank recalled that all the Pollock
brothers were heavy drinkers; their straitlaced “mother had to know some of
the time, but she didn’t seem to have much influence on us, even if she had
throttled my dad.”
When Jackson arrived at the Art Students League, Prohibition was
two years from repeal. In the school’s cafeteria, he and a band of friends
would pour drinks from bottles decorated with a bootlegger’s gin label. In
THE AMERICAN INFINITE
17.

the evenings, he visited a speakeasy on West Fifty-eighth Street, a

block
north of the school. A drink or two would numb his terrors and liberate
his rage, turning him into a groper of women and an_ ineffective
brawler. He could not resist the degrading fun of it, and from Benton he
learned that his drunkenness was more than fun. It was a sign of manly
strength.
 Vie ~

3. Thomas Hart Benton, SelFPortrait with Rita, 1922. Oil on canvas, 4912 x
AO in.
 5
Thomas Hart Benton was a short, slim man, with a weather-beaten face and
a thick mustache. During waking hours he drank steadily but never enough
to impair the performance of his self-appointed role: America’s greatest
painter. Benton’s ability to hold his liquor was a metabolic quirk; he presented
it as an admirable trait of character, a willed virtue. To drink like a manly
man was to prove himself unfit for the world of art. Museums, he explained
to interviewers, were sanctuaries for effeminate types too ready to dote on
the fashionable obfuscations of avant-garde theory—especially the Parisian
kind. Benton particularly needed to attack Paris. When he was nineteen, his
well-to-do family sent him there to study art, and the city’s avant-garde se-
duced him.
He was amazed and stirred by the paintings of Paul Cézanne. Neo-
Impressionism, Expressionism, and Constructivism all insinuated themselves
into his early work. Benton became sufficiently avant-garde to make a ten-
tative alliance with the Synchromists, a splinter group of Cubists founded by
two expatriate Americans, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.
His Synchromist paintings showed promise, yet Benton chose not to be en-
couraged. Modernist freedom felt to him like a wallow in unwarranted li-
cense. After a short immersion in Parisian experiment, he fled, sputtering,
convinced that the avant-garde was a decadent, alien force intent on ruining
his American sense of the fitness of things. In 1924, six years after returning
from his last trip abroad, he announced in a New York art magazine that it
was time for “native painters to quit emulating our collectors by playing
weathercock to European breezes.”
Still, Benton never abandoned the ideas of form and structure he learned
from the European avant-garde. This is an irony but not a subtle one. Benton
tended to generate unsubtle ironies. He denounced effeminate curators so
brutally, so repetitiously, and finally so hysterically that his sister told him he
20 THE iEALEVOR ACES IUIE

was “protesting too much.” Prodded by the fear that he might be homosexual,
he played the militant homophobe; and as his attacks on museums and their
personnel turned nastier, his reliance on museums and their contents grew
more obvious. Benton’s insistence on misunderstanding himself did little to
cripple his output.
While working on America Today for the New School for Social Research,
he launched and completed a smaller project, The History of Water. Com-
missioned by a drug company in Washington, D.C., this was a single large
canvas on the theme of water’s industrial uses over the centuries. Next came
The Arts of Life in America (1932), a six-panel project for the library of the
Whitney Museum of American Art, then lodged in four town houses on
West Eighth Street. A month after finishing this cycle, he began A Social
History of Indiana (1933) for the state’s pavilion at the Chicago world’s fair
of 1933. It was to be fourteen feet high, 230 feet long, and finished in six
months—a suitable project for an artist with a liking for the Midwest and a
need to exhaust himself in marathon stints of hard work.
To prepare, Benton toured Indiana. Sketching as he went, he encouraged
local people to tell him what they knew of the state’s history and legends.
The point of the routine was to give his art roots in American life. This, too,
Pollock imitated. After his first year at the Art Students League, he and a

4. Thomas Hart Benton, The Arts of Life in America: The Arts of ihe South, 1932.
Oil on canvas, 8 x 13 ft.
 THE AMERICAN INFINITE
Bi]

classmate, Michael Tolegian, hitchhiked from New York to Los Angeles.

In
a letter to Charles he reported that “the country began getting interesting in
Kansas—the wheat was just beginning to turn and the farmers were making
preparation for harvest. I saw the negroes playing poker, shooting craps and
dancing along the Mississippi in St. Louis. The miners and prostitutes in
Terre Haute gave swell color.” He meant local color, a display of the pic-
turesque. Pollock added that miners and prostitutes alike were “starving—
working for a quarter—digging their graves.” Pollock’s background in-
structed him in racism and sentimentality; from Benton he learned how to
convert them into a blustery patriotism.
Painting day in, day out, all day, with few breaks, often returning to work
after dinner, Benton finished the twenty-six hundred square feet of A Social
History of Indiana in sixty-three days. On average, he brought a four-by-ten-
foot stretch of canvas to completion every day for over two months. This feat
of stamina shows a fanatic certainty of purpose. Benton knew precisely what
he wanted to paint; he knew even better his need for a hectic schedule. By
keeping busy, he defeated introspection, and busyness triumphed in his mu-
rals too. With flashy juxtapositions of theme and fancy tricks of perspective,
he just barely induces their overcrowded structures to cohere. The results
look theatrical and rickety and, in their undeclared dependence on Europe,
provincial.
Benton’s murals borrowed structural ingenuity from Cubism and verve
from El Greco’s flamelike figures. Unable to deny that El Greco and his other
master, Michelangelo, were European, he framed his theories to suggest that
great art belongs to no time or place; it is transcendent, and the devices of
greatness are at their best when they serve the militantly American themes
of his murals. In Benton’s compressed perspectives, each image is an element
in a rebus spelling out a jingoistic speech about life in the United States.
Elongated and twisted into extravagant poses, Benton’s representative citizens
make brittle gestures. Those who work are bent with toil and, having worked
hard, they play hard—as cliché demands. When asked to expound on his
devotion to America, he didn’t so much praise this nation as sneer at all the
others. This was a sour patriotism. The painter’s father, Maecenas Eason
Benton, was more generous.

Trained in the law, the elder Benton served four terms in Congress as a
representative from southwestern Missouri. He was a Democrat, and small
farmers were his constituency; his opponents were bankers and land specu-
lators. This configuration of the political struggle was a legacy from his uncle,
the first Thomas Hart Benton, a senator from Missouri. Sent to Washington
in 1821, when his state joined the Union, he held that office until 1851, when
his stand against slavery sent him to defeat.
22 HIE PATE OR VAN Ges Uirae

Senator Benton was capable of extended ranting, on the Senate floor and
in the newspapers. He was not above devious political maneuvers. Yet he had
a large idea of America as a sanctuary of agrarian virtue, and he respected
the American people—above all, the ones who returned him to Congress
term after term. To praise them, even to flatter them, he needed only to call
on feelings of genuine affection. Though his nephew, Maecenas E. Benton,
felt a more remote concern for his constituents, he worked hard for them.
Young Tom, the painter, saw himself as the inheritor of their responsibilities.
His father and great-uncle had represented certain parties, certain regions, in
Congress. He would represent the entire American people in paint.
To better their examples, Benton needed a national reputation. With dog-
ged flair, he earned it. Each of his murals prompted an energetic response in
the press. With his folksy mannerisms and evangelical devotion to the idea
of an all-American aesthetic, he encouraged reporters to see him as a sort of
Johnny Appleseed helping art to germinate throughout the country. Early in
1933 Pollock told his father, in a letter, that “Benton is beginning to be
recognized as the foremost American painter today. He has lifted art from
the stuffy studio into the world and happenings around him, which has a
common meaning to the masses.” In December 1934 Time magazine put
a Benton self-portrait on its cover. Inside, it proclaimed him the leader of a
small band of American painters whose plain styles and familiar themes had
defeated the vogue for the “deliberately unintelligible” art of the modernists.
In phrases echoing Benton’s, Time announced the arrival of art made strong
by American virtues. This was sheer boosterism. All that was generous in
the earlier Bentons had shriveled in him.
He intended his murals to celebrate America as the nation’s democratic
ideals demanded, so it bewildered him to be called a right-winger. The best-
aimed attack came from Stuart Davis, a leader of the New York avant-garde
who tried, with his Americanized Cubism, to reconcile modernist aesthetics
and leftish politics. “Any fascist or semi-fascist government” would have a
use for Benton, wrote Davis in 1935. “His qualifications would be, in general,
his social cynicism which allows him to depict social events without regard
to their meaning.” How, Benton wondered, could he be a fascist when for
so long he had sympathized with Marxism? His illustrations appeared in a
Marxist history of the United States, Leo Huberman’s We, the People (1932);
and he had borrowed the book’s scheme of analysis in organizing America
Today.
Benton did not claim to be a model Marxist. By the late twenties, the
American Communist Party’s habitual obedience to Moscow had begun to
rub him the wrong way. Nothing in his temperament inclined him to accept
the Stalinist dictate that artists depict workers as the happy, heroic citizens
of a paradise in the making. Benton considered himselfa realist of sorts; but
 THE AMERICAN INFINITE 2253

that, he indignantly argued, did not make him a fascist. What was he, then?
Impressed by the cover story in Time, newspaper reporters gave Benton many
opportunities to devise an answer to that question. For him, an interview was
like a few rounds in the ring with a cooperative sparring partner.
His early moves always included an acknowledgment of the obvious: mar-
kets had collapsed in the Depression. Familiar institutions were helpless in
solving the crisis, and American assumptions about rugged individualism
were suspect. In the jargon of the times, there was the need for a collective
solution. Collectivism in the Marxist mold was of course too rigid. Even
Roosevelt’s New Deal, admirably American as it was, had fostered ideological
intransigence at the public art agencies. Hope, said Benton, thrives in the
middle-western heart of the country. This region “has harbored the three
important collective experiments in the United States (Rapp, Owen, Amana).”
Moreover, its young, “radical” artists—Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry,
Benton himself—have accepted “collectivist ideals” without sacrificing their
independence. This is the Bentonite ideal: collectivism reconciled with the
old-fashioned Jeffersonian democracy that encourages the autonomy of the
individual. It is an impossible reconciliation.
The impossibility did not trouble Benton, for he had no genuine interest
in politics. For him, communism, collectivism, and radicalism were hardly
more than useful words: verbal counters in a game of polemics. When the
occasion required, he would invoke the democratic ideals of his father and
great-uncle, and of his great-uncle’s presidential crony, Andrew Jackson.
Never did he act on those ideals. Though not a fascist, Benton was far from
a democrat. He was an America-Firster of the stubbornest sort. Fearing that
he and everything American deserved the condescension of Europe, he often
and loudly asserted that America was the best.
Benton protested too much about everything that troubled him, and his
images of American superiority are unconvincing. With their Michelange-
lesque muscles, the white working men in his panoramas look like handsome
dolts animated by habits of simple obedience; the women look blank and
inconsequential, or sluttish if they’re pretty. In Benton’s America, intellectuals
are New Yorkers with parodies of Semitic features and blacks play the roles
of humble darkies who strum banjos when their cotton picking is done.
Signs of respect appear only in his pictures of men wearing suits and ties
—corporate managers and political bosses—and here, too, cliché prevails. The
bodies of these figures are heavy with authority. Their gestures are com-
manding, and the artist has stamped the face of each with one or two quickly
read signs of character. Benton never paused over people’s particularities.
Even the figures he admired became pawns in his cranky game of dressing
up his resentments and sending them into the world as a patriot’s proud
beliefs.
 at a shh 7
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= aah 8 BD

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 A

The jazz age brings to mind flappers and sporty roadsters. Then comes the
Great Depression, with its breadlines and shantytowns crowded by men with-
out jobs. These are newsreel images, grimly intelligible but weightless until
we imagine the shock of sudden, massive economic disaster in a nation that
understood its prosperity as a benefice ordained by history in concert with
nature. Not every member of the middle class descended into poverty. Those
who did carried with them a burden of fear and humiliation they never
expected to bear. They found out what it was to be unwanted.
After standing on the margins for so long, avant-garde artists weren’t
shocked by the Depression, only further wounded. Some were disinclined to
feel the pain of it fully. The sculptor David Smith told Thomas B. Hess that
“parties were never as wonderful as in the 1930s, when everyone chipped in
for whiskey and all the girls were beautiful.” When the ordinary intruded—
when it was time to pay rent or buy groceries or simply walk through streets
filled with derelict people—the avant-gardists let their aesthetics arrange their
points of view.
Their views were leftist, for in the thirties innovative art appeared to be
the refined cousin of revolutionary politics. Members of the avant-garde at-
tended union rallies; some marched in picket lines. The painter William
Baziotes remembered strikers charged by mounted police on Eighth Avenue
near the main post office, with no defense but marbles to roll beneath the
horses’ hooves. He was close enough to watch this expedient in action and
to see precisely how it failed. Not so easily upended, the horses advanced as
planned. In that reminiscence you feel the Depression’s desperation turning
into panic. Mostly, the artists of that time recall the art they made and how
it led to later triumphs; or they talk of quiet stratagems that kept them housed
and clothed and sometimes adequately fed.
“You learned to eat practically nothing so that you could buy a tube of
26 inte WeyNINe (Oye 2 Cle SICUiele

paint,” said an artist named Burgoyne Diller. Always there was an eye out
for the odd job or the opportunity to barter. “The artist,” Diller added, “was
probably the most self-reliant, self-sufficient individual in the city of New
York. You had some of your top management people standing on a corner
selling apples, but . . . the artist had so many accomplishments, craft accom-
plishments and related things, that he somehow or other survived.” Diller
had enrolled at the Art Students League before the 1929 crash; afterward, he
earned his meals by painting restaurant placards.
Certified as an art teacher by City College, Lee Krasner decided to make
art, not teach it. This was a courageous choice in 1933. To support herself,
she decorated china and hats; in silk pajamas, she waited on tables at a
Greenwich Village restaurant. The painter Mark Rothko taught art to chil-
dren part-time at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, and his first wife, Edith Sachar
Rothko, made costume jewelry. They had a small apartment on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. Downtown, artists lived in the cold-water flats of
Greenwich Village; in neighborhoods to the east and north, they took up
illegal residence in loft buildings zoned for light industry.
Some city inspectors were lackadaisical; others were bribable nuisances.
When the thumping on the door began, pots, dishes, and whatever the artist
used for a stove had to disappear. It helped if the bed could become a sofa.
Jumpers—gadgets that bypassed electric meters—were disconnected. If the
loft looked sufficiently unlived-in when the door was opened, the inspector
would go away. If not, he would receive the handful of nickels and dimes
set aside for the occasion. The usual sum was two dollars—roughly ten per-
cent of a month’s rent on an East Tenth Street loft.
Leading invisible lives, making works of art that went unseen, the artists
channeled some of their fervor into loud public demands. They formed the
Artists’ Union and picketed City Hall, agitating for a gallery open to all
applicants. They claimed to be unemployed, therefore deserving relief pay-
ments. Long afterward, the critic Harold Rosenberg remarked on the oddity
of presenting oneself as an out-of-work artist. To paint or sculpt was not to
hold down a job. Artists could not be dismissed like surplus factory hands.
Pretending otherwise, they assumed the stances—and shouted the slogans—
of an oppressed proletariat. “We want bread,” cried John Graham, as he
marched in a May Day parade, his gesticulating hands clad in chamois gloves.
At another march, Rosenberg saw a writer carrying a sign that read “we
WANT BON-VIVANT JOBS.”
These events were sometimes giddy at the edges, for artists and writers
broke a taboo when they sacrificed their independence to a collective effort.
Avant-gardists “can be as ruggedly individualistic as any creatures in the
United States,” said Diller. Awkwardly, they improvised allegiances,
prompted by “one very simple, basic thing. They needed to eat.” Union tactics
 THE AMERICAN INFINITE Di,

mustered a “power which each individual artist could not exercise. . . It was
something just building up, something that hadn’t reached any kind of ma-
turity in its demand, but still the demand was there, and it was vocal.” To
meet this demand, the Roosevelt administration jerry-built a series of art
agencies. These departments of government appeared, evolved, split, and
merged at high speed. The most important for painters was the Federal Arts
Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration—the Project, for
short. It rested on the premise, sincerely believed by major figures in Wash-
ington, that art is a good thing.
When the Department of the Treasury became a patron of post-office
murals, an assistant secretary told the press that “encouragement of the fine
arts has always been recognized as one of the functions of the Federal Gov-
ernment.” Traditionally, the federal government had been indifferent to the
fine arts, and supported them now for reasons less aesthetic than therapeutic.
“In times of depression,” the assistant secretary went on to say, “the work of
artists and craftsmen greatly aids everyone by preserving and increasing our
capacity for enjoyment.” Art is a good thing because it is good for morale;
also, it provides an opportunity for proper politics. Franklin Roosevelt com-
mended the Treasury Section of Fine Arts for drafting equitable regulations
“in keeping with our highest democratic ideals.” He and his advisers may
have feared, also, that idle artists would turn radical sentiment into hard
principles of revolutionary action.
When the Artists’ Union had no point of its own to make, it sometimes
joined forces with other unions. Joseph Solman, a social-realist painter, said
later that “if the salesgirls went out on strike at Macy’s department store in
Brooklyn, a grouping from” the Artists’ Union and the National Maritime
Union “was bound to swell the picket line.” When artists picketed, “a truck-
load of NMU workers would appear and jump out onto the sidewalk to join
our procession. Cheers welled up from all sides. Those were spirited times
indeed.” Government stipends led the artists’ high spirits back to the studio.
A clerk at Woolworth’s lived on about thirty-two dollars a month in the
mid-thirties. Receiving three times as much, artists on the Federal Arts Proj-
ect had an income approaching the national median. With that, said Willem
de Kooning, “one could live modestly and nicely.” The Project allowed him
to set aside carpentry, window trimming, and house painting to focus on
painting as high art. Meeting “all kinds of other painters and sculptors and
writers and poets and architects, all in the same boat,” he learned a standard
of seriousness. The FAP enrolled him in its mural division in 1935. A year
later, an administrator discovered that de Kooning was not an American
citizen and threw him off the Project.
Forced again to support himself with odd jobs, he accepted as few as
possible. Rudy Burckhardt tells of adepartment store in Philadelphia offering
28 Winle FAIE Ole W GESTS

de Kooning a job as a full-time window dresser. “This was around 1936,

maybe a little later,” says Burckhardt. “The pay was $150 a week, which was
very good then, but he turned it down because he didn’t want to move to
Philadelphia. He wanted to stay in New York and be a painter, which meant
that he was very poor.”
All the avant-gardists were poor, despite de Kooning’s talk of living “mod-
estly and nicely” on a stipend from the Project. During the war years, Baziotes
sometimes indulged himself in the ambiguous luxury of recalling the hard-
ships imposed by that meager and occasionally delayed sum. With skipped
meals went a reluctance to flip electric light switches; in winter, artists often
sacrificed heat. Baziotes’s wife, Ethel, later recalled that his time on the WPA
so damaged him physically that afterward he could paint only a few hours a
day. Yet he refused to play the invalid’s part. Jimmy Ernst, a painter and the
son of the Surrealist Max Ernst, described Baziotes as a Bogart-like figure in
a fedora and a dark overcoat.

Harold Rosenberg said the Depression forced New York artists to make a
“personal code” of “ascetic discipline.” From the rigor of their aesthetics they
evolved an ethic of the hard life, and with this ethic they protected their art
from their frailties. Burckhardt remembers a time in the thirties “when de
Kooning was very upset about something. I suggested that he have a drink
to calm down. He wouldn’t. He refused to drink in those days. When he
was upset, he would walk around all night.” De Kooning was fidgety and
stubborn. In a memoir of the thirties, the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby
said, “I often heard him say that he was beating his brains out about con-
necting a figure and a background.”
After a desperate stint in the studio, there would be another restless walk
through the streets. Afterward, Denby recalled, de Kooning would talk with
his friends “about scale in New York, and about the difference of instinctive
scale in signs, painted color, clothes, gestures, everyday expressions between
Europe and America. We were happy to be in a city the beauty of which
was unknown, uncozy, and not small scale.” Denby, de Kooning, and Burck-
hardt wanted to throw light on all that is thoughtlessly grand about Man-
hattan. Their art would give their reasons for loving a city that, despite its
sophistication, had next to no idea of their struggles. Because their refined
taste put them in danger of starving, it felt to them like personal courage.
In a poem called “The Climate,’ Denby notes the light flashing from a
“worn-down cafeteria fork.” In that instant, an ordinary object looks like an
emblem of the way artists and poets lived then. Denby’s cafeteria fork is a
proud, even a prideful, emblem. Assuming heroic postures, these New York-
ers endowed themselves with resilient surfaces. As they endured and were
overlooked, they would not complain, though they talked incessantly. It was
THE AMERICAN INFINITE BY

nearly all the entertainment they had. “Maybe the talking had something to
do with coffee,” says Burckhardt. “Everybody drank coffee then, at the caf-
eterias. The main one was the Waldorf, at the corner of Eighth Street and
Sixth Avenue. You could eat there, fairly cheaply, or just get a cup of coffee
and sit at a table for as long as you wanted.”
During “the years of hanging around,” as Rosenberg called them, the artists
gossiped. They complained about the Project’s regulations or sniped at each
other's aesthetics. From aesthetics they drifted—or leapt—to politics. Social
realists talked about painting pictures “of the people and for the people.”
They would sneer at avant-gardists in “ivory towers.” Lee Krasner helped
organize protests by the Artists’ Union and sometimes she picketed with other
unions. She accepted the idea, as pervasive as hunger in the days of the
Depression, that misery is capitalism’s leading product. To sympathize with
that misery was to stand on the left; to be a serious painter, she stood apart.
Looking back on the thirties, Krasner told the art historian Barbara Rose: “I,
for one, didn’t feel my art had to reflect my political point of view. I didn’t
feel like I was purifying the world at all. No, I was just going about my
business and my business seemed to be in the direction of abstraction.” The
trouble was that only a few friends cared whether she succeeded.
Krasner and her colleagues read Cahiers d’art, the Parisian avant-garde’s
journal of record. They visited shows at the Museum of Modern Art, and
whenever the work of a European avant-gardist appeared in the galleries of
a Fifty-seventh Street dealer, they appeared on the premises, modestly dressed
and obviously intending to buy nothing. They were looking for signs pointing
to the high road of aesthetic advance. If none appeared, they would settle for
cues to further conversation at the tables of cheap, overlit cafeterias. Refusing
to let this talk subside, the avant-garde New Yorkers preserved the illusion
that they were not thoroughly inconsequential. They were not, on the island
of Manhattan, utterly insular.
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The Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929. Seven years later, the museum’s
first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., put the institution’s principles on display
in an exhibition called Cubism and Abstract Art. The show was a gathering
of work by more than one hundred artists, designers, architects, and photog-
raphers. There were paintings by modernist heavyweights—Paul Cézanne,
Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian. There was a rug by a modernist lightweight
named Jean Lurcat, a model of Le Corbusier’s Savoye House, a poster by the
commercial artist A. M. Cassandre, a lamp by the visionary architect Fred-
erick Kiesler.
Barr complemented Picasso’s Cubism with a small selection of “African
Negro sculpture.” The show also included an etching of a prison vault by
the eighteenth-century Italian Giambattista Piranesi. With this image, said
the director, Piranesi “anticipated Cubist-Constructivist esthetics.” Amid the
Old World plenitude was work by two Americans: Alexander Calder and
Man Ray, expatriates who counted for Barr as honorary Europeans. New
York was the site of the Museum of Modern Art, yet the city’s artists did
not appear in this exhibition.
A curator’s choices cannot be right. They can only be coherent and, in
their coherence, persuasive. The coherence of Cubism and Abstract Art was
dazzling. Barr’s associate Dorothy Miller said that he needed almost no time
to select works for this exhibition: “Alfred had it all in his head.” In the
museum, the show occupied four floors of gallery space. Barr’s concept of
modern art and its major developments was monumental. On firm founda-
tions, this quietly imperious scholar had raised a solid and only slightly fussy
edifice of historical argument. Schematized, his thesis generated the diagram
of avant-garde genealogy that spread across the cover of the exhibition’s cat-
alog. Though it is six decades old, this chart still guides the Modern’s pre-
sentation of its holdings. Barr’s chart had no room for New York artists.
Se Tie A E Ol Ag Go URE

Recalling the thirties, Krasner said, “There was little support and few
rewards. I felt like I was climbing a mountain made of porcelain.” All the
artists she took seriously were scrambling on the same inhospitable slope.
They looked at art, they read and talked about it. To relieve the solitude of
the studio, they attended classes at the Art Students League or the Metro-
politan Museum. In 1938 the painter Amédée Ozenfant, a veteran of the
Parisian avant-garde, immigrated to New York and dispensed instruction in
a midtown atelier. Preferring the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in
Greenwich Village, Lee Krasner studied there for three seasons.

Born in Germany in 1880, Hofmann had come to Paris at the age of twenty-
three. Picasso was still in his Blue Period. When Hofmann returned to his
native Munich in 1914, Fauvism had flourished and died, and Cubism was
entering its maturity. Kept in Munich by the outbreak of war, he opened an
art school and gave his students the benefit of his immersion in the conver-
sations about style conducted by the Parisian avant-garde. Hofmann had met
Picasso and Braque, and among his friends was the Cubist Robert Delaunay.
He had attended drawing classes at the Ecole de la Grande Chaumiére with
Henri Matisse, who liked to explain to his fellow students the workings of
color in the paintings of Cézanne. Hofmann felt that he had begun his career
as a participant in history.
Invitations to teach brought him to California in 1931; within a year, the
Nazis’ increasing power persuaded him to abandon Germany for the New
World. After stints of teaching in Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Gloucester,
Massachusetts, Hofmann settled in New York and founded his school, which
served as a platform for an immense apparatus of theory. The American art
world has generated only one distinctive critical method, which goes by the
name of Greenbergian formalism. Its inventor, Clement Greenberg, has ac-
knowledged his debt to Hofmann’s doctrine that a painted image should
acknowledge the conditions of its existence: the flatness of the canvas, the
straightness of its edges, the squareness of its corners. Hofmann gave New
York painters a way to think coherently about their work.
To illustrate his principles, Hofmann would amend a student’s drawing
with his stick of charcoal, or he’d tear it up and rearrange its fragments to
reveal the structure it should have had. His students were worthy of his
efforts, but to outsiders he would offer “no explanations.” An avant-gardist’s
task is to preserve the faith that “some day the Philistines will see!” For only
habit and mild caution hide serious art from uninitiated eyes. These veils
must fall of their own meager weight. When they do, serious art in all its
integrity, its universality, will be there to meet the gaze. And no serious artist
will be considered provincial.
At Hofmann’s school, one faction blended his teachings with Wassily Kan-
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 3S

dinsky’s doctrines of transcendent symbol and spontaneous expression. They

were the Romantic Hofmannites. The neoclassical faction favored the severe
lucidity of Mondrian’s straight lines and right angles. This was Krasner’s
group, a clique of geometers. By the end of the thirties, she considered herself
a seasoned apprentice. Her pictures declared her allegiance to the principles
Hofmann had distilled from his seasons in Paris. These principles are too
general to produce an individual style. Krasner knew that. At the Hofmann
school, she was fortifying the talent that, given free rein, would establish her
singularity. When she met Pollock, the moment was near.
In him, she found something rare in the New York avant-garde: a painter
who could talk only hesitatingly about art. Pollock read the art magazines
now and then; he attended museum and gallery shows. He knew the mod-
ernist styles and had managed to vex his art with their complexities. Never,
though, did he solve the, small stylistic problems he set for himself, and he
didn’t know there was a large one; he had not faced the provinciality problem.
Thomas Hart Benton taught that a proper style is what an artist’s true nature
prompts him to assert single-mindedly, the way a good American asserts his
patriotism. Pollock left the Art Students League with nothing but a few
Bentonite habits and no knack for developing his avant-garde reflexes. As
innovations arrived from abroad, as they clashed and evolved and local styles
emerged, he couldn’t follow the action. During the thirties Pollock was lost,
adrift in the present as others found ways into the future.

In the spring of 1933, he took his last class at the Art Students League and
the school stopped its grants of money. Still feeling fatherly—or big-
brotherly—Benton invited him to spend the summer with his family at their
cottage on Martha’s Vineyard. Jackson returned the next summer and the
next. With his helplessness, he commandeered help. Late in 1934 Benton
steered him to a janitor’s job at a private elementary school in Greenwich
Village. Pollock’s brother Sanford arrived in town soon afterward. Finding
no job for himself, he helped Jackson with his. Though the pay was laughable,
their expenses were low. The brothers lived rent-free on the top floor of an
abandoned, unheated building at 76 West Houston Street. Jackson earned bits
of money doing household chores invented by Rita Benton. He helped her
hang shows of young artists’ work in the basement of the Feragil, her hus-
band’s gallery, and occasionally tended the shop. This was not a job so much
as a way to keep busy at the edge of destitution.
Inevitably, Pollock and his brother went on relief. Sull working as janitors,
they now received two incomes, both minuscule. There was always enough
to eat, though Pollock’s myth has them stealing food and fuel from pushcarts
in the killing winter of 1935. The Pollock boys made of the Depression a
dreary and hectic carnival. If they stole in the streets, they were driven less
34 Tae PATE Or AsGE cirUrRic

by hunger than by a mean sort of naughtiness. Sanford’s worst tribulation

was Jackson’s alcoholism.
Silently, the Pollock family had allotted him the task of keeper. Without
complaint, he accepted it, compelled by his brother’s anguish and the chance
to join in his staggering rampages. The painter Peter Busa remembers a party
where Sanford climbed onto Jackson’s shoulders and “started hitting people
all over the room.” This was horseplay only a few degrees more violent than
usual on the rowdier fringes of New York bohemia. Sanford could stop
himself at that point; Jackson could not. As his long, drunken nights ended,
he became a stumbler down stairwells and a roller in gutters, literally.
Early in 1935 a city agency called the Emergency Relief Bureau assigned
Pollock the task of cleaning the Firemen’s Memorial, a bronze and marble
leviathan at 100th Street and Riverside Drive. There was other statuary to
scrub—George Washington on a horse in Union Square and, near Astor
Place, a seated Peter Cooper. After a few months, the bureau demoted him
and his pay fell from $1.75 to eighty-five cents an hour. No help came from
the Bentons, who now considered themselves poor by the most forgiving art-
world standard. Housed, fed, and miserable, Pollock endured until August,
when he joined Sanford in the mural division of the Federal Arts Project.
A Benton protégé named Job Goodman chose Jackson as an assistant and
kept him busy on a mural called The Spirit of Western Civilization. Goodman
was determined to complete this large painting and he did, then he oversaw
its installation in an outer-borough high school. Many FAP murals went
uninstalled. More were never executed. The mural division was a sanctuary
of elevated intentions and deflected energies. Yet there were enclaves of ef-
ficiency, and Pollock had been drafted into one of them. Feeling overworked
for half a year, he switched to the easel division, which required painters to
produce just one twenty-four-by-thirty-inch canvas every month for the ap-
proval of a local supervisor.
Now that federal bureaucrats formed the chief audience for contemporary
art in America, the director of the Project, Holger Cahill, fretted about stan-
dards of taste. As he said, quality is “a very hard thing to pin down.” Never
confident enough to work up a set of critical criteria, the FAP defaulted,
enrolling nearly everyone who claimed to be an artist. “It didn’t matter,”
Harold Rosenberg recalled, “if you were a portrait painter or you painted
bears in a shooting gallery on Coney Island.” Supervisors were free to impose
their own tastes—narrow or fickle or both. Even accomplished artists couldn’t
be sure, from month to month, that their offerings would be accepted. Like
an underachieving child, Pollock was sometimes told to give a canvas a bit
more work; now and then, his supervisors flatly rejected his submissions. The
prospect of sparring with these functionaries drove him to blandness.
Few of his FAP pictures survive. One shows field hands bending over
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 335)

cotton plants, their bodies strained in the manner taught by Benton. Alert
for a transferred jolt of the teacher’s energy, you feel nothing. Cotton Pickers
(c. 1935) is a dismal picture, the product of dispirited compliance. Pollock
resented the easel division for extracting efforts like this one, and he feared
its power to turn away his livelier work. Stymied, defiant of deadlines, he
would have been dismissed from the Project without the help of Burgoyne
Diller, who had become a supervisor in the New York office.
A disciple of Mondrian, Diller was a utopian internationalist with no sym-
pathy for Thomas Hart Benton’s Americanism. Still, he refused to blame
Benton’s students for their teacher’s unsavory attitudes. Now and then he
had done what he could to shield Pollock from the Project’s routines. Toward
the end of the thirties, Diller was visited by the painter Philip Guston, who
had been Pollock’s classmate at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.
When Pollock distributed pro-art, anti-football broadsides, Guston collabo-
rated, and they were expelled together. Now Guston made himself as much
a friend as the other’s torment allowed. At the Project office, he told Diller
that Pollock had “shut himself up” in his East Eighth Street studio and was
“drinking too damn much,” convinced he had strayed unforgivably far from
the middle of the FAP road. Though a deadline had just passed, he refused
to submit work. Maybe, Guston said, he would listen to reassurances from a
Project official. Diller agreed to visit Pollock in his studio.
There he was astonished. Pollock’s pictures showed that “he had been
going through a terrific psychological thing. You could see it was just a
turning upside-down of what he had been doing. He was attacking these
canvases with a vehemence that freed him in a way. They had terrific im-
pact.” Singling out the least agitated ones, Diller told Pollock to bring them
to the Project the next day. He did, and the pictures were approved. Rejection
would have cost Pollock his stipend. This possibility gave him reason to be
wary of the Project supervisors. It was not enough to plummet him into
panic. What terrified Pollock was his evolution, as it took him step by un-
certain step beyond the reach—and the support—of Benton’s authority.
 EX

5. Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1034235. Ol on aeeteeaicl 15% x

20% in.
 ©
In his crackpot certainty about art and life, Benton thought he was fit to lead.
Pollock wanted to follow, or believed he did. Yet he was unfit to be led, for
he didn’t know how to get the gist of another’s example—not even Ben-
ton’s—though his teacher did convince him that art could be a manly, not a
sissified, pursuit. Paintings could be broad-shouldered and American; they
could be Bentonesque. The workers and farmers in Benton’s pictures are
sinewy, like him, and their poses stretch their muscles taut. Built from intri-
cate adjustments of form to space, his compositions feel clenched—an effect
Pollock could never achieve.
Pollock’s Cotton Pickers is merely slack. Stronger works like Landscape with
Rider (1933) and Going West (1934-35) show traces of Benton’s pedagogy—
American themes, a brownish palette, shapes traceable to El Greco—and you
sense Pollock’s efforts to force these pictures to tighten up, to become trim
Bentonesque bits of pictorial machinery. Failing, they swirl and pulse. They
slip away from the eye. Also, they lack Benton’s fussiness about detail. The
people and beasts in Goimg West are smooth and tentative, as if their shapes
could easily shift. The Bentonisms of Pollock’s art are approximate. Those of
his life were precise. The role of Benton’s sidekick supplied him with attitudes
and a costume, but gave no thrust—no torque—to his ambition. His first
attempt to escape his teacher’s influence was thoroughly studentlike. He mim-
icked Albert P. Ryder, an American painter famous at the turn of the century
and the object of Benton’s dogmatic praise.
Ryder was a visionary inclined toward themes like The Temple of the Mind
and Macbeth and the Witches. In The Race Track, the figure of death rides a
pale horse and clutches a scythe. Fraught with large and vague significance,
Ryder’s forms loom through a dusk that feels like melancholy made visible.
In his pictures of moonlit nights at sea, waves and rushing clouds impose
their shapes on solitary ships. These vessels persevere in their loneliness, and
38 PAE FAME (Or ArG Esa URE

sometimes lend their forms to the elements trying to engulf them. Each ship
makes its distress the dramatic focus of unbounded immensities. When he
turned from Benton to Ryder, Pollock chose to imitate the nocturnes, not the
literary pictures.
Laboring to be original, he pictured a daytime setting in T.P.’s Boat in
Menemsha Pond, a Ryderesque exercise from the mid-thirties. The colors are
garish and the boat looks not lost but incidental. Though Pollock mismanaged
each cue he took from Ryder, this picture is not just a botch. Every painting
has what might be called muscle tone, a quality transferred to the image by
the hand’s idiosyncrasies. Benton’s images look like the work of a hand made
strong by hard, driven labor. The smooth density of Ryder’s paint suggests
that his strength was serene; no matter how eccentric, the shapes in his sea-
scapes are elegant; they flow one from another. Pollock could not mimic that
ease. In T7.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, the blunt curves of seashore and
clouds gesture and grimace, straining for rhythm. They never find it, yet this
image is not merely awkward. It has an odd force, as of baffled muscularity.

hs i

6. Jackson Pollock, T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, c. 1934. Oil on metal panel,
4% x 6% in.
THE AMERICAN INFINITE Bg

Looking for a new model, Pollock turned from Ryder to the Mexican mu-
ralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Appalled by the abysmal drift of European
politics, the New York avant-garde founded the American Artists Congress
as a platform for anti-fascist manifestos. At the first session of the congress,
held early in 1936, Siqueiros represented Mexico. With the proceedings ended,
he gathered a crew of young artists around him in a Union Square studio.
The mission was to execute in chicken wire and papier-maché his design for
a May Day float—a confrontation between a Wall Street capitalist and a
towering hammer and sickle. Sanford Pollock had studied with Siqueiros in
Los Angeles. Now he joined this communal project and recruited Jackson,
who worked hard. Jackson was drawn to Siqueiros’s aggressive energy, as he
had been drawn to Benton’s. It gave him the illusion of a direction. Also, he
liked his new leader’s devotion to new materials. In modern times you need
modern paints, said Siqueiros. His favorite was Duco, a lacquer designed for
automobiles. In solidarity with assembly-line workers, Siqueiros applied it
with a spray gun. He also dripped, poured, and splashed his colors. Pollock
took note, though he continued to work with pencil and brush.
Besides Siqueiros, the leading Mexican muralists were Diego Rivera and
José Clemente Orozco. These painters worked in the genre of history paint-
ing: the large, heavily populated composition with an elevated theme. Si-
queiros and the others joined their country’s indigenous myths to Christian
images of crucifixion and resurrection. Adapting their mixtures of style and
theme to the needs of radical prophecy, these painters told of cruel landlords
and martyred peasants, greedy tycoons and the struggle between nature and
mechanization.
After staggering under the force of Siqueiros’s grim bombast, Pollock no-
ticed the morbidity of Orozco. Responding with something like glee, he sub-
jected this muralist’s skeletal motifs to hysterical repetitions. Though Orozco
talked chiefly of political revolution, he invented a new public style. Here
was his true success. Pollock didn’t know what to make of it. From the bare
ribs and shinbones of Orozco’s cruelest images, Pollock generated uneasy
patterns with only tenuous connections to any style, radical or conservative.

In 1935 Thomas Hart Benton had received two inducements to leave New
York: a commission to supply the Jefferson City, Missouri, state house with
a mural and the offer of a teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute. He
accepted both. New York, he informed a reporter from The Sun, had “lost
its dynamic quality.” As usual, Benton and his family spent their summers
on Martha’s Vineyard. Pollock still joined them there, and he spent Christmas
1937 with the Bentons in Kansas City. On the way back to New York, he
stopped in Detroit to visit his brother Charles, who had found a job drawing
cartoons for a union newspaper.
40 i= AVE tO CAR HewiUinie

Pollock lingered so long that he used up his leaves of absence from the
Project. A sketching trip with Benton, planned for the following summer,
would now be impossible. Enraged, he launched himself on a binge; two
weeks later the Project dismissed him from its rolls. Helped by a psychiatrist
named Helen Marot, Sanford Pollock arranged for Jackson to be admitted
to the White Plains branch of New York Hospital. After three months, the
hospital released him uncured. Pollock was an exemplar of incorrigibility.
Early in 1939, he became a patient of a psychiatrist named Joseph L. Hen-
derson, whose idea of therapy was to give detailed Jungian interpretations of
the drawings Pollock brought to his sessions. Henderson did nothing about
the artist’s helpless drinking.
Re-enrolled on the Project, Pollock subsisted, suffering only his familiar
grinding difficulties, until the war prompted his draft board to seek him out.
In a panic, he persuaded Dr. Henderson’s successor, Violet de Laszlo, to tell
the board that he was unfit for military service. Pollock, she wrote, “finds it
difficult to form or maintain any kind of relationship.” Though Dr. de Laszlo
was reluctant to call him a schizophrenic, she noted “a certain schizoid dis-
position” underlying his “emotional instability.” Pollock’s board classified him
4-F. He was less ashamed by the label than frightened by the army’s promise
of discipline. The mildest regimentation could unhinge him.
At the City and Country School in Greenwich Village, he had managed
the routine of janitoring only with his brother’s help. Sanford could ply Jack-
son’s mop, but no one could lend him the competence he lacked. Pollock
sought a state of swaddled suspension, an oblivion insulating him from even
the gentlest, most oblique demands. Only sleep or a drunken coma gave him
sufficient protection. Krasner remembered him staying in bed for “twelve,
fourteen hours . . . around the clock. We’d always talk about his insane guilt
about sleeping late.” If no crisis erupted, he would get to work sometime in
the afternoon.
Only by the usual measures was Pollock slothful. His labors of imagination
were immense, though dazed by frustration. The Flame, painted toward the
end of the thirties, is a pattern of red, black, and white. Desperately over-
worked, these colors spread across the canvas in a tarry crust. Here, flame
does not gracefully flicker. It is awkward and dense and gives off a violent
light. All the pictures he painted for himself—not for FAP supervisors—
seethe with panicky energy. Whatever he saw in Pollock’s studio, Burgoyne
Diller was right to take it for a sign that its maker had been weathering a
“terrific” storm of the psyche.
Pollock had a seismic hand, the kind that registers cataclysms of need and
fear. That was not enough for him. He wanted the hand of a great artist.
Impressed by an image, he would try to capture its power by impersonating
its maker. This was not the calm mimicry that earns a young artist a place
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 41

7. Jackson Pollock, Flame, c. 1934-38. Oil on canvas mounted on composition

board, 20 x 30 in.

in a master’s following. It was an attempt to become the other artist. He

failed because he felt no empathetic impulses. Pollock’s way of being himself
was so chaotic that he could not imagine what it was to be another person.
Whatever his model, he lumbered around it with excruciating awkwardness.
The failures of his early struggles are difficult to see; we lose them now in
the glamour blazing from his major work.
8. Jackson Pollock, Birth, c. 1938-41. Oil on canvas
mounted on plywood, 46 x 21% in.
 /
In April 1937 the Magazine of Art published John Graham’s article “Primitive
Art and Picasso.” Pollock read it and wrote to the author, who sought him
out, for that was his habit. Graham insisted on knowing what New York
painters were doing, especially the younger ones. He wanted to be an art-
historical Gabriel, announcing the future of painting in the New World. Born
Ivan Dombrowsky, Graham was descended from minor Polish nobility. Dur-
ing the Russian Revolution, he fought as a cavalry officer on the czarist side.
Imprisoned, he escaped and joined White Russian forces in the Crimea. Any-
way, these are among the stories he told after the White Russian cause failed
and he fled westward, settling eventually in New York. There he studied at
the Art Students League and became enough of a painter—and enough of
a Marxist—to claim a place in the avant-garde.
Dogmatic and fierce, he exercised strict control over every detail of his
public presence: his military bark and theatrical gestures, his cravat and mon-
ocle, his cuff links and gloves. When Graham died, in 1961, Thomas B. Hess
wrote of his talent for scavenging: “It was said that he could walk into any
junk shop and find a beautiful object for 50 cents.” During the thirties, Gra-
ham dealt in African sculpture, buying in Europe and selling in the United
States. Among his Parisian acquaintances was Pablo Picasso. After visiting
this colossus of modernism, Graham would report on their conversation to
friends in New York.
From the Surrealists Graham learned to speak of “vision” as a “power
procreative.” “Work in art,” he wrote, “is like making primitive fire.” The
will must abdicate, freeing the painter’s hand to take dictation from the raw,
anarchic energies of the unconscious. As color flows in “absolutely sponta-
neous” currents, painting becomes écriture automatique—automatic writing.
With his talk of spontaneity, Graham only slightly jumbled a doctrine pro-
44 THE EATE OF Ay GiESmURE

mulgated in 1924 by André Breton, the field marshal and chief theoretician
of the Surrealists.
In long quasi-therapeutic conversations with Pollock, Graham tried to talk
the young artist past his resentment of Europe. Pollock responded at first
with Bentonoid sneers. He attacked Picasso, even. Though Graham would
bristle, he stayed in the mentor’s role—autocratic yet forgiving. After all,
Pollock had come to him, drawn by the force of new ideas. And Graham
felt in Pollock’s violence the nearness of the unconscious and the promise of
the new. With imperious patience, Graham encouraged him to keep looking
at non-Western art and to think about Surrealist experiments in painterly
freedom.
Sometime between 1938 and 1941, Pollock painted Birth. To finish the
picture, he impersonated Orozco, Picasso, and the carver of the Eskimo mask
pictured in John Graham’s essay on primitive art. Though he failed to escape
himself, Pollock did charge the image with the force of his desperation. The
writhing figure of Birth may be several figures, male and female, or a solitary
creature with the organs of both sexes. Graham chose Birth for American
and French Paintings, the exhibition he presented at the McMillen Gallery.
A reviewer for Artnews admired its “swirling figures.” This was Pollock’s
first critical notice; the review didn’t mention Krasner.
The McMillen show ended in February 1942; a few months later, Project
administrators chose Krasner to lead a team of artists in the war-services
division. Their task was to design window displays promoting military
courses at New York city colleges. Krasner chose Pollock as an assistant and
took care not to overburden him. During the summer, he ended his treat-
ments with Dr. de Laszlo. Firmly, Krasner was assuming the management
of his life. As 1942 ended, so did the Project. Pollock got a job decorating
ties and lipstick cases in a silk-screen studio. Like Pollock, Robert Motherwell
was saved from the draft by a 4-F rating. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko
were approaching forty when America entered the war. Neither summoned
nor rejected by their draft boards, they waited out the conflict in a state that
Newman later described as “horror.”

Since the late thirties, war and the threat of war had been driving avant-
gardists from Europe to New York. By 1942, the roster of émigrés included
Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, and Pavel
Tchelitchew. These were personages already introduced by the art magazines.
American artists could now meet them in the flesh, yet few took the oppor-
tunity. They didn’t want to seem overly interested in émigrés so obviously
unimpressed by them. Clustered around André Breton, the Surrealists were
especially disinclined to fraternize with locals. Breton and several others re-
fused to speak English. Except for Motherwell, the New Yorkers spoke no
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 45

French, and their manners didn’t mesh with those of the zealously snobbish
Surrealists.
Only Roberto Matta Echaurren, one of the younger Surrealists, made an
effort to meet Americans. A native of Chile, Matta had studied architecture
in Paris with Le Corbusier. After his exposure to the geometric rigor of
Corbu, he switched his allegiance to Breton and became an advocate of
spontaneity—an automatist. Automatism was a product of Breton’s fear that
education was bad for poets and painters. Burdened with too much knowl-
edge and good taste, they were capable only of the most predictable propri-
eties. They needed to be liberated. Cribbing the Freudian method of free

9. André Masson, Meditation of the Painter, 1943. Ink on paper, 20% x

257/83 in.

association, Breton proposed that writers set aside their literary intentions and
record whatever currents of language flowed directly from the unconscious
mind, where all was “subject to the principle of pleasure alone.”
Automatism would allow a writer to receive messages from a paradise
usually silent and, of course, invisible. To show us pictures of this hidden
46 (ce FS OP A Ole
SW Uae

Eden, an artist needed only to suspend his aesthetic standards and let the
unconscious move his pencil over the paper. Many Surrealist painters played
with the method. Masson, Joan Mir6, and a few others became addicted,
though they never inveigled the conscious will into a complete surrender. At
most, they persuaded it to relax, to lighten the aesthetic effort with a carnival
spirit. The will was on holiday but still in charge.
The automatist method made a good fit with Matta’s brio. Motherwell
called him “the most energetic, enthusiastic, poetic, charming, brilliant young
artist I’ve ever met.” Also, he was fluent in English and restless with ambition.
In New York he saw a chance to declare his independence from the Surrealist
veterans through whose hierarchy he feared he would never rise very far.
With Motherwell’s help, he would recruit the best American artists to a fresh
avant-garde; with Matta guiding them, they would set off an aesthetic explo-
sion. Motherwell was game; so was his friend William Baziotes. On their
advice, Matta invited Arshile Gorky, Pollock, and a few other painters to his
New York studio for a demonstration of automatist techniques. Putting Mat-
ta’s lessons to proper use, Gorky impressed Breton as the only New Yorker
worthy of induction into the Surrealist ranks. The breakaway cadre never
formed.
In the forties and throughout his long career, Motherwell would launch
an image with a burst of unpremeditated form; then, remembering its re-
finement, his hand would gather the wild blobs of color and tangles of line
into an orderly composition. This was a reined-in automatism. Baziotes,
Rothko, and Newman resisted the method still more rigorously. Art, they
believed, is not a surrender to unconscious impulses. Nonetheless, the idea of
that abandonment turned them toward the swampy and the primordial. Baz-
lotes set amorphous creatures adrift in pools of dark color. Rothko’s forms
are wispier and swim in sunnier environments. Evoking egg and sperm and
fertilization, Newman’s drawings from the early forties illustrate his fixation
on beginnings.
Not long after the session with Matta, Motherwell stopped by Pollock’s
studio and explained, again, the theory of automatism. “To my astonishment,”
Motherwell recalled, Pollock “listened intently; in fact, he invited me to come
another afternoon, which I did. This would be the winter of 1942.” That
year, Pollock painted Stenographic Figure (1942). Color moves through this
picture in quick flickers. Anatomy turns elastic. In The She-Wolf (1943), Pol-
lock’s brushwork grew denser and more violent, calling forth an image of
bestial grotesquerie. Alfred Barr acquired this canvas for the Modern in 1944.
Stenographic Figure entered the museum’s collection later. These images can
be made to testify to a Surrealist Pollock, an American painter with a secure
place on Barr’s chart of modernist progress. But there was no Surrealist Pol-
 ‘i : *

11. Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943. Oil, gouache, and plaster on
canvas, 417% x 67 in.
48 Wine WANS ONe ZN (eke SUNN Is

lock; or, if this personage did appear for a season or two, he vanished in the
painting of The She-Wolf.
As performed by Masson, Miré, and other Surrealists, automatic painting
was a brilliant charade. With a lively hand and a willingness to shock, these
artists generated the look of wild new freedom won through the sacrifice of
old refinements. Yet their automatist images tend to be lushly textured and
beautifully composed. Promising to unleash the primitive forces of the un-
conscious, these Surrealists revitalized our most sophisticated pictorial
traditions. In this discrepancy between program and practice lies the wit of
automatism. Pollock had no use for it.
Indifferent to Surrealist ironies about control and abandon, he wanted to
force his medium to obey. With the splashed, smeared, scratchy brushwork
of The She-Wolf, Pollock tried to register every surge, every flicker, of his
deliberate will. Confined to an oblong habitat, the she-wolf fills it with her
oblong shape. The Guardians of the Secret (1943) guard a cryptic image: a
painting within the painting the guardians occupy. Edges reiterate edges,
corners echo corners in these works from the early forties. Pollock’s willful-
ness was producing blunt, brutal symmetries. He wanted more command
over his medium, not less, and—this is the paradox of his art—he brought
his colors under full control only when he began to fling them through the
air.
Still, the Surrealists did convince Pollock that an unkempt painting can be
legitimate. So historians continue to talk of a Surrealist Pollock, though he
had no firm grasp of automatist theory or any other doctrine of the avant-
garde. Many paths took him beyond Benton’s dogma, and on all of them he
was lost. Embracing a new style, a new method, he would bear down on it
with obsessive fervor, hoping for immediate satisfaction. He never learned
that avant-garde art was not intended to be satisfying now, in the moment.
It was an assault on the future. Avant-gardists asked themselves: of all that
is happening at present, what will turn out to have been of use to those who
make history? Krasner attacked this question doggedly. Pollock ignored it.
Immersed in his private quandary, painting as if there were no tomorrow,
he looked to her like a primitive. He also looked to her like the most powerful
painter in New York.
As artists come to know their ambitions, they invent ways to realize them.
Pollock knew only that he needed to be great. He needed Krasner to tell
him what that meant, and she needed him as the recipient of her lessons.
She wanted to feel that parental dominion. She taught him that ambition
requires enemies, and high ambition requires precisely the right one: the artist
who blocks the single, narrow path from present oblivion to a place in history.
This was Picasso, whose blithe and terrible egoism made him the one to
supplant—not to emulate, as Pollock had tried to do in the late thirties and
THE AMERICAN INFINITE
49

early forties. Then, Picasso was one model among many. Krasner taught him
to concentrate his gaze.
One evening, when they were still living on East Eighth Street, she heard
“something fall” in his studio. Next came the sound of

Jackson yelling, “God damn it, that guy missed nothing!” I went in to
see what had happened. Jackson was sitting, staring; and on the floor,
where he had thrown it, was a book of Picasso’s work.

Artists had long looked for possibilities neglected by Picasso. Pollock was
now poised to give the possible a redefinition that would make Picasso’s
mastery obsolete.
The nemesis of Picasso could not be too American, for he had to count as
an internationalist, a fitting successor to the hero he had defeated; yet he
needed to be thoroughly American, to show that modernist progress had led
to the New World. Worse than being too European was being American in
the wrong way, like the jingoistic Benton or the provincial adepts of Mon-
drian. The right way was to be an American pioneer whose explorations led
deep into Parisian tradition and beyond to new territory.
eb schtens ae i
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 6
The idea of avant-garde progress gives artists a proprietary attitude toward
the future: when it arrives, they believe, it will be theirs. The New York
painters had sustained that faith even when the cruelty of the Depression
pushed them hard against their moment, and sometimes they took their dif-
ficulties for signs ofa high destiny. Then the war began abroad, and historical
pressures subsided in New York. The artists felt diminished, especially as
their city filled with art stars from Europe. Most of these visitors intended to
return to Paris the moment it became possible; for the duration, New York
would be a way station—the avant-garde’s capital-in-exile. To its original
inhabitants, the city’s art world felt increasingly tenuous. Then Peggy Gug-
genheim arrived on the scene and gave it a center.
Guggenheim was an expatriate New Yorker with an indifference to Amer-
ica, to the war, to nearly everything but her edgy need for pleasure. Upon
turning twenty-one, in 1919, she had inherited a share of the family’s mining
fortune. Certain relatives had received more, so Peggy called herself a “‘very
poor” Guggenheim. Still, her portion was more than sufficient to sustain her
luxuriously in Europe. There she pursued distraction and no particular pur-
pose until 1937, when her uncle Solomon announced that he would establish
a foundation for the support of two modernist painters: Wassily Kandinsky
and Rudolf Bauer. Suddenly rivalrous, Peggy launched Guggenheim Jeune,
a London art gallery; a season later, she sketched plans for London’s first
museum of modern art. The blitz drove her to Paris, the original headquar-
ters of her expatriation.
In her memoirs she tells of finding modern paintings for sale at panic
prices. Making the rounds of studios and galleries, acquiring as she went, she
soon found the effort unnecessary. Artists and dealers would visit her house
“with pictures. They even brought them to me in bed, in the morning before
I woke up. . . . My motto was ‘Buy a picture a day’ and I lived up to it.”
By (Une INE Ole AGE
sal Wine

She also sought a man a day but, as she once told the art historian John
Richardson, “pictures were easier to obtain.” As the German advance drove
a stream of refugees through the city, she lingered. Only after the city fell,
in June 1940, did she slip reluctantly into the current. Crates containing her
pictures reached New York in the summer of 1941, a few days before she
did.
Guggenheim brought along her newest lover, the handsome and conceited
Max Ernst, who considered himself the only Surrealist painter of any con-
sequence and a natural aristocrat with a license to behave as he pleased. An
artist of judicious whims, he married Guggenheim after the United States
entered the war and his German citizenship put him at risk of deportation.
Upon meeting an attractive young Surrealist painter named Dorothea Tan-
ning, Ernst began an affair with her. Guggenheim reciprocated by sleeping
with Laurence Vail, her first husband and the father of her two children.
Soon bored by this distraction, she opened Art of This Century at 30 West
Fifty-seventh Street, to provide a showcase for her collection.
Guggenheim commissioned Frederick Kiesler to design the interior of her
miniature museum. Barely five feet tall, this native of Vienna had an indom-
itable faith in his power to “break down the physical and mental barriers
which separate people from the art they live with.” He alone among the
modernist architects knew how to establish “a unity of vision and fact,” the
harmony of self and world that had “prevailed in primitive times.” Geometric
abstractions were removed from their frames and mounted on lengths of
string stretched taut between ceiling and floor.
In the Surrealist room, paintings hung from adjustable wooden beams
cantilevered from concave panels of gumwood. Behind these tall, curving
panels, the walls were black. Hlumination was by spotlight. This, wrote the
critic Rudi Blesh, “was uterine architecture as involute as the subconscious
minds from which were born the paintings themselves.” With more delight
than shock, the New York press and Fifty-seventh Street habitués agreed that
here was the look of the modern.
Marcel Duchamp—instigator of Dadaism and friend of the Surrealists—
had encouraged Guggenheim with her plans for the London gallery. In 1942,
he settled in New York, and Guggenheim again turned to him for guidance.
Duchamp suggested that she present a selection of artworks by women. She
offered a few solo exhibitions and, early in 1943, decided to assemble a “spring
salon” of work by young artists. For this event, she recruited a jury. Among
its members were Duchamp, Alfred Barr, and the partially forgiven Ernst.
One morning, as she leaned pictures against the gallery wall, another member
of the jury arrived. It was Piet Mondrian, a refugee from Paris by way of
London. When he paused before a small batch of Pollocks, Guggenheim
THE AMERICAN INFINITE BS)

rushed over and said, “Pretty awful, isn’t it? That’s not painting, is it?”
Mondrian said nothing and she went away.
Later he was still in place, still absorbed. Guggenheim returned and
spouted what she supposed were Mondrian’s judgments: “disorganized . .
muddy .. . dreadful.” He remained silent as Guggenheim went on: “There
is absolutely no discipline at all. This young man has serious problems, and
painting is one of them.” Mondrian turned to her, unflustered, and said: “I
have a feeling that this may be the most exciting painting I have seen in a
long time, here or in Europe.” Guggenheim was amazed. Style usually
prompts a game of allegiances. Mondrian was the era’s leading geometrician.
With straight black lines and rectangles of primary color, he composed em-
blems of universal harmony. Pollock’s colors were garish and murky; his lines
swooped and skidded over the canvas. What could Mondrian find to like in
painting like this?
He allowed that Pollock’s art “points in the opposite direction of my paint-
ing, my writing.” To his eye, it looked alien. Yet he saw “‘no reason to declare
it invalid. . . . Where you see ‘lack of discipline,’ I see tremendous energy.”
Mondrian declared himself “very excited.” Soon Guggenheim was calling
Pollock an “exciting” new artist; in her memoirs she named him “the greatest
painter since Picasso”—greater, presumably, than Mondrian. Half a year
later, she gave Pollock his first solo show.
After three months of decorating neckties and lipstick cases, Pollock had
found work at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Established by Sol-
omon R. Guggenheim, this institution was later renamed for him, and now
occupies Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral monument on upper Fifth Avenue. In
1943, the museum was housed in a smallish building on East Fifty-fourth
Street. Pollock ran the elevator, helped with frame-making, and mocked the
museum’s collection—especially pictures by Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Jean
Arp. He was rescued from this job by Peggy Guggenheim, who agreed to
advance him one hundred fifty dollars a month against future sales. Their
contract was for twelve months. If, at the end of a year, not enough had been
sold to cover advances plus the gallery’s commission, Guggenheim would be
compensated in paintings. From 1943 “until I left America in 1947,” Gug-
genheim later wrote, “I dedicated myself to Pollock.” He “became the central
point of Art of This Century.”
Sull poor, Pollock could now paint full time. During the war years, no
other downtown artist was so little burdened by everyday constraints. None
had been so oppressed by them. De Kooning gained much by rubbing against
the grain of the ordinary. Pollock did not. The world’s friction infuriated
him. Guggenheim reduced it crucially and, of course, imposed new pressures,
for she was a demanding patron. Having scheduled his solo exhibition, she
54 hie FATE ir TANG EswWiie

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12. Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 1% in. S 19 ft. 10 in.
THE AMERICAN INFINITE D5)
56 Pinte FATE Ol ARG Esi Vine

commissioned him to paint a mural for the vestibule of her Upper East Side
town house.
To make room for a stretcher large enough—roughly nine by twenty
feet—he tore down a partition in his Eighth Street studio. He stretched his
canvas, hung it, and wrote to his brother Charles, in Detroit, that the empty
field “looks pretty big, but as exciting as all hell.” It was now midsummer.
The picture was to be finished by November, so Guggenheim could include
it in Pollock’s debut exhibition. He completed many works during the next
three months but not the mural. Then in a single night he covered his huge
canvas with writhing tendrils of color and called it, simply, Mural (1943).
At his patron’s house, Pollock discovered that his twenty-foot canvas was
too long for its intended place. Guggenheim was at the gallery. Pollock tele-
phoned her there for advice, but she could make no useful suggestions. Call-
ing again and again in panic, he continued to receive no help. Nosing about,
he found her hidden liquor, got drunk, and kept calling. The afternoon had
slipped away unpleasantly before Guggenheim asked Marcel Duchamp and
the sculptor David Hare to hang Mural. Hare later remembered asking Pol-
lock whether it would be all right if they lopped off a short section of the
work. He said he didn’t mind, though he may not have focused sharply on
the question.
As Mural was wedged into place, Pollock removed his clothes and wan-
dered into Guggenheim’s living room, where a party of her friends had gath-
ered. Crossing the floor, he stood before the fireplace and urinated. This stunt
is a matter of public record. We have only Guggenheim’s word to support
her story that Pollock also peed in her bed during her one attempt to seduce
him. He was stupefied by alcohol, and the experiment failed. Krasner did
not fear Guggenheim’s allure. Pollock’s anxieties about women made him
nearly unseducible. What Krasner feared was his drinking. He needed to get
away from Manhattan, with its familiar bars and ready supply of fellow
drunks.
On a visit to East Hampton, Krasner glimpsed the possibility of resettling
out of town. Pollock rejected it at first, then changed his mind, and in the
summer of 1945 they found a house for sale on Fireplace Road in Springs.
Of course they could not afford it. Aside from Mural, Pollock sold no other
large work but The She-Wolf. Now Krasner came to Guggenheim to borrow
two thousand dollars for a down payment on the house in the Hamptons.
No, said Guggenheim, it was an expense she could not possibly justify.
As Guggenheim lay in bed, exhausted by an ailment diagnosed as mono-
nucleosis, Krasner visited her every day and made the same pitch. The con-
tract could be renegotiated; two thousand dollars was not such a terribly large
sum; it was imperative for Jackson to be taken away from the city. Eventually,
Guggenheim gave in. Under the new contract, to run for two years, Pollock
THE AMERICAN INFINITE
SY

would receive three hundred dollars a month, minus fifty dollars for repay-
ment of the loan, interest-free; in return, Guggenheim would receive the
painter's entire output, except one painting a year. Pollock’s works were so
hard to sell that Guggenheim had next to no reason to accept this deal.
Nonetheless, she did, explaining that “it was the only way to get rid of Lee.”
 = = a Tu
13. Jackson Pol lock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946. Oil on canvas, 38/4 x 26% in.
 9
Leaving Eighth Street late in November, Krasner and Pollock arrived at the
house on Fireplace Road “during a northeaster.” “ What an entrance!” said
Krasner, long after Pollock’s death. “The house was stuffed with the belong-
ings of the people who had lived there. It was a rough scene. The barn was
packed solid with cast-iron farm tools. So it was a matter of cleaning ev-
erything out before either of us could work. In the meantime, Jackson took
one of the bedrooms to try to paint in.” The run-down house had never been
comfortable. A water pump stood in the basement; there was no bathroom
and no central heating. In winter, reliable warmth came only from the
kitchen range. To open a view to Accabonac Bay, the barn was moved twenty
yards to the north. Pollock painted there and Krasner set up her easel in the
bedroom-studio he had vacated.
During his first year at Springs, Pollock painted Eyes in the Heat (1946).
Though its colors look gluey, the artist’s brush skittered in laying them on,
and it moved with even greater speed to cover Shimmering Substance (1946)
with its agitated crust of brilliant, sun-soaked white. To eliminate all friction
of brush on canvas, Pollock taught himself to pour his colors through the air,
and from these currents flowed the paradoxes of his mature art. To intensify
his contact with the painting—the image—Pollock had to break contact with
the canvas. Giving up the usual control of his medium, he gained control of
a new kind. No longer bedeviled by the constraints of traditional technique,
he found new and congenial ones in gravity. Unable to determine precisely
how color would fall on the canvas, Pollock redefined precision. A streak of
slung paint looks well formed if its vector is clear; if it merges with the
immediate field, it looks well placed.

Alfred Barr had accepted The She-Wolf as the work of an American with
Parisian affiliations. Pollock’s poured imagery made him feel uneasy. Early
60 Tee ih Ast EeeOlin eA CIES RUiRit

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.Jackson Pollock, One, Number 31 {1950}, 1950. Oil and enamel on can-
vas, 8 ft. 1O in. x 17 ft. 5% in.
THE AMERICAN WNUEIUST IE 61
62 Lite PATE SOIR RAN Gino TURE

in 1950 Barr warned a young curator at the Modern: this was not work “that
we would want to support.” Soon afterward, he persuaded the Modern to
buy a large drip painting called Number 1A (1948). When Betty Parsons
showed this canvas in 1948, it had gone unsold. Her explanation of the shift
in Barr’s policy was simple: everyone was talking about the poured images
and he could not ignore the buzz. One hears this explanation often, outside
the art world and deep within it: taste is an exercise in conformity. An artist
turns hot and art lovers flock around in unthinking admiration; favorable
criticism spews forth automatically, collectors collect, curators acquire; like a
totalitarian regime in perfect working order, the fad imposes complete una-
nimity. Yet fads never do that, even at their most powerful.
Much of the praise Pollock received in the late forties and early fifties had
a forced and overheated quality. Nonetheless, the early furor included a note
of intelligent zeal. Barr caught that note and replayed it in his writing. Asked
to select three of six artists to represent the United States at the Venice
Biennale of 1950, Barr settled on de Kooning, Gorky, and Pollock. Among
the Pollock canvases he chose was the Modern’s recent acquisition, Number
1A. In a note composed for the Biennale catalog, Barr said that Pollock’s
pouring “provides an energetic adventure for the eyes, a luna park full of
fireworks, pitfalls, surprises and delights.” Here were pleasures to be felt and
high aesthetic significance to be glimpsed.
“Sometimes,” said Barr, the painter’s “whirling vortex of lines develops a
mysterious depth and glow of light, without however destroying the sense of
the picture surface which Pollock and all his companions seek to preserve as
essential to their art.” As intense as the delights of Pollock’s art may be, they
never violate “the sense of the picture surface.” The integrity of that surface
is preserved, as Clement Greenberg had been arguing for the past few seasons.
His argument had a corollary, crucial to the claim for Pollock’s importance:
the “constructed, reconstructed flatness” of his imagery evolved from Parisian
precedent. Thus Pollock is an “extreme disciple of Picasso’s cubism and Miré’s
post-cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and Surrealism.”
In the babble about Pollock, Barr heard this well-constructed argument
and made it his own. For here was the link to Europe that gave the drip
paintings their place in the Museum of Modern Art. Pollock’s One, Num-
ber 31 (1950), a drip painting more than seventeen feet wide, is a monumental
feature of an itinerary that begins in a gallery devoted to Cézanne. Next come
leading figures of the School of Paris: Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin, the
Neo-Impressionists, Matisse and the Fauvists, Picasso and the Cubists, Mon-
drian, Miré. Byways lead to minor episodes and back to the high road, the
great boulevard of Parisian modernism. One appears as the boulevard veers
toward New York. At this turning, we are to understand Pollock’s greatness
as an adhesive joining Old World and New.
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 63

This is an impressive claim. Ever since America’s discovery, its relations

with Europe have generated friction, and it would be gratifying to believe
that Pollock overcame the conflict—in the realm of painting, anyway. If he
did, his accomplishment is major, though there is something small about it,
too. An elaboration of Cubist flatness is, after all, just a formal exercise, even
if it does join the avant-garde painters of Paris and New York. The passion,
the strange glory, of Pollock’s best art must have some greater significance
than that. Yet authoritative voices have been saying for nearly half a century
that it doesn’t—rather, Greenberg and Barr and William Rubin, Barr’s suc-
cessor at the Modern, have argued that, in painting, there is no greater sig-
nificance, no greater glory, than a major innovation in form.
Others are not convinced. To account for the power of Pollock’s drip
paintings, critics invoke images of air and light. They look for figures in his
tangles of color, and some have tried to see them as mirrors—images of the
artist who made them. Pollock’s most recent biographers, Steven Naifeh and
Gregory White Smith, claim that he excreted the major paintings—not in
fact, of course, but with a vividly literal sort of mimicry. By letting his paint
run from a stick, write Naifeh and Smith, the artist enacted an early memory
of his father urinating on a flat rock out West, somewhere in the mountains
of Arizona or California. As Roy Pollock asserted his manhood by tracing
patterns on rock, so his son became a man, or at least a mature painter, by
tracing similar patterns on canvas. Thus a resemblance becomes an explana-
tion.
Naifeh and Smith base their theory on a statement taken down by Jeffrey
Potter, the third of Pollock’s biographers. Among Lee and Jackson’s friends
in the country was a writer named Patsy Southgate, who told Potter of hear-
ing the painter say that

the reason he put his canvas on the floor . . . came out of his childhood.
The thing he had really liked then was standing beside his father on a
flat rock pissing. He was really tickled, you know, when he watched,
and said to himself, “When I grow up, am I ever going to do that!”
This theory says, “Now I’m going to show Dad!”

Whatever the explanatory power of this theory, the flow of pigment from
Pollock’s stick did resemble the arcing, spattering flow of male urine; and his
alcoholism often reduced him to uncontrolled peeing.
Naifeh and Smith quote the Southgate anecdote, then present a dossier on
Pollock the pisser. They retell the story of Pollock urinating in Guggenheim’s
fireplace. They report that he often wet the sheets while sleeping offa binge,
at home or as a houseguest, and they call on witnesses willing to testify that
Pollock liked to urinate in the street rather than use the men’s room of a
64 Tinie PAE IO VASGiES UIE

bar. Pissing had more than ordinary significance for Pollock, as the evidence
makes it pointless to deny. Though Naifeh and Smith can’t say exactly what
that significance is, they conclude that, whatever it may be, the artist’s poured
paintings share it.
To believe this, you have to believe that Pollock was deluded in supposing
that he wanted to make images, that his true purpose was to mimic urination
with the flow of paint. Unhappily, he spent nearly two decades muddling
along with pencil and brush, trying to master those implements, before it
occurred to him to let paint sail off the end of a stick. With that, painting’s
resemblance to peeing was complete. Pollock’s work as an artist was finished,
so far as Naifeh and Smith understand it.
This account prompts questions. What about other children who saw a
man peeing outdoors? Why did none of them grow up to invent a drip
method like Pollock’s, and what are we to make of the paint dripped on
canvas in the thirties by David Alfaro Siqueiros? Did he see his father peeing
on a rock? Naifeh and Smith’s explanation of Pollock’s big gestures sounds
like a parody of ali the clichés about Jackson the frontiersman, the Westerner,
the American hero letting loose in American immensities. Most commentators
throw the Naifeh-Smith thesis out of court with shudders of indignation.
“What nonsense!” Clement Greenberg said.
Stull, before we dismiss the metaphor of drip painting as peeing, we ought
to note how easily it turns into the metaphor of painting as ejaculation. When
Pollock let his enamel get more viscous than piss, it spattered onto the canvas
like gobs of sperm. He taught himself to “control the flow of paint” from
the end of his stick, he said, yet nothing controls the mind’s associative drift.
To the critic Max Kozloff, Pollock’s method suggested an “aerial sphincter.”
Where his paint flows over the surface stickily, it looks like venous blood. A
frothier flow suggests the arterial kind. Instead of rejecting the Naifeh-Smith
thesis, we should expand it until intimations of all the body’s processes appear
in Pollock’s stained, smeared, encrusted canvases.
Sometimes vision sinks helplessly into a pool of color. The image congeals
and the force of Pollock’s gesture fades. Metaphor weakens. Emerging from
a murky pool, the eye feels stymied by flurries of drips and drops and
spatters—the effluvia of Pollock’s method. At these moments, it’s tempting
to turn away, though the eye that lingers with patience always finds a path
into the painting’s dense tangle. It reopens, more grandly than before. Sailing
on rapid currents, vision finds it impossible to separate the artist’s presence,
his bodily energy, from the surges of light and weather his gesture stirs up.
In “Pollock Paints a Picture,’ Goodnough wrote that a session of about
half an hour produced the first stage of the large painting called Number 4,
1950. Afterward, Pollock
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 65

did not know yet when he would feel strongly enough about the picture
to work on it again, with the intensity needed, nor when he would
finally be finished with it. The paint was allowed to dry, and the next
day it [the canvas] was nailed to a wall of the studio for a period of
study and concentration.

The painter came back to Number 4 several weeks later, having launched
other works. Over the black of the first session he sent filaments of reddish
brown. There were spurts of aluminum paint, then a halt and another interval
of contemplation. “The final work on the painting was slow and deliberate,”
wrote Goodnough. “A few movements in white paint constituted the final
act.”
A picture usually comes to rest after a time, clicking into a harmonious
stability; or the picture doesn’t click and you say it is badly composed. Com-
posed neither well nor badly, a poured painting is a zone of contingency with
an atmosphere permanently roiled. Everything plays off against everything
else locally, and overarching forms do not emerge. No compositional archi-
tecture subordinates small incidents to bigger ones; nothing establishes a prin-
ciple of containment. Reaching for the edge of the canvas, arcs of Pollock’s
color often swerve away and return to the interior, or they zoom onto the
studio floor. That a canvas has limits is an obvious fact. Pollock treated it as
a mere fact, not as the indispensable premise it is for most painters.
A poured canvas has no stable premises, only the rush of its image, its
bursts and swirls of pictorial incident, each making an equal claim on the
attention and none willing to relinquish any part of it. Interviewed by The
New Yorker in 1951, Pollock mentioned “a reviewer a while back who wrote
that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as
a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment.”
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Pollock died in 1956, when he drove his car off the road. Krasner had insisted
on their marrying before moving to Springs, and for years the art world
knew her best as Mrs. Jackson Pollock, the widow who tended the estate
with a careful hand. Slowly, Krasner rewon her independence as an artist.
At her death in 1984, she routinely appeared on historians’ rosters of the
heroic postwar generation of American artists. Though Krasner escaped Pol-
lock’s shadow, she always longed for him and for the time when she had
been nearly alone in feeling the power of his art.
A year before she died, Krasner told Barbara Rose of a dream she remem-
bered from her early days with Pollock: “Jackson and I were standing on top
of the world. The earth was a sphere with a pole going through the center,
I was holding the pole with my right hand, and I was holding Jackson’s hand
with my left hand. Suddenly I let go of the pole, but I kept holding onto
Jackson, and we were both floating off into outer space. We were not
earthbound.”

Pollock, too, had dreams of limitless space. “I’m sort of way out there on my
own,” he told Jeffrey Potter. “Moving slowly to the edge, but not to a cliff,
and it’s not a void either. What it is, what it feels like, is just more me—on
and on.” There are no definite edges, no true voids, because self equals space
equals self—an expansive equation the artist could sustain only in dreams or
in the depths of a painting. He never tried to explain this equation. Language,
he feared, could only cloud it.
The painter Grace Hartigan remembers Pollock dismissing all talk, espe-
cially his own, as “a betrayal.” Betrayal is always tempting and sometimes he
gave in. De Kooning testified that Pollock was good at art talk, especially
when “he was half-loaded, that in-between period.” These periods were
 68 Wale PANE OF A Ele
Sp Wikle

short. Fully loaded, he bellowed. Sober, he was habitually silent, and if he

did venture a remark, he could never be counted on to sound like a proper
avant-gardist. When Krasner met Pollock, she was appalled to learn that the
few bits of jargon he commanded were tattered Bentonisms. To help him
acquire jargon of a higher grade, she persuaded her teacher, Hans Hofmann,
to visit Pollock’s studio. Hofmann would be impressed by what he found,
she hoped, and in his comments Pollock would hear the voice of the avant-
garde.
The visit took place in 1942, soon after Pollock and Krasner showed
their work at the McMillen Gallery. It was not a pleasant occasion. Pollock’s
clutter disgusted Hofmann. When he picked up a brush that sat in a can,
the can came with it. The paint had hardened, capturing the brush. “You
could kill a man with this,” he said. ““That’s the idea,” Pollock replied. Un-
fazed, the older painter turned to the younger one’s canvases and delivered
a critique, as if he had been presiding in his classroom. According to
Hofmann’s doctrine, the artist cannot be satisfied with ordinary vision.
True art requires “spiritual projection.” By exercising this faculty, “our emo-
tional experiences can be gathered together as an inner perception by which
we can comprehend the essence of things beyond mere, bare sensory
experience.”
Hofmann believed that the mechanical tone of scientific perception de-
prived modern life of meaning. The artist’s mission was to make good the
loss. With the airy flood of his pedagogy, Hofmann exhorted his students to
find in themselves the organic vitality of spirit that feels its way past the
world’s familiar surfaces to the depths of the real. His teaching blended a
» dog-eared version of German Romanticism with the style of formal analysis
he learned during his Paris years. Comporting himself as a missionary from
the Old World to the New, Hofmann had announced upon his arrival in
Manhattan that “the problem of civilizing this enormous country is not fin-
ished.” Yearning to improve themselves, Americans like Krasner saw Hof-
mann as European high culture made flesh. Pollock found him intimidating
and finally insufferable.
During his studio visit, Hofmann recommended that the younger artist
attend his classes. Pollock replied that he wasn’t interested in Hofmann’s
theories, adding that he ought to “put up or shut up.” This was a nicely
placed jab. For years, Hofmann had been reluctant to exhibit his work. None
of his students knew how he painted. Deciding to put up, he allowed Krasner
to persuade Peggy Guggenheim that his work deserved a show at Art of
This Century. Pollock helped win Guggenheim over, though he was indif-
ferent to Hofmann’s painting and resisted his teachings with reflexive ve-
hemence.
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 69

Their best-known skirmish occurred on that first visit or later, at the artists’
colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Accounts vary. Hofmann told Pollock
he should work from nature. All accounts agree on Pollock’s reply: “I am
nature.” This comeback has the flat clang of cliché. Pollock asserted what a
few Surrealists, many Expressionists, and nearly all Romantics had asserted
before him: authentic art is the work of those who embody natural forces.
Hofmann, too, promoted this doctrine, though he couldn’t accept Pollock’s
brusque equation of artist and nature.
Like the German Romantics whose subtleties he sloganized, Hofmann
talked of empathy. Harold Rosenberg recalled that, in the summer,
Hofmann “ritualistically attended the setting of the sun from a high point
among the dunes of Provincetown.” The painter would say, “I bring
the sunset home with me.” This was not a blending of artist and na-
ture. Intuiting the essential being of other things, other people, the artist
feels a heightened individuality. And whatever is embraced by intui-
tion becomes more fully, more self-evidently itself. Everything that has
withered in a disconnected state is renewed and returned to natural
harmony: perception and fact, self and world, the particular and the uni-
versal.
When Pollock said, “I am nature,” he argued in shorthand that empathy
was unnecessary. He and the world were one, so he had no reason to look
at sunsets or at anything outside himself. “But if you work from inside,”
Hofmann said in reply to Pollock’s famous outburst, “you will repeat your-
self.” With this warning, Hofmann prophesied the sameness that would afflict
Pollock’s art when it became great. The best of his poured paintings are all
the same painting. On canvases of various sizes colors change, gesture mod-
ulates, density shifts, yet nothing new appears—and rightly so, for Pollock’s
pouring succeeded only when he held fast to the premise that all is present,
all is reconciled.
That is why the poured images have no use for compositional devices,
those means of reconciliation. No emblem of the self stands apart, needing
to be harmonized with all that it is not. The poured paintings show an ego
construing its isolation as its triumphant unity with the universe—not the
commonplace universe overrun by others but a universe made bearable, made
glorious, by the absence of every ego but one’s own. When Pollock painted,
he transcended ordinary life. Then he felt sufficient. Away from the studio,
his being grew thin and turbulent; he felt himself begin to tatter. The studio
always tugged at him and terrified him, too. He could never be certain that
his gesture would create the needed unity of body and space, painter and
painting, figure and ground.
70 THEY PATLE SOUR SAG Gresik

Occasionally, Pollock let a definite shape emerge from his webs of slung
paint. Or he cut a crudely human outline from an old canvas and pasted it
on a new one. In 1948 he attached the flat wooden profile of a rocking horse
to a poured image. The usual distinctions between figure and ground seemed
natural to Pollock, and he never abandoned them completely. At most, he
could hold them in abeyance with skeins of color that induce the ground to
permeate the figure and the figure to permeate the ground. No boundary 1s
firm, all edges look arbitrary. Contained only in the most contingent manner,
the image implies an infinite.
An infinite can only be implied because it cannot, of course, be pictured.
The poured images do not picture anything. That is why members of the
New York art world usually call them paintings or canvases. They are objects
bearing traces of a self-absorbed drama: not merely a journey to the infinite
but a transformation. Pollock becomes the infinite; his feeling of helpless
exposure vanishes as his presence expands to fill the space that in less exalted
moments would bear in on him unendurably.
Even a small poured painting is ungraspably large in scale; and even the
largest has a human scale, because it is the residue of the artist's gestures.
Currents of paint lead us past the visible to an obscure sense of the body’s
interior, pulsing and wet. Glistening allusions to blood and guts refer as well
to substances the body expels, sometimes explosively. From metaphors vio-
lently mixed come evocations of the body that imply boundless space, as if
the infinite were bodily and the body were infinite. In Pollock’s words, “It
all ties together.”
This oneness made Pollock feel optimistic so long as he kept it vague—
an intimation of his allover image, as it is known. Nothing else permitted
him much hope, though he had gravitated toward leftist politics during his
high-school years. At the age of sixteen, he was a fan of Jeddu Krishnamurti,
the Indian mystic who became a cult figure in southern California dur-
ing the twenties. Pollock liked Krishnamurti’s intimations of something be-
yond the reach of the mundane, a saving force that individuals can draw
from themselves.
Baffled by the leader’s cloudiness, he clung more urgently to the idea of
art, having gathered that artists were somehow estranged, different from
others, and extreme in their individuality. Their power raised them above
the common world and its miseries. Year after year, from early adolescence
well into middle age, Pollock had not known what to do with his sin-
gularity, which left him feeling as raw and shapeless as a clam without a
shell. Then, pouring his paints, he ushered himself into a state of oneness
with all that is. Because this was no ordinary unity, it was not visible to
ordinary eyes. Among the few who seemed to see was a fellow painter named
THE AMERICAN INFINITE al

Clyfford Still. Pollock accepted with gratitude Still’s grandiose praise.

Quizzed in the year of his death about the point of his art, Pollock could say
only that he had “changed the nature of painting.” So, he said, had his friend
Clyfford Still.
15. Clytford Still, 1958. Photograph by Hans Namuth
 1]
The son of an accountant, Clyfford Still grew up in Spokane, Washington,
and Bow Island, a small town in Alberta, Canada. Encouraged to draw as a
small boy, he taught himself to paint as he grew older. His parents introduced
him to music and literature and gave him the means to accumulate a sizable
array of art books and magazines. Still made his first visit to New York in
1925. Twenty-one years old, a native of the Far West, he expected to find
the city a place of happy fulfillments.
From reproductions, Still had gathered grand ideas about certain old-
master paintings, including some in the collection of the Metropolitan. When
he saw them in the flesh, these images seemed weak and uncompelling. He
had come to New York to complete his education at the Art Students League.
After forty-five minutes of his first class he quit, convinced that he knew all
the lessons being taught—and knew them, furthermore, to be worthless. New
York, the capital of his country’s high culture, had nothing to give him.
Returning to Spokane, Still enrolled at the local university. After graduation,
he taught fine arts at Washington State College, in the town of Pullman.
In 1934 Still painted a picture of a naked, brutally awkward figure striding
through an empty landscape. The figure nearly fills the surface of the canvas,
as the cloud-laden sky presses outward toward us. He is a monument im-
mersed in nature’s glory. Still arrived at his mature style by letting the figure
be overwhelmed, drawn into the background, which became the fore-
ground—the dense surface of his oil paints. Heavily but delicately laid on,
his patches of dark color are craggy and mountainous. Tall, jagged voids
allude to canyon openings or fissures in cloud banks covering western skies.
Sometimes a jagged streak of bright color snakes over the surface like a bolt
of lightning.
Sull’s forms are versatile. His clouds flicker like flames; they loom up like
bat wings, ready to enfold you. Melodramatic by temperament, Still had a
74 Tie Ae Oh eA Gre
Sal URE

knack for gothic effects. Before a particularly dark painting, you half expect
a sudden clap of thunder. Yet the eye feels at home in even the spookiest of
his paintings—at home and at ease, for his imagery evolved from familiar
pictures of the unspoiled American West. In the nineteenth century, Albert
Bierstadt and Frederick E. Church became famous by celebrating this coun-
try’s bigness with big, swaggeringly sublime paintings. Still was their direct
descendant. Nonetheless, he stated in 1961 that “I paint only myself, not
nature.”
This statement makes sense only if we return to the thirties, when Still
was merging human anatomy with the forms of mountains and clouds. The
figure vanished, yet it survived. It became the surrounding territory—flesh
of the earth, breath of the sky. In the expansive light of Still’s paintings,
nature was at one with him, with the self that supplied the artist with the
only subject he considered worthy. Through his art, he had achieved “total
psychic unity.” His “feeling of freedom,” he added, “was now absolute and
infinitely exhilarating.” Still conceived his canvases—these emblems of his
being—as portions of a single, ever-expanding work so powerfully cohesive
that it swept aside all boundaries. “To be stopped by a frame’s edge was
intolerable,” he declared in 1963. And it was intolerable that the European
avant-garde had filled the world with paintings that merely reiterated the
frame—paintings like Piet Mondrian’s, though Stull rarely did Mondrian the
honor of indicting him by name.
Looking past all geometric painters to geometry’s origins, Still saw an
ancient tyranny of straight edge and right angle. There is “‘a Euclidean prison
. to be annihilated,” he said. To be free, the painter must challenge the
“authoritarian” frame with forms indifferent to boundaries. Painters unwill-
ing to make this challenge were weaklings “hopelessly trapped in the grids
and geometries laid down by the saint of all masochists, Euclid.” In unde-
niable fact, the frame does stop the spread of Still’s painted forms. Yet they
move over the canvas as if it had no limits; they show no respect for the
edges of the frame or the traditions of painting that give the edges the au-
thority to enclose an image and detach it from ordinary space.

During the early years of the war, Still worked in the defense plants of
Oakland and San Francisco. In the spring of 1943 the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art gave him his first one-man show. The following autumn, he
returned to teaching, at the Richmond Professional Institute in Virginia. A
year and a half later, he moved to New York and looked up Mark Rothko.
The two had met in Berkeley. Rothko now introduced Still to Peggy Gug-
genheim. She showed a few of his works in an autumn salon at Art of This
Century and, early in 1946, gave him a solo show. In Still’s art Guggenheim
detected “a melancholy, almost a tragic sense.” This sounds like language
THE AMERICAN INFINITE Le)

16. Clyfford Still, 1954, 1954. Oil on canvas, 9 ft. 5% in. x 13 ft.

learned from Rothko, whose catalog essay claims that “Stull expresses the
tragic-religious drama which is generic to all Myths at all times.” Thus Still
transcends the limits imposed on the mind by any particular culture. Further,
he comes close to transcending the mind itself, with its mundane clutter. The
shapes in Still’s pictures, said Rothko, “form a theogony of the most elemen-
tary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond its will to live.”
Guggenheim remembered that all day, every day, during the run of his
show, Still sat in the gallery, saying little. “A strange man,” she decided.
Maybe, as Guggenheim assumed, he wanted to keep track of sales. Maybe he
wanted to know how visitors managed their confrontation with his tragic,
uncommunicative art. Would it exalt them? Would they flinch at an intuition
of the disenchantment that had led him into isolation? Maybe they would
join him on “the high and limitless plain” where there is no eluding the
tragic sense of art and of life. Still was not hopeful. Nor was Rothko, though
he persisted in talking of the audience that awaited him—all “the people
who are looking for a spiritual basis for communion.”
These viewers would feel in his darkly glowing colors “the states of mind
76 EME AML EE (Ol VAC iE Su Uri

of the total man.” Unhappily, they did not appear save at long intervals, in
small groups or alone, and Rothko could never feel sure of their responses.
The picture that “lives by companionship . . . dies by the same token,” he
said. So “it is a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.” Rothko
feared painting’s audience. Still despised it, and felt he could do no less.

In 1950 Betty Parsons showed a roomful of Still’s new paintings. With these
works, the artist said, he “made it clear that a single stroke of paint, backed
by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could
restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices
for subjugation.” Still believed that his paintings had redemptive powers: See
them clearly, feel their power fully, and you will be free. You will be new
and strong.
Evidently, though, the audience did not want to be redeemed. It wanted
to be amused or soothed; at its most serious, the audience wanted to be told
truths about itself or the world. Still would not oblige. “To memorialize in
the instruments of art the banal attritions of daily experience that are common
to nearly every individual, appears to me to be of small virtue,” he wrote in
1972. There was sizable virtue only in creating images of one’s liberated self.
If others had the courage for that task, there might have been a community
of creator-heroes in America, this immense nation with no use for the “sterile
conclusions of Western European decadence.” Americans might have remade
themselves and the world. Their refusal to do so drove Sull into a state of
unrelenting bitterness.
Hans Namuth’s photographs of Still show a tall, slim, dignified man with
stiff posture. A taut half-smile hovers on his lips. This is the Clyfford Still,
prim and restrained, who sent a thin, persistent stream of bile through the
American art world from the early forties until just before his death in 1980.
It was not enough for him to declare his contempt for artists who give in to
the temptations of the marketplace. He must tell us that he hears them
“whimpering from their morbid cribs,” hoping to justify their offense. Why
did they compromise themselves? “For the price of a flunky’s handout,” says
Sull, and for the sake of showing their art in “dead rooms . . . prepared for
self-contempt, for clowns, for the obscenity that degrades the discipline of
true freedom and perverts the idea that marks the moment of elevation.”
Sull admired only Rothko, Pollock, and Newman, for they stood apart, as
he did, uncompromising and unentangled. A year after his show at Parsons,
Still wrote:

When I expose a painting I would have it say: “Here am I; this is my

feeling, my presence, myself. Here I stand implacable, proud, alive,
naked, unafraid. If one does not like it he should turn away because I
THE AMERICAN INFINITE TIL

am looking at him. I am asking for nothing. I am simply asserting that

the totality of my being can stand stripped of its camouflage and look
out on the fractional people who pass before me and see them without
rancor, desire, or fear.”

He is whole, others are “fractional.” Sublimely self-sufficient, he would be

diminished by contact with us. So we are to expect no messages from Still.
“Demands for communication are both presumptuous and irrelevant,” he
said. Nothing is relevant but the display ofa will untouched by all debilitating
counterforces: others’ wills, society’s expectations, the authority of historical
tradition. Still’s destiny is solitude. Our part is to marvel and to avoid im-
pertinent thoughts about the bitterness that sustains him.
Sull gave up the last of his New York studios in 1961. Settling with his
wife, Patricia Still, on a farm northwest of Baltimore, in Carroll County,
Maryland, he became the irascible hermit he had long impersonated. Still
exhibited his work in later years, if he felt sufficiently flattered by the op-
portunity. He accepted medals and honorary degrees and donated paintings
to favored institutions—the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. To the end of his life, he filled his
letters with denouncements of “the parasitical forces . . who would appro-
priate and pervert” the work of “creator-man”—the lonely, liberating hero
that Stull believed he embodied for his time.
 SYA
AWW

17. Barnett Newman, | 95 Ie Photograph by Hans Namuth

 be
Alone and adrift, permeating the fullness of space with one’s unshackled
vitality—this is the state of being evoked by the paintings of Clyfford Still
and Jackson Pollock. Their grandiosity has a peculiarly American tone, as
Willem de Kooning noted in 1960. A native of Rotterdam and trained at the
local academy, de Kooning cast a skeptical, European eye on his friends’
efforts to elude the clutches of tradition. Painters like Pollock and Still “stand
all alone in the wilderness—breast bared,” said de Kooning. “This is an
American idea.”
It is an idea of losing one’s tiresome, ordinary self in the unbounded prom-
ise of the New World; liberated from history, one is reborn with primordial
strength and integrity. When Pollock and a few others infused their paintings
with the hope of redemption American-style, de Kooning said they were
making art “out of John Brown’s body” —a reference to the abolitionist who
tried, in his raid on Harpers Ferry, to resolve the quandaries of American
life with a single violent gesture. After Brown’s execution in 1859, Henry
David Thoreau praised him as “the most American of us all.” As de Kooning
saw, Pollock and Still had some of his fanaticism. —
At first glance, Mark Rothko seems to belong in their company. The three
painters admired one another, and Rothko espoused a notion of art no less
heroic, no less exalted, than Pollock’s or Stll’s. Toward the end of the fifties,
he declared his devotion to the “basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy,
doom.” A dark splendor blazes from the blocks of color that Rothko balanced,
one above the other, to form the signature image of his mature work. Each
luminous red or purple floats in a state of absolute quietude. All is cloudy,
yet all has been resolved with exquisite precision. Rothko’s forms are at
peace with one another and with their places within the boundaries of the
canvas. Though a hazy strip of bright color may draw the eye into infinite
80 TE FAD EO mAS Ges WIRE

depths, none of Rothko’s hues crowds the frame. His colors accept their
confinement, and in that acceptance is Rothko’s difference from Pollock and
Sull.
Rothko treated the frame with something more than respect. His oblongs
of color echo the edges and right angles of the frame in a homage that
continued for more than two decades, the entire span of Rothko’s maturity
as a painter. It may be that the enclosing frame was his emblem of doom
and its inevitability. To honor the frame was to honor our fate, which Rothko
understood as tragic. Pollock and Still had no patience for tragedy’s insights.
In their paintings, form pushes restlessly at the frame, as if any enclosure
were arbitrary and therefore dubious—a mere fact not worthy of full respect.
Refusing to resolve their imagery, they filled it with expansive forces to be
felt with equal power in the work of only one other painter: Barnett New-
man.
Born in Brooklyn and educated at City College in upper Manhattan, New-
man borrowed from the French the habit of wearing a beret-—an emblem
of his artistic vocation. His monocle, suspended from a length of black ribbon,
announced an Old World formality of manner. Well-tailored, he made a
point of not resembling Clyfford Stull, with his air of small-town irascibility,
or Jackson Pollock, in his T-shirt and blue jeans. Yet he considered them
friends. Newman felt exaltations like theirs and—beret and monocle to the
contrary—he shared their distrust of the European past. Like Stull, Newman
believed he had glimpsed an irony both subtle and shocking: Piet Mondrian,
progressive leader, guide to a perfected future, wielded the authority of the
past with particularly oppressive skill.
Mondrian made paintings from straight lines, right angles, black, white,
and the primaries—red, yellow, and blue. These, he argued, are the distillates
of pictorial tradition. To paint well is to place them in the “equilibrated
relationships” that “in society signify what is just.” In due time, art like his
would show the way from proper composition to the architecture of utopia.
Room, house, street, city, and society would be remade and gathered into the
“cosmic” unity. “And man?” asked Mondrian. “Nothing in himself, he will
be part of the whole; and losing his petty and pathetic individual pride, he
will be happy in the Eden he will have created!”
Mondrian wanted us to see his exquisitely adjusted pictures as promises of
an all-embracing harmony. Newman saw in them “an empty world of geo-
metric formalisms.” Mondrian’s arrangements of line and color left Newman
feeling beleaguered, imprisoned, reduced to a cipher capable only of correct
but reflexive responses to the composition’s domineering cues. In the place
defined by a Mondrian canvas, Newman sensed a deadening, a loss of himself.
THE AMERICAN INFINITE row

So “it is precisely this death image, the grip of geometry, that has to be
confronted.” He confronted it with Mondrian’s own means: straight lines,
right angles, flat expanses of bright color.
Almost eight feet high and nearly eighteen long, Newman’s Vir Heroicus
Sublimis (1950-51) is a field of warm red punctuated by five thin vertical
lines—or “zips,” as the artist called them. At first, these zips look like
familiar compositional devices: echoes of the frame that measure off the
field into nicely balanced, comfortably contained units of color. But that
is not how they work. With astonishing delicacy, Newman has arranged the
zips in a pattern that does not mesh with the proportions of the red field.
The zips float free, indifferent to the edges of the canvases. Their authority
denied, these edges do not contain the field of red with any force. This color
seems endlessly expansive, potentially infinite, and imbued with the will of
the artist who generated this openness with his placement of the zips.
Having exercised the power of his gesture, Newman claimed to have
“busted geometry.” “I’ve licked Mondrian,” he boasted. “I’ve killed the
diagram.”
In the early fifties, Thomas B. Hess had not yet become Newman’s leading
advocate and most ingenious explicator. With embarrassment, Hess later re-
called having seen Newman at a Kootz Gallery opening a week before his
second one-man show was to open at Parsons: “He came over, beaming with
pleasure, and gave me the announcement card, which he had designed him-
self. It was printed in white ink on white paper. ‘White on white,’ I thought,
‘poor Malevich.’ But Newman had ‘confronted’ the mystical Constructivist,
wiped him out, and made something else. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘sort of acombination
of the zabula rasa and Huck Finn.’ I thought, ‘More lessons from the learned
sage.” Take away the flip tone, and Hess’s thought was correct. Newman
was in fact highly learned, and his description of his white-on-white an-
nouncement contains, in condensed form, a helpful lesson about John Locke,
Mark Twain, and America.
The tabula rasa—blank slate—is Locke’s image of the mind at birth: in-
nocent of all but its potential. Sensory perceptions deliver simple ideas, said
Locke, and from these the mind builds its complex ideas. To Newman,
Locke’s tabula rasa was a guarantee of the individual’s independence. Rec-
ognizing no authority but one’s experience and the will to make something
of it, one creates oneself. Newman understood this labor as immense and
possible only in conditions of uncompromised freedom—only in America, if
one sees the true America as the blank slate it was for Huck Finn in the last
chapter of his story.
Aunt Sally plans to “sivilize’ Huck and he “can’t stand it.” So
82 THE PATE OF ARG ESiauUiRie

he decides to “light out for the Territory,” the empty, unbounded region
to the west, where civilization has not yet begun to erect its confining,
regulating structures. Out West, it is always the present, and the individual
is eternally renewed—or that is the fantasy Newman elaborated by con-
flating so brilliantly the Lockean model of the mind and Huck Finn’s
idea of geography. His greater brilliance was to paint images that evoke
the habitat of the solitary, primordial American. But what use is that to
others?
In 1962 Newman told an interviewer that “almost fifteen years ago Harold
Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly
mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly
it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. The answer
still goes.” Properly read, Newman’s art would lead each of us beyond tra-
dition, beyond inhibition, to self-renewal in a world of perpetually renewed
individualists. His art did not have this effect, any more than Still’s gave
us back “the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for
subjugation.” Newman was disappointed, perhaps more than Stull, for
he had begun more optimistically. In 1933 Newman ran for mayor of
New York on a Writers-Artists Ticket, with himself at its head. In a pam-
phlet addressed to “all the members of New York’s cultural community,” he
stated it as axiomatic “that culture is the foundation of not only our present
society, but of all our hopes of all future societies to come.” He meant high
culture, the work of educated creators: “artists, musicians, writers.” Fiorello
La Guardia won the election, as expected, and Newman looked for ways
to define society as beside any exalted point a serious artist might want to
pursue.
Making the gallery rounds, Newman presented himself as “Barney”—
affable, attentive, always game for a drink and chat about art and artists.
In the studio, he cultivated a sublime isolation. “The aesthetic act always
precedes the social one,” Newman proclaimed in 1947. “Man’s first ex-
pression . . . was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication.
Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger
at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness
before the void.” Self and void: the bitterness of defeated hope permitted
the most ambitious New York painters to see genuine significance in
nothing else. Their paintings are monuments to an ideal of isolation per-
fected.
Newman talked for three decades of the true artist as a figure “outside
society” who can’t “build on anything” external to himself. He has no so-
cial or cultural inheritance of any worth. To begin “from scratch,” as he
must, the artist forces himself “to give up the whole notion of an external
18. Bomel Newman, One | 1948
84 Tithe AWitEs (OliwAG Grea UIRGE

world.” Then he is free to realize his one legitimate hope: to say “some-
thing that would be important to himself.” In 1947 the avant-garde maga-
zine Tiger’s Eye asked artists for comments on art and its prospects. Newman
stated, in full: “An artist paints so that he will have something to look
at; at times, he must write so that he will also have something to read.”
Indifferent to the work of others, the true artist doesn’t much care if
others attend to his work. Why, then, did Newman exhibit his paint-
ings?
No doubt his hope of being useful—of improving society, of ending
“state totalitarianism,” and the rest of it—never entirely faded. Yet his
experience persuaded him to repudiate the hope that his art might ever
be of use—or even intelligible—to anyone but himself. Art, he believed,
can succeed only by making that repudiation. He exhibited his grandly
uningratiating paintings to let us know that his independence was
uncompromised. He would concede nothing to weakness, nothing to
sentimentality, his own or ours. The presence pervading the somber blaze
of Vir Heroicus Sublimis is not a familiar sort of person with com-
municable feelings. He sends us no messages. Newman is present in his
art as a force of will. If you are able, you may impersonate him. You may
come to know what it is to be the outsize self filling a place that lacks
most of a place’s usual features, for here are next to no forms, no dependable
scale, nor any sharp distinction between surface and depth. In Newman’s
version of an American place, everything feels sublimely provisional, includ-
ing oneself.
These images encourage the sensibility to drift beyond its own purview.
The effect can be joyful and grand. In the absence of reliable cues, so many
responses are possible that one begins to seem vast to oneself—vast and pow-
erful and yet unable to prevent the failure of joy. Newman said that his
subject is “the terror of the Self,” and an exhilarated confrontation with his
art drifts easily into a desolate understanding that one is alone in one’s
experience.
After Newman’s second show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951,
Pollock visited his studio, looked hard at paintings others had mocked, and
accepted Newman as an equal. Barney’s birthday was the twenty-ninth of
January, Jackson’s the twenty-eighth; for a few years the Newmans and the
Pollocks made a custom of celebrating the occasion together. Seven years
Jackson’s senior, Barney sometimes played the elder brother. He would lec-
ture Jackson about his drinking and, at Lee’s request, try to retrieve him
from benders. Newman made the effort out of friendship and deep admi-
ration for Pollock’s art. Yet he said that his own art “had meaning only in
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 85

relation to Pollock’s work and against it.’ Newman turned his art against
everyone and everything. His images are utterly unwelcoming. We feel the
full force of their splendor only when we see how adamantly they exclude
us, how unfit they are for anyone but Newman in his most sublimely heroic
conception of himself.
 _——_ . eo i
19. Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm,hm, 1950. Photograph by Hans Namuth
 ine
We like to think that even the most wildly peculiar art is somehow useful.
At the very least, it stimulates memory and feeling. It provokes the association
of ideas. In 1949 a poured painting in a Pollock exhibition reminded the critic
Henry McBride of “a flat, war-shattered city, possibly Hiroshima, as seen
from a great height in moonlight.” This is a recurring notion: Pollock’s snarls
of line were his means of “expressing the city’—in the words of Selden
Rodman, who interviewed Pollock two months before the painter’s death.
“What a ridiculous idea,” said Pollock. “Never did it in my life!” Musing,
he allowed that he might somehow express “my times and my relation to
them.” Then he added, “Maybe not even that.” Or certainly not that. Art
like Pollock’s is a means of withdrawing from one’s times, of having only a
reproachful relation with them. A poured painting offers us the spectacle of
a will manifesting its isolation, first to itself and then to the audience.
Struggling to be helpful, Pollock told Rodman that “painting 1s self-
discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” These are clichés, yet they
are given an anguished vitality by Pollock’s doubts about who or what he
was. He once told another interviewer that “the modern artist is working
with space and time.” What artist doesn’t do that? Pollock’s words come alive
only when we see that, for him, to work with space and time was to paint
what he became in his wildest imaginings: the artist as Nature, coincident
with the universe. In Pollock’s aesthetics, creative self and created world are
one. Making that unity visible, gesturing it into being, he felt redeemed. Idle,
he felt damned. Krasner remembered him saying in the late forties, “Painting
is no problem; the problem is what to do when you're not painting.”
Away from the studio, he would putter around the property at Springs.
He would drive up and down the roads of rural Long Island, sometimes
cutting across lawns and open fields. He’d pore over his reviews or the article
in Life—signs that the world was taking notice of all that he had suffered,
88 ale Veils (Ole IN Gite SilUlivts

all that he was accomplishing now, as his strength increased, from one season
to the next. Yet he suspected that attention was coming to him tinged by
falsity. No one could know him truly, for he didn’t know himself. Unable
to state his painterly intentions, he could only enact them, and he always
feared that one day he would fail. To know the inward source of his gesture
would have been a comfort. At the very least, Pollock needed a definition of
the art his gesture produced. By 1950, the critic Clement Greenberg had
supplied one.
During studio visits, Greenberg coached Pollock on matters of surface,
abstractness, and the need for historical continuity—with Cubism, in partic-
ular. Pollock was coachable because Krasner had for long seasons been teach-
ing him similar lessons learned from Hans Hofmann, the source she shared
with Greenberg. By the time Alfred Barr acquired Pollock’s One for the
Museum of Modern Art, the painter was adept at impersonating the Amer-
ican modernist who is intrinsically European—or not too American. Or, any-
way, not an American of the wrong sort, a provincial midwesterner like
Thomas Hart Benton or a New York provincial devoted too slavishly to the
example of Mondrian.
In 1950 Pollock told a radio interviewer that “modern art didn’t drop out
of the blue; it’s part of a long tradition dating back with Cézanne, up through
the cubists, the post-cubists, to the painting done today.” By giving this al-
ready official account of his history——Cézanne to Picasso to me, Jackson
Pollock—he showed he could speak in the voice of a respectable avant-
gardist. He showed that Krasner’s sacrifice, herself for him, was in truth her
triumph, for Pollock the successor to Picasso was her creation. And he showed
that Alfred Barr’s chart could be extended to provide a salient place for this
post-Picassoid Pollock. In doing all this, Pollock hid himself and his art.
Speaking as the next great painter after Picasso, Pollock became the con-
scious medium of Krasner’s ventriloquism, for he had intuited a truth: his
poured paintings did not evolve from late Cubism or any other avant-garde
style. They belong nowhere in the updated versions of Alfred Barr’s mod-
ernist genealogy. These images are off the chart. De Kooning could see their
strangeness, and he sensed Pollock’s distaste for the part Krasner had taught
him to play. Inclined to be mischievous, de Kooning liked to tell Pollock that
the drip paintings are “beautiful.” This was a needling sort of compliment,
for it meant: these works are not at all strange; they are well composed, well
executed, and thus admirable by the familiar standards of the Old World.
When he accused Pollock of producing beauty, de Kooning was saying: Don’t
feel so uneasy about parroting the avant-garde line you learned from Krasner
and Greenberg; in fact, you are an avant-gardist, a New York painter dedi-
cated to School of Paris traditions.
This needling hurt. Pollock returned it by calling de Kooning “a god-
THE AMERICAN INFINITE 89

damned European.” This meant: You're the one who composes beautiful
pictures; you lay on your paints in the traditional manner; you're the
descendant of the Cubists; you are the captive of avant-garde history. I am
none of these things, I do none of those things. | am my own painter, my
own man, free of the past and its oppressive directives.

A month or so after his session with Rudy Burckhardt, Pollock let Hans
Namuth photograph him at work. There was no miming this time, and
Namuth’s pictures turned out so well that he proposed a further intrusion: a
film of the painter slinging his pigments. Shooting outdoors in the cold North
Atlantic light, Namuth worked slowly. Pollock was cooperative until it came
time to assemble a sound track. Namuth’s collaborator, Paul Falkenberg,
suggested Indonesian gamelan music. As he later wrote, “The seemingly
amorphous elements swirling in Pollock’s canvases suggested to me the loose-
structured sound sequences of a gamelan orchestra.” Pollock objected, saying,
“Paul, this is exotic music. I am an American painter!” The music that even-
tually accompanied Pollock’s performance in the film is the work of Morton
Feldman, an American composer.
“I am an American painter.” This was true, though Pollock’s worldly
success depended on his stressing the point precisely as instructed. He was to
present himself as the conduit through which the most powerful impulses of
modernist painting passed on their way from the Old World to the New. If
he played along with this scenario, the poured paintings would be seen as
crucial links between Paris and New York. But if he played along, he would
play himself false. Pollock felt trapped in a nightmarish scheme. Namuth’s
movie seemed part of it, though he couldn’t say exactly why.
As the camera rolled, Pollock was free to behave precisely as he did in the
isolation of his studio. From the filming came a painting, an addition to his
oeuvre. Pollock could formulate no objection to the project, to Namuth’s
intentions, or to his own, yet he feared that he was lost—that the machinery
of his success had already snared him. Pollock’s panics made him melodra-
matic, and the weather on the last day of filming encouraged dire imaginings.
It was late in the year and late in the afternoon. Thanksgiving had just passed.
The breeze had turned to a sharp wind, as you can tell from the painter’s
numbed face in the last sequences of the film. Namuth remembered an
exchange of congratulations while equipment was being stowed. The project
had been difficult at every step. Money was scarce, and there was no assurance
of an audience or even of a theater willing to show the work. Nonetheless,
Namuth persuaded himself to be optimistic.
In the house were a dozen guests, assembled for a post-Thanksgiving din-
ner. Pollock entered, went to the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, and
brought out a bottle of whiskey. He poured one glassful for himself and
90 AE AWE TOiF RAS GrESTUISE

another for Namuth. Krasner saw and was horrified. He had not drunk
liquor for two years. During that time, he made his best paintings, the ones
that make him memorable now. Pollock drank off his first glass and then
another. Krasner called the party to the table. On his way, Pollock snatched
from the wall a leather strap decorated with sleigh bells. Pretending to be
playful, he swung it at Namuth, who told him to put it down. Krasner
suggested that everyone be seated. Pollock dropped the bells and lurched to
the head of the table. Unfortunately, the shuffle of guests left Namuth seated
at Pollock’s right. Soon the others heard voices, held low in anger. The word
phony kept recurring nastily. Namuth, it seemed, was being charged with the
sin his accuser most feared to commit.
Suddenly Pollock stood, his hands under the edge of the table, poised to
tip it over. “Now?” he asked, glaring at Namuth, who said, “Jackson—no!”
“Now?” he bellowed. He waited, as everyone watched him, then bellowed it
again, still louder. Then he tipped the table on its side, sending the meal and
several guests to the floor. As Pollock stalked out, Krasner announced that
coffee would be served in the living room.

Three days later, Betty Parsons opened a show of Pollock’s new drip paint-
ings; among them were the Modern’s One and Autumn Rhythm (1950), now
in the Metropolitan. Even the artist’s detractors were impressed. These can-
vases had an air of unassailable triumph. Also, Rudy Burckhardt remembers,
they inspired “something a little odd. One of the fashion magazines used
them as backdrops for their models.” The photographer was Cecil Beaton,
on assignment for Vogue.
At Parsons, Beaton wanted Pollock’s latest images to oxygenate the slightly
stale air swirling around the “new soft look” that Vogue had decreed for

Hie x
Vi
20. Jackson Pollock, The Water Bull, c. 1946. Oil on canvas, Oe in. x 6 ft.
11% in.
THE AMERICAN INFINITE OT

21. Jackson Pollock, Number 14, 1957, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 57% in.
See te LT in.

spring. It was 1950 and the magazine’s arbiters were pretending that it was
1934, when gowns wreathed the body in clouds of taffeta, silk, and ostrich
feathers. Beaton’s lens drew an equation between puffs of see-through fabric
and Pollock’s airy loops of pigment. The painter’s reaction is not on record.
No one on the downtown scene wanted to admit that a fashion photographer
could discredit a serious painter. Undeniably, though, Beaton had gathered
the poured paintings into the media’s store of exploitable images. Maybe
Autumn Rhythm’s appearance in Vogue was a sign that Pollock had become
an old master, great but no longer in contention. Burckhardt says, “There
was a feeling that Pollock had reached a dead end with his drip method.
You could imitate him but you’d never be able to do it the way he did.”
Pollock, too, felt the need for a new way.
In 1950 he laid aside his sticks, took up an oven baster, and sent streaks
of black enamel looping and curling over unprimed canvas. When he worked
fast, his line turned wispy. Slowed down, the current of paint spread into
velvety pools. With his first method of pouring, Pollock had banished the
creatures that inhabited his art. With this second method, he induced them
to return, somewhat evolved. Water Bull, of around 1946, became the hulking
beast of Number 14, 1951 (1951). The tall, dense figures of Totem Lesson II
(1945) reappeared as the tall, airy figures of Echo: Number 25, 1951 (1951).
 aa

22. Jackson Pollock, Easter and the Totem, 1953. Oil on canvas, 7 ft. V4 in. x
58 in.

The black-on-white paintings of 1951 have the cool yet burnt-in feel of per-
sistent afterimages. At their best, they are like glamorous nightmares, imprints
of obsessions that a personality blander than Pollock’s might envy. After
basting his canvases with black enamel, he went back for a moment to sticks
 i ta at E he

23. Jackson Pollock, Male and Female, 1942. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. Vs in.
x AQ in.

and dripping. Tangled and shimmering, Convergence: Number 10, 1952 (1952)
belongs among the poured canvases of 1947 to 1950. He would move forward,
he hoped, if he could persuade his past to haunt him.
Easter and the Totem (1953) is a tribute to Matisse and a reprise of Male
94 Wine JANINE (Ol a (Gie Si Wite

and Female (1942), which honored Picasso. Pink and green and willfully
rough, Easter and the Totem pays marvelously involuted homage to Parisian
modernism. In The Deep (1953), a field of white solidifies and then opens
onto a dark and eerie void. This is abstraction in the gothic mode. During
1954 and 1955, Pollock let his paint become as thick as it had been in 1946,
just before he began to pour his colors; the next year, the last of his life, he
painted nothing.

In 1955 Pollock met a young writer named B. H. Friedman. “I’m not work-
ing much anymore,” the painter said, unprompted. “I go to my studio, but
nothing happens.” After a pause, he added, “I don’t want to repeat myself.”
By then, he had spent half a decade redoing with unsteady flair all that he
had done in the forties. For help with his drinking and his bafflement in the
studio, Pollock turned to the last of his psychiatrists, Dr. Ralph Klein.
Pollock’s weekly appointment was on Monday. Sometimes his friend Patsy
Southgate sat with him during the train ride from the Hamptons to Man-
hattan. Her task was to steer Jackson past a dingy, favorite bar in Grand
Central Station and on to Klein’s office. After his session, he was left to his
own self-punishing devices. Nearly always, he appeared at the Cedar Street
Tavern. Despite its name, the Cedar stood on University Place just north of
Eighth Street. It was a neighborhood bar with fluorescent lighting and walls
painted a dreary color no one has bothered to remember with much precision.
Office workers ate lunch there. At night, painters and sculptors filled the
place and alcohol set the tone. “In the forties,” said Elaine de Kooning, a
painter and the wife of Willem de Kooning, “we all drank coffee.” Then, as
the fifties began, “there was a booze explosion in the art world.” Downtown,
liquor became conversation’s fuel, a necessity taken for granted. The artists
did not make a topic of it, nor wonder at length why coffee was now obsolete.
They let booze suspend all tedious inquiries.
Downtown, bad manners were mannered. Toughness had its proprieties,
even toward the end of an evening at the Cedar. No matter how drunk, the
artists did not discuss politics. They did not complain about the perfidy of
dealers or the indifference of the public. They drew near the subject of art
and talked around it, preferably with self-assured wit. From the clash of
attitudes, the artists wove a delicate and fragmentary web of beliefs about the
meaning of their efforts. Pollock’s appearance disrupted the weaving.
The bar was in Pollock’s old Manhattan neighborhood, and there he played
his old part: the two-fisted desperado from out West. No longer a flat-broke
art student dependent on the friendship of Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock
was a painter more fascinating to the popular media than Benton had ever
been. The painter Franz Kline remembered how carefully Pollock directed
his appearances at the Cedar. Before coming in, he would look through the
24. Jackson Pollock, The Deep, 1953. Oil and enamel on canvas, 7 ft.
234 in. xX 59% in.
96 THE BAT ESO ASG ES TRUIi:

front window to see if the crowd of hangers-on was big enough to justify an
entrance. Then, or later, he would walk in and exhibit his version of the
drunken demented artist.
Pollock’s staggering antics once prompted de Kooning to aim a punch at
his face. It landed, and spectators egged him on to a counterattack. “What?”
said Pollock. “Me hit an artist?” Writers offer this story and a few others as
proof that Pollock felt solidarity with his colleagues. Possibly he did, though
his refusal to hit de Kooning has a tone of false indignation. When drunk,
Pollock felt no scruples about hitting anyone, nor about impersonating the
aggrieved victim—especially in the company of de Kooning, who was gaining
strength as Pollock lurched through the sad routines of alcoholism. He too
felt the force of de Kooning’s glamour, and when he was drunk he resented
it. He resented Kline, he resented Philip Guston, he resented anyone of his
generation who had not slipped and fallen, and he found it impossible to
bring the younger artists into focus. They should be content, he felt, to serve
as the blurs, the woozy presences, that formed the audience for his perfor-
mances at the Cedar.
If Pollock was not drunk on arrival, his friends could see traces of his old
radiance, the allure that outreaches every sexual label. Then his first few
drinks would take effect and he’d become what another painter, John Ferren,
called an “ugh artist”—boorish and inarticulate, a stumbling dervish who
whined and blubbered and snarled and sank into obscenity. According to
legend, Pollock tore the door of the men’s room at the Cedar off its hinges;
he may actually have done it. There is no doubt that he liked to clear tables
of glasses and ashtrays with a lunging sweep of his forearm. Raging, flailing,
weeping, proclaiming his helpless, hopeless despair, Pollock displayed his tor-
ment with melodramatic élan. Nonetheless, it was real and deepened yearly.
 Hes.
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 PAR 2

THE ACTION PAINTER

DE Koontnc: That’s what fascinates me—to make something I can

never be sure of, and no one else can either. I will never know, and
no one else will ever know.
RosEnBERG: You believe that’s the way art is?
DE Kooninc: That’s the way art is.
25. W illem de Kooning, New York, 1950. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt
 14
As Pollock sank, the currents of his infinite reached into paintings by Grace
Hartigan, Harry Jackson, Al Held, Norman Bluhm, Alex Katz, and other
recent arrivals on the scene. Plying brushes and palette knives, never pouring
their colors, these artists felt safe from the charge of mimicking Pollock’s
gesture. He had dismantled standard structural devices. Now Hartigan and
the others did the same. For a few seasons, downtown studios filled with
approximations of Pollock’s dripped and spattered fields. These paintings look
inadvertent, almost entranced. Pollock’s art worked on newcomers like a
daydream of the abyss. After sinking into it for a while, they’d pull away
and return to the solid realm of well-built compositions. Only the veteran
Willem de Kooning made a thoroughly conscious effort to redesign Pollock’s
intimations of infinity. The result was a canvas called Excavation (1950).
Its structure looks elastic. Angles are springy; lines stretch and become
curves that feel to the eye like muscles flexed or voluptuously relaxing. Certain
slits in the painting’s fleshy surface are evidently mouths; others may be fe-
male genitalia. This is a big painting, over eight feet wide. Across its surface,
allusions to the body proliferate and turn topographical; supple flesh becomes
fluid, like watery clay, and spreads in currents churned by remnants of anat-
omy. De Kooning’s challenge to Pollock was unmistakable. He, too, could
make a field painting.
Unlike Pollock, he felt no need to abandon traditional technique. Excava-
tion flaunts the virtuosity of the maker’s hand; and never, not even in this
hectic, slippery image, did de Kooning entirely dismantle the scaffolding of
composition. With little complaint, the roiling forms of Excavation allow
themselves to be contained by the edges of the canvas. You could say that
Excavation is nothing like a drip painting and therefore no challenge to Pol-
lock. That is not what the downtown painters concluded in the fifties. They
saw in this canvas proof that aesthetic options need not exclude one another;
100 ite PAINE Ole A Wie
Si Wise

in art, you can have it both ways. You can undermine pictorial architecture
and persuade it to stand. You can evoke the infinite without abandoning
proper composition. You can make a painting that looks, in its moment, as
audaciously new as Excavation and give it roots deep in European tradition.

At the start of the fifties, de Kooning was ending his forties. Short and sinewy,
he had a high forehead and a strong chin. His fine, wavy hair was already
gray and would soon be white. The force of de Kooning’s intelligence kept
him from looking merely handsome. Grainy snapshots from those days show
that, when excited, he would mug a bit; sometimes his features turned rub-
bery and coarse, though his nose preserved its delicate shape. On documentary
sound tracks, his voice sounds a little flat. He is avoiding the pomposity of
the maestro, the whimsicality of the bohemian. Occasionally, he lets himself
be wry.
De Kooning’s English is so supple that after a while his quirks of grammar
begin to sound like legitimate variations. The ear ignores his Dutch accent,
though it was strong enough to affect his spelling. In a letter to friends about
the Hamptons, he wrote, “The vegetation here is really nothing to rave
about.” Therefore, it is “yust right. It fits my condition. For a painter like
me it is much better to be surrounded by a small nature. Places like the
Grand Canion would frighten me to dead.” J becomes y, th becomes d. When
American-born painters borrowed the look of his brushwork, some adopted
his accent, too. A few became assiduous mimics. Others were more casual,
and didn’t always notice their de Kooningisms. To talk like Bill, as he was
known, was simply to sound like a downtown painter.
Born in 1904 to a working-class family, de Kooning entered the Rotterdam
Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques at the age of thirteen. There he
learned lettering and commercial design; he drew from statuary casts and
made properly academic paintings. His earliest surviving canvases are still
lifes—pictures of dishes rendered with a precise and unassuming realism.
Rooted in the seventeenth century, this familiar Dutch manner was pretty
well exhausted by the middle of the nineteenth. De Kooning gave it fresh
strength. In his teens, he was a grown-up painter.
After a four-year apprenticeship to a decorating firm in Rotterdam, de
Kooning found a job with an art director at a local department store. He
thought of himself as a workman, the practitioner of useful trades. Much
later he told an interviewer that young artists at the Rotterdam Academy

were not interested in painting per se. We used to call that “good for
men with beards.” And the idea of a palette, with colors on it, was
rather silly. At that time we were influenced by the de Stijl group... .
THE ACTION PAINTER 101

The idea of being a modern person wasn’t really being an artist in the
sense of being a painter.

When he was twenty, de Kooning and a few friends made a long visit to
Antwerp and Brussels. They wanted a change of scenery and a chance to
visit some unfamiliar museums. De Kooning supported himself by painting
signs, trimming windows, and drawing cartoons—“all sorts of jobs,” he later
said, “and after three months of crazy work I couldn’t even buy one pair of
socks.”
Europe depressed de Kooning. It felt small and unpromising, a place which
taught ordinary citizens to accept modest lives. Yearning to live expansively,
de Kooning stowed away on a ship bound for America. He came ashore at
Newport Beach, Virginia, in August 1926. Soon he had settled in Hoboken,
New Jersey, and found a job as a housepainter. “What the hell,” he has said.
“If you can paint you can paint houses.” De Kooning remembered getting
“nine dollars a day, a nice salary for that time. In one week I could buy a
new suit, black, for Sundays ... nice workman’s clothes. In three weeks I
could pay off my rent and had new underwear and socks.”
The following year, he found an apartment in Manhattan’s West Forties
and worked at his trades. He was still poor, but American poverty permitted
his ambitions a measure of elbow room. Toward the end of the twenties, he
found paths leading to the bohemian margins of New York. He met Stuart
Davis, John Graham, David Smith, and Arshile Gorky. De Kooning listened
to their shoptalk, he painted, yet he stopped calling himself a commercial
artist only after finishing his stint on the Federal Arts Project of the WPA
—his year of living “modestly and nicely” in the depths of the Depression.
At the end of that year, 1935, he went back to living desperately, all the more
so because he was reluctant to paint houses or take on commercial art
assignments.
Like Gorky, de Kooning played variations on the Picassoid still life. Those
of his friend are earnest, sometimes labored. De Kooning’s are cool and airy
and filled with evidence that he has looked past Picasso to the geometries of
Mondrian and the lush, anti-gravitational fantasies of Miré. Toward the end
of the thirties, de Kooning began a series of minutely realistic portraits, first
of men and then of women. For these, he borrowed a delicate line from
Picasso, who had borrowed it, more than two decades earlier, from the neo-
classical portraiture of Ingres. Gathering precedents at the highest level of
pictorial endeavor, modifying them to his taste, de Kooning had become a
fine artist—serious but not solemn.
In a memoir of the thirties, Edwin Denby recalled walking at night with
de Kooning through the streets of Chelsea, “and his pointing out to me on
the pavement the dispersed compositions—spots and cracks and bits of wrap-
 Be bp a,

26. Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, c. 1940-41. Pencil

on paper, 12'/4 x 11% in.

pers and reflections of neon-light—and I remember the scale of the compo-

sition was too big for me to see it. Luckily I could imagine it.” Even de
Kooning’s smallish early canvases tremble with the restless immensity of New
York. All is ramshackle and exalted, and all coheres, though the artist makes
it easy to overlook his stratagems of order. So much else engages the eye. De
Kooning knew how to get dry, delicately weathered textures from a half-
loaded brush; he understood the way thick paint skids on a tight curve, and
what to expect from an overload of thin paint, how its splashes become
rivulets.
During the war years, de Kooning let his realistic portraiture merge with
his abstract imagery. From this process, which the artist did not intend to be
smooth, came a series of increasingly agitated pictures of women. As the
forties ended, he dismissed his identifiable subjects, though some were reluc-
tant to leave. In white-on-black abstractions like Orestes (1947) and Painting
(1948), voluptuous contours bring to mind the warmth and sliding weight of
oe

S.
a

IRS W illem de Koon ing, Queen of Hearts / Cc 1943; O il and charcoal on

fiberboard , 46'% x 27% in
104 Tee AVS sO WANG Rit
EeSanu

28. Willem de Kooning, Painting, 1948. Enamel and oil on canvas, 42° x
566 in.

buttocks, breasts, and thighs: in murky light, a damp grinding. Straight lines
and right angles suggest woodwork and window frames. Sometimes a shape
looks like a coupling of organic and carpentered form. In de Kooning’s the-
ater, nothing, not even the stage set, goes unembraced.
Always, he confines the formal drama of his art to the shallow space in
which Georges Braque and Picasso elaborated the compacted subtleties of
Cubist form. Cubism is so obviously de Kooning’s master style that he once
felt obliged to state: “I never made a Cubistic painting.” This is a disclaimer
of the sort that leads to one counterexample after another; and there are many,
for he required none of his mature paintings to do without the amenities of
Cubist architecture. Yet even as he learned from Braque and Picasso, de
Kooning was tearing Cubism down to the ground; by the end of the
forties he had rebuilt it to his own specifications. The Parisian Cubists ad-
justed images of the body to the inanimate structures of Euclid and the city.
THE ACTION PAINTER 105

In Excavation de Kooning offers an astonishing variation: Cubist structure

with the body’s heat and pliancy.
According to Clement Greenberg, Pollock was pointing the way past the
landmarks of Parisian Cubism. Nearly everyone else gave de Kooning credit
for doing that. Laden with valuable baggage, de Kooning was entering new
terrain. History and its possibilities seemed to be gathering around him, not
Pollock. As de Kooning advanced, the most ambitious younger painters
would not follow him; they would find destinies of their own in his vicinity.
This is what they told themselves. In truth, they followed him more closely
than they ever admitted then or later, and so did many of de Kooning’s
contemporaries. Early in the fifties, the New York art world tacitly recog-
nized him as America’s exemplary modern artist, and in the pages of Artnews
Harold Rosenberg presented de Kooning as the embodiment of a myth: the
“action painter.”
if uf i
 iS
Though history has labeled him an art critic, Harold Rosenberg was no spe-
cialist. He believed he could write about any topic big enough to interest him.
Born in Brooklyn in 1906, he made his Manhattan debut as a poet devoted
to revolution, aesthetic and political. Attracting little notice, he reappeared in
prose. His fast-moving essays won him a place at Partisan Review, Dissent,
and other left-wing journals of the Depression years. In these circles, Marxist
sympathies were obligatory. Rosenberg met the obligation but it chafed
against his large idea of himself. After the war, he denounced communist
dogma for imposing a rigidity on the mind that relieves it of the need to
think.
Rosenberg was tall—well over six feet—with a barrel chest and a large,
angular face sectioned off by thick eyebrows and a mustache. He delivered
quips in a voice at once querulous and imperious; falling silent for a moment,
he would glower. Quickly the quips would resume, with their impatient edge.
His conversation was always a kind of chiding. He demanded agreement or
a challenge or a sudden swerve to a new subject—anything that would charge
mere talk with the urgency of dramatic dialogue. Wanting the excitement of
theater but not the confinement of a tightly scripted role, Rosenberg became
an advocate of improvisation.
Marxists, Freudians, utopians, and tastemakers must be resisted, he argued,
because their common purpose is to trap us in thoroughly predictable sce-
narios. To behave as they demand, one must wear a mask and let the will
go numb. Actions no longer belong to the actor. Existence feels fake and
weightless, a sensation that cannot be relieved by devoting oneself to a fresh
cause, tinkering with the personality, or learning to love a new style of art.
One must remove one’s mask and stop playing an alien part; one must become
oneself. Rosenberg never explained how to do this. Instead, he praised certain
artists who had done it, despite the “depersonalizing” vulgarity of Western
108 THE SATE Olf SAG Esa Wines

society. In “The American Action Painters,” published by Artnews in 1952,

Rosenberg argued that the artist must fight his way to the integrity of iso-
lation: to be worthy of an audience, he must seek none. Uninhibited by
anyone’s expectations, including his own, the artist will become spontaneous.
Rosenberg believed that spontaneity was the solution to every problem and
the action painter was its one true practitioner.
In Rosenberg’s telling of the exemplary tale, this hero anguished for years
over the pleasures and the morality of art. He—the action painter is always
ostentatiously “he”—grew weary of his doubts. Then, in the mid-forties, he
suffered “a grand crisis” of belief. Baffled, he somehow understood that the
way out of this impasse was through sheer doing, pure action. “The canvas,”
declared Rosenberg,

began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in

which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design,
analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on
the canvas was not a picture but an event.

Dismissing all systems, methodologies, and scenarios, the action painter ar-
rived at “the big moment” when “it was decided to paint. . . just to PAINT.
The gesture on canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political,
esthetic, moral... . The refusal of values did not take the form of condem-
nation or defiance of society, as it did after World War I. It was diffident.
The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas
to be a world.” In this blank and unencumbered realm, the painter took
dictation from no doctrine. Acting by and for himself, he “gesticulated upon
the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare him and his art
to be.”
“He is not a young painter,” said the critic, “but a re-born one. The man
may be over forty, the painter around seven.” Having removed the disguises
of his long apprenticeship, he is becoming himself, Rosenberg tells us. He is
emerging in his art. But how are we to know that the painted image has any
bearing on the painter’s being? How are artist and artwork to be joined so
that the truth of one entails the truth of the other? They don’t need to be
joined, says Rosenberg; they were never separate: “the act-painting is of the
same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has
broken down every distinction between art and life.”
To common sense, this breakdown is a nonevent; distinctions between art
and life remain. And this “metaphysical substance” looms up like a large
wisp of fog, a scenic effect designed to obscure slapdash methods of construc-
tion. Having fashioned no convincing links between the action painter’s art
and life, Rosenberg carried on as if they simply were identical. His polemic
THE ACTION PAINTER 109

requires this unity, and his tone suggests that if readers don’t believe in it
they should try harder. They should have more faith, for the action painter
is what the moment needs; furthermore, he has arrived and everyone ought
to be glad. In a time falsified by politicians, therapists, and every manner of
manipulator, the action painter enjoys the strenuous pleasure of being real,
of being spontaneous; and in the world of his canvas he creates new realities
with the slightest impulse of his hand.

This man of action was the product of Rosenberg’s chronic exasperation with
the life of the mind. Our intellectual traditions, he believed, are the half-
conscious accomplices of commerce and politics; instead of clarifying the
world, they hide it in a haze of delusions. This is the existentialist case against
the routines of rationality, as set forth by Rosenberg’s acquaintance Jean-Paul
Sartre. Few of the American writer’s grander flourishes lack Sartrean au-
thorization. When he talked of de Kooning’s willingness to doubt all art,
including his own, Rosenberg was reporting accurately on the American
painter’s state of mind. He was also recycling Sartre on Alberto Giacometti’s
devotion to transience, ambiguity, and risk. The angst of Sartre’s Giacometti
essay settles like dust into every corner of the action painter’s studio.
Yet Rosenberg never enlisted in the philosopher’s band of followers. He
was too vain—and too itchy a satirist—to accept a leader. In any case, his
impatience kept him from devising respectably philosophical arguments. He
intended his polemic on action painting to make a fast, sharp impression on
the New York art world, and it did. Michael Goldberg remembers “reading
Harold’s action-painting piece out loud. We were in East Hampton—Patsy
Southgate, who was my wife then, and Frank O’Hara, Norman Bluhm, a
few others. The essay made no sense but we knew the jargon. We filled in
the blanks.”
“The American Action Painters” was a stylish performance. Nimbly evad-
ing academic issues, Rosenberg claimed for New World artists the glamour
of the moment’s most fashionable Old World writers—not only Sartre and
his friend Albert Camus but Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, and Samuel
Beckett. Those who kept track of style in the late forties and the early fifties
felt the affinities between Sartre’s idea of the absurd and the droll horror of
Beckett’s plays and the grim but delicate beauty ofJuliette Greco, the Parisian
chanteuse who wore an astonishing amount of mascara and sang in wearily
bell-like tones.
For all its disapproval of conventions, existentialism became popular not as
a philosophy but as an attitude, a manner, a clichéd look. Toward the end
of the fifties, Willem de Kooning told Irving Sandler that “we weren’t influ-
enced directly by Existentialism, but it was in the air, and we felt it without
knowing too much about it. We were in touch with the mood.” “It was a
 —

29. Hans Hofmann, Fantasia, c. 1944. Oil, Duco paint, and casein on panel,
51% x 36% in.
THE ACTION PAINTER fifi

mood, all right,” says Alex Katz. “All the painters kept Sartre’s Nausea on
their night tables. At the Cedar you’d hear the existentialist phrases—alien-
ation, man alone, stuff like that. Guston would talk about squeezing his life
through tubes of paint. Marxism and primitivism were out, all of a sudden.
No more proletariat, no more myth. Existentialism was the hot new thing—
cigarettes and black turtleneck sweaters and lots of brooding.”

In Namuth’s film of Pollock painting, you see the artist concentrating his
gaze. Suddenly he makes a gesture, a series of gestures. He acts. For decades,
the art world has assumed that Rosenberg must have had Pollock in mind
when he devised the figure of the action painter. Krasner knew better.
To paint, said Rosenberg, is to launch a dramatic exchange; the painter
makes a gesture, the painting gestures back, and its replies may of course be
empty. Naming no names, Rosenberg suggested that certain painters were
smothering their canvases with billowing clouds of pretense. Working his
way to a joke about “apocalyptic wallpaper,” Rosenberg made it obvious to
Krasner that he had aimed his charge of vacuity at the sprawl of Pollock’s
biggest, most ambitious canvases. She was enraged.
Krasner and Rosenberg had been friends since their days on the Project.
His example had taught her that a disputatious temperament could be witty,
not merely aggressive. She taught him that a woman could be his equal in
aggression and in wit. Rosenberg respected Krasner but condescended to Pol-
lock, who commanded no bright repartee. One evening, the painter drank
too much at the critic’s house on East Tenth Street. Conversation became
theoretical, as always, and Pollock dismissed every flight of abstract disqui-
sition as “a lot of shit.” Eventually, Rosenberg directed him to go upstairs
and take a nap. Pollock obeyed, with the docility of a child who agrees that
he has been naughty. After he left, Krasner turned on Rosenberg and in-
formed him, in her most fervently nasty tone, that Pollock was a famous
painter and no critic had the right to condescend to an artist of such conse-
quence. Rosenberg’s wife, May Tabak, remembered him saying, “Don’t tell
me who’s famous. But if there’s going to be anyone famous here, it’s me and
not that drunk upstairs.”
Rosenberg’s action-painting essay appeared soon afterward, bristling with
cleverly unfair jibes at Pollock’s best work. Determined to form an anti-
Rosenberg front, Krasner turned to Clement Greenberg and found him in
retreat. Action painting is a way of life, an all-consuming effort to stave off
moral and psychological death. Busy disentangling art from these messy con-
cerns, Greenberg had nothing to gain from a feud with Rosenberg. Anyway,
his support for Pollock’s recent work had begun to weaken by the end of
1952. Careful steps were leading him to the conclusion that the best interests
of pure painting were now being served by Clyfford Still. Clem, as the critic
ff Wele GAWe OR WN Tle Syke

was known, had abandoned Jackson, and Krasner found it difficult to deny
that Pollock was abandoning himself. Her campaign against Rosenberg failed.
For a season or two, Pollock had feared, vaguely, that younger painters
were finding de Kooning’s paintings more pertinent than his. They were
ignoring his gesture. Now Rosenberg had mocked it. Willfully, Pollock chose
to be flattered by “The American Action Painters.” His name for the essay
was “Rosenberg’s piece on me.” This annoyed the critic, who had trimmed
the image of his painter-hero to fit artists he liked far more—Hans Hofmann,
Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning. In their paintings, not Pollock’s, Rosen-
berg saw identities taking shape. “Painting for de Kooning . . is a real
action, comparable to crossing an ocean or fighting a battle,” Rosenberg de-
clared. “His sole concern has been to maintain touch with himself as he is—
an enterprise which in this epoch so disturbed by the fear of anonymity has
demanded the deepest insight as well as genuine moral independence.”
Rosenberg applauded de Kooning’s canvases as episodes in a lifelong work
of existential theater. He never sensed the pleasure the painter felt as he
taught his doubts to knock down the scaffolding of Parisian Cubism. Nor
did he feel de Kooning’s joy in converting doubt to bravado, as he rebuilt
this Old World style to accommodate a grandiose idea of life in the New
World. For de Kooning, to paint was to dote obsessively on his responses to
American space and architecture, light and flesh. Rosenberg’s action painter
displayed a more puritanical self-involvement. Born in difficult times, over-
coming them through sheer authenticity of being, he was blazing a path
through moral thickets.
Though he never objected to being taken for the epitome of an action
painter, de Kooning didn’t much resemble this imaginary artist so intently
focused on himself that he displayed no eye for painting. In Rosenberg’s
scenario, to paint was no longer to make a permanent and therefore ponder-
able image. Working with a brush had become a species of performing art,
as evanescent as dance or theater, and so the action painter needed no eye
for painting. Gazing into his canvas, he looked only for signs that his hand
had moved spontaneously enough to leave traces of his true being.
 16
For the act to be spontaneous, said Rosenberg, the will must be pure. The
downtown painters liked the impatient sweep of Rosenberg’s rhetoric. They
liked his assumption that New York painting was now crucial to its moment.
But they couldn’t work up much interest in the idea of purity. De Kooning
detested it, or so he told Thomas B. Hess one afternoon late in the fifties, on
a walk through the galleries of the Metropolitan. Hess had invited the painter
to visit the museum and say whatever came to mind; afterward, he published
some of his friend’s remarks in Artnews.
De Kooning began by praising the accuracy of Courbet’s eye. He called
Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm “lyrical and calm,” and questioned Marcel Du-
champ’s devotion to art. He said that “being anti-traditional is just as corny
as being traditional.” De Kooning called Velazquez “great,” and then S¢gren
Kierkegaard loomed up in the conversation, as he often did in the fifties.
Claimed as an ancestor by the existentialists, this nineteenth-century Dane
had become a stylish ghost. The last time he read Kierkegaard, said de Koo-
ning, “I came across the phrase, “To be purified is to will one thing.’ It made
me sick.” De Kooning took pleasure in willing several things at once—success
and failure, for example.
“T took the attitude that I was going to succeed,” the painter said in 1960,
“and I also knew that this was just an illusion.” Failure was inevitable—or
success was indefinable—so there was no point in setting out with “an idea
of perfection.” He would work and rework an image just “to see how far
one could go... with anxiousness and dedication to fright maybe, or ecstasy.”
De Kooning found it nearly impossible to bring a canvas to completion. Once,
he said that the end arrives when “I paint myself out of the picture.” The
painting becomes itself; it has its own “countenance.” Another time he said
that he is “always in the picture somewhere.” With contradictions like these,
de Kooning kept his art alive and on edge.
114 TE GRA ESO! RAG Te ocgueR

De Kooning found uses for the chaste, neoclassical line of Ingres. He also
loved the passionately sloppy art of Chaim Soutine. To paint like Soutine and
Ingres at once—that, Rudy Burckhardt remembered, was de Kooning’s wish.
It can’t be done, though de Kooning sometimes sends a contour of Ingresque
clarity slicing through a swamp of color as frantic and sweaty as any in
Soutine’s overloaded canvases. While Rosenberg argued that the moment's
best painters were becoming more truly themselves, de Kooning looked for
new ways to be at odds with himself. In his pictures, a flourish of drafts-
manship reminiscent of the aristocratic Peter Paul Rubens can become, with
a second look, a bohemian affront to good taste.
De Kooning never tried to justify his inconsistencies. Instead, he flaunted
them, with a bravado that often collapsed into its underlying anxiety. Paint-
ing, said de Kooning, “never seems to make me peaceful or pure.” Nothing
in art is ever settled. Nothing reassures or redeems. Rosenberg could not
agree. From his account of the action painter emerged a crucial article of
faith: at certain moments, “painter and painting are one.” The authenticity
of the painter’s act unites art and artist in a bond untouched by the demands
of history or criticism or the marketplace. Rosenberg found this unity in the
careers of de Kooning, Gorky, Hofmann, Kline, and a few others. In the act
of painting, said Rosenberg, these painters become themselves, truly and
purely; prolonging the act from one painting to the next, they reveal the flux
of their identities.
The painters’ states of being were not of much interest to Clement Green-
berg. He was more concerned that paintings become more truly themselves:
less illusionistic, more purely “optical.” To achieve this purity, a painting
needed to acknowledge its physical traits: flat surface, straight edges, square
corners. An object itself, a painting was under no obligation to represent
other objects. A depicted thing appeared in a depicted place; to look into that
place was to enter it imaginatively. Such looking engaged the body and that
was bad, said Greenberg. A painting attained its true nature by appealing to
the eye and the eye alone. The flatter, the more abstract the image, the
stronger the appeal to vision, so a ban on pictures of people and other three-
dimensional objects was a logical imperative. For a decade, de Kooning ap-
peared to be following the path Greenberg had marked.
In the late thirties, de Kooning’s precise Ingresque portraits were realistic
in a manner that could fairly be called old-fashioned. Year by year, his touch
became more frantic, his forms less easily recognizable. By the end of the
forties he had become an abstract painter, and yet no stage of de Kooning’s
evolution was simple. Though the black-and-white pictures he exhibited in
1948 and 195] are not realistic, the sexual insinuations of their heated, surging
contours are difficult to miss. From the insomniac shallows of these canvases
Wine ACT T@IN PRAVINGEE R pipS

30. Willem de Kooning, Woman |, 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 37 in. x

Se) ile
116 HIE SANE © A ClesS aU

emerged the Women he showed in 1953—-massive figures with imperious

poses and rapacious smiles.
Concentrate on the behavior of paint—the way it splashes and drips and
smears—and you can see these pictures, too, as abstractions; but the Women
will not be denied. You feel their wild gazes on you. Greenberg was appalled.
“It is impossible today to paint a face,” he told de Kooning. “That’s right,”
said the painter, “and it’s impossible not to.” Eventually, there were five more
Women, each a variant of the first. Her smile persists. Unnerved, the artist
tried to reduce her to a pretext for his brilliance. He failed, of course, knowing
at every moment that he would. The dazzle of his brushwork could not fend
off this nightmarish Woman, only make her more seductive.
Female anatomy disappeared from de Kooning’s pictures in 1955. It also
remained, its massively voluptuous shapes entangled with drifts of cloud and
water and terrain. “The landscape is in the Woman,” he said, “and there is
Woman in the landscapes.” Thus he “could sustain this thing all the time
because it could change all the time; she . . . could not be there, or come
back again, she could be any size.”’ She could be either sex. “You can’t always
tell a man from a woman in my painting,” he noted, adding that “those
women are perhaps the feminine side of me—but with big shoulders. I’m
not so big, but I’m very masculine and this masculinity mixed up with fem-
ininity comes out on the canvas.”
De Kooning’s first show of black-and-white paintings had introduced a
virtuoso fully formed. His second was such a strong encore that even Time
was impressed. The magazine’s anonymous reviewer said that de Kooning’s
works “are always original and often elegant in composition.” To no one’s
surprise, sales were negligible. Like Betty Parsons, Charles Egan had become
a dealer when clients for contemporary American art were an unevolved
species. Sales were not expected, so Egan never bothered to cultivate patrons
who responded to good notices, to cues from the Museum of Modern Art, to
the sense that an artist was becoming a contender. Other dealers did.
The quickest on his feet was Sidney Janis, who showed de Kooning’s
Women in 1953. Though the Modern bought Woman I, collectors held back.
A while later, the artist told Harold Rosenberg, “Janis wants me to paint
some abstractions and says he can sell any number of black and whites, but
he can’t move the Women. I need the money. So if I were an honest man,
I'd paint abstractions. But I have no integrity! So I keep painting the
Women.” Before he stopped, there were fifteen of them.
Remaking the meanings of ordinary words, de Kooning left their usual
meanings in play. We are to understand that his supposed lack of integrity
was in fact integrity of the highest kind, braced by irony. Because he could
not have a purpose that was not a cross-purpose, a flicker of shifting intention
THE ACTION PAINTER WIT

fills his art. Willing many things at once, he outwitted his equilibrium. Thus
he kept it. He prevented nausea.
Toward the end of the fifties, a number of New York painters looked
closely at Franz Kline’s wide swathes of black paint. The force of his example
shows in pictures by Elaine de Kooning, Al Held, Michael Goldberg, Alfred
Leslie, and Joan Mitchell. Usually considered followers of de Kooning, these
artists were finding uses for Kline’s boldness—as de Kooning himself did
when he painted Montauk Highway (1958), Door to the River (1960), and other
“parkway landscapes,” as Thomas B. Hess called them. Joining in a move
made by certain of his younger admirers, de Kooning became his own acolyte,
a de Kooningesque painter. Or he played that role, though his mix of delicacy
and brusque urgency is always recognizable. Door to the River doesn’t really
look like a Kline. It looks like a de Kooning masquerading as a Kline.

Being poor in the fifties was not the ordeal it had been during the Depression.
Artists scrambled from week to week, month to month, without deep fears
of complete ruin, and now they can’t recall precisely how they managed. Even
memories of first sales are dim. Most of the hard facts about artists’ incomes
in the fifties float on the currents of Jackson Pollock’s legend. According to
Tony Smith, Pollock’s art earned him about $2,600 in 1950. One sold for
$6,000 in 1954; soon afterward, Blue Poles (1952) fetched $8,000. In the last
year of his life, 1956, Pollock’s work sold steadily. Within a season, de Koo-
ning began to do nearly as well in the marketplace.
De Kooning had used cheap commercial enamels to paint his black-and-
white abstractions. Now he moved his studio from East Tenth Street to 831
Broadway, just south of Union Square, and overstocked it with oil paints and
canvas of the highest quality. De Kooning’s new top-floor space was what
Hess called the first of the “ ‘luxury lofts-—wood floors sanded and waxed,
sparkling like crystal; chairs by Eames instead of homemade carpentry; a
refrigerator capable of producing ice with real suburban efficiency.”
In 1963 de Kooning fled the city for Springs. The following year he began
to work in a studio built—and endlessly rebuilt—to his shifting specifications.
Early in the seventies, Rosenberg asked him if working out of town had
affected his art. “Enormously!” said de Kooning. “I wanted to get back to a
feeling of light in painting . . . I wanted to get in touch with nature. Not
painting scenes from nature, but to get a feeling of that light that was very
appealing to me, here particularly. I was always very much interested in
water.” The landscape shimmers, as if in a reflection, and female anatomy
has the fluidity of ocean currents. All is lush and sprawling, an overflow of
hot pinks and yellows.
During the seventies, de Kooning smeared and scraped his overloaded
118 Winhe PANNE Ole (A) haoie

31. Willem aE Kooning, Suburb in Havana, 1958. Oil on

canvas, 6 ft. 8 in. x 7O in.

canvases, sometimes pushing them to the edge of chaos and beyond. With
their soggy greens and muddy reds, these pictures seem waterlogged, yet you
wade through their tangled expanses in the company of familiar landmarks.
Unmistakably de Kooningesque forms float by in slow motion, blurry and
half-submerged and charged with the familiar sensuous force. After this jum-
bled density came a clarification. De Kooning would send a few flat, twisted
ribbons of red and blue meandering elegantly over the surface. Curving planes
are implied and occasionally filled with yellow.
In 1984 de Kooning turned eighty. For several years, his memory of recent
events had been erratic. Usually, but not always, the distant past remained
vivid. The present engaged him only when he turned to a painting in prog-
ress. His last works look empty until you see how succinctly they summarize
the repertory of taut, luscious forms he had begun to develop nearly half a
century earlier. De Kooning did not go unhonored in old age. A steady
LE AE WON SP AINTIER 1D

succession of awards and international exhibitions began in the mid-seventies.

In 1979, an especially busy year, he was elected to the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters; he received the Andrew W. Mellon Prize
from the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh; and the Dutch government made
him an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau.
This recognition appeared to please him, though it may have seemed no
more than the aftermath of that moment, in 1959 or 1960, when he looked
up from his work and sensed that he was “the center of things.” The center
he occupied for the rest of his career is the one reserved for America’s leading
modernist master. Pollock may be our greatest artist. Some have nominated
Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol for that position. Undoubtedly, though, our
greatest painter is de Kooning.

' {

32. Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 8 in. x 8 ft. 4 in.
 of ape

ie

ji

}/

fi
 17
One night at the Cedar, in March 1956, Pollock met Ruth Kligman, a twenty-
five-year-old brunette who provoked comparisons with Elizabeth Taylor. En-
rolled in a painting class at the New School, she had a job at a small
downtown gallery and an apartment on East Sixteenth Street. According to
a memoir Kligman published years afterward, she and Pollock began a love
affair a week after they met. Other accounts suggest that their affair didn’t
start for several months, that she had to pester him into it. Pollock was afraid
of Krasner, who had developed a loathing of his behavior but refused to
consider divorce. It is certain that, by late spring, he had fallen into the routine
of spending Monday nights at Kligman’s apartment, then taking the train
back to the Hamptons the following morning. Before meeting again, they
would talk by telephone, Kligman in Manhattan, Pollock at Springs, with
Krasner nearby. She refused to acknowledge the affair.
Pollock took Kligman drinking in midtown nightclubs. They attended the
theater. At Waiting for Godot, he found the spectacle of Beckett's tramps
insupportable. He began to cry, then to moan. Kligman led him away, into
the street. As summer started, she took a job at the Abraham Rattner School
of Art in Sag Harbor, not far from the Pollocks’ house on Fireplace Road.
She lived in an apartment near the school. Pollock and Kligman would meet
at the beach. They’d have dinner together. Krasner still said nothing.
Early one morning, she saw Kligman and Pollock emerging from his stu-
dio. With the full force of her outrage, Krasner ordered Pollock to “get that
woman off my property before I call the police.” Pollock drove Kligman to
Sag Harbor. When he came back to Fireplace Road, Krasner said that she’d
leave him if he continued the affair. Usually, this threat would cue Pollock's
apologies, then his well-worn promises to stay sober, to try to paint. Her grief
and anger assuaged, Krasner would pretend to be convinced, and the couple
would continue as before. Now Pollock refused to go through the routine.
122 (rE PATE Wr A IGESTPURE

Krasner threatened to sail for Europe. Pollock suggested that she go ahead.
She did, and three days later Kligman moved into the house at Springs.
Their life was bearable at first, though Pollock tended to pass out, drunk,
early in the evening. Or he would weep endlessly. Kligman has written that
“he was wonderful as far as being able to cry and let out his emotions.”
Inevitably, his anguish turned aggressive, and he would rage at her as he had
raged at Krasner. Once, without letting Kligman know, he arranged for a
dozen roses to be sent to his wife’s hotel in Paris. In front of friends, Pollock
would insult Kligman or ignore her. After three weeks at Springs, she re-
turned to New York.
Toward the end of the following week, Kligman called Pollock to say that,
on Saturday, August 11, she and a friend would arrive at East Hampton on
an early train. Pollock met them with his car, an Oldsmobile convertible. He
was sullen, barely saying hello to Kligman’s friend, Edith Metzger. On the
way to the house, he stopped at a bar for a drink. Squabbling filled the day,
as Pollock drank and wept. That evening, he was expected at Alfonso Os-
sorio’s house for a piano concert. Driving there with the two women, he felt
sick and stopped his car at the side of the road. He wanted to return to
Springs. Kligman convinced him not to turn back, though she thought that
perhaps he ought to have something to eat before he went on.
They found a restaurant, where Pollock telephoned Ossorio to tell him of
the delay. He had several drinks. Afterward, Metzger refused to get into the
car, infuriating Pollock as he staggered across the parking lot. Kligman per-
suaded her to climb into the backseat of the Oldsmobile, and Pollock sped
out of the lot, along Fireplace Road. Metzger screamed, demanding that he
stop, that he let her out. She tried to jump from the convertible, but the wind
forced her back into her seat. A hump in the pavement sent the car to the
right.
Veering left, Pollock kept the car on the road for a long moment, until it
lurched across the shoulder, snagged a patch of dense vegetation, and sailed
end over end. Metzger was crushed to death when the car fell to earth. Flying
free, Kligman sustained several injuries. Pollock was thrown fifty feet through
the air and died when his head struck a tree.

In May a subordinate of Alfred Barr had written to Pollock with good news.
The Modern was launching a series of shows that would survey the achieve-
ments of artists who had arrived at middle age. The first would be dedicated
to Pollock. Four months after his death, the show opened in an atmosphere
of solemn remembrance. No one was certain when Pollock had slipped into
the past. It may have happened six years before, when he finished the last of
the great poured paintings. Now that he was dead, the question was settled.
New York artists paid their respects to the thirty-five canvases on view at
Ginhe ACTHON RATNER (PBS

the Modern, then turned back to the increasingly exciting present. De Koo-
ning, Kline, and Guston were painting at the height of their powers and
showing regularly on Fifty-seventh Street. In vigor and sheer numbers, the
next generation was beyond the capacity of the uptown dealers. To meet the
demand for exhibition space, a dense cluster of cooperative galleries appeared
on East Tenth Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues.
Treated ever more respectfully by the popular press, New York painting
had found an audience beyond the boundaries of the art world, in the nation
at large. Almost more important to the painters was the interest they had
piqued in Europe. Traditionally, the Old World had ignored New World
art. After the war, a series of traveling exhibitions brought American painters
to the attention of audiences in Western Europe’s capital cities. Pollock, de
Kooning, and their colleagues became the objects of controversy. Dismissal
was common and sometimes violent. Puzzlement sometimes gave way to
praise. These reactions were never more intense than during the European
tour of The New American Painting, an exhibition organized by Dorothy
Miller, the most powerful of Alfred Barr’s lieutenants.
As he built the Modern’s collection of European modernists, Barr had
delegated American art to Miller. Fourteen Americans, the first of her sur-
veys, opened in 1946. The last, Americans 1963, ranged from the veteran
abstractionist Ad Reinhardt to a trio of Pop artists—Claes Oldenburg, Robert
Indiana, and James Rosenquist. Presented every three to five years, these
shows were masterworks of curatorial diplomacy. The assortment of styles
was always lively, with competing tendencies subtly balanced. Mixing new-
comers with veterans, Miller usually offset the preponderance of East Coasters
with a few artists from other regions.
Over the years, her shows included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Wil-
liam Baziotes, and Clyfford Still. Grace Hartigan’s career was solidified by
her appearance in Twelve Americans, of 1956. Among the other eleven were
Franz Kline and Larry Rivers. In 1959, Fifteen Americans introduced Robert
Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. The art historian Robert Rosenblum says
that being tapped for a Miller show at the Modern was the art world’s equivy-
alent of an Oscar.
Early in 1958, The New American Painting opened its eight-city tour at
the Basel Kunsthalle. The exhibition included Pollock, de Kooning, Newman,
Still, Guston, Motherwell, Kline, and Rothko. Gorky and Baziotes recalled
New York painting’s Surrealist past. Bradley Walker Tomlin preserved the
scale and delicacy of prewar abstraction. Miller chose only two younger
artists—Hartigan and Sam Francis, a painter with light-flooded affinities to
Pollock. European critics were astonished first, and possibly last, by the sheer
size of the American canvases. Reporting for a Barcelona newspaper, Mer-
cedes Molleda noted that a painting by Pollock and another by Hartigan
124 AE SEAT EO PASS Ero Ui Rie

could enter Madrid’s Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporaneo only after

workmen had enlarged its main doorway. In the exhibition, wrote Molleda,
“a strange sensation like that of a magnetic tension surrounds you.” This art,
she concluded, is animated by “myths, gods, and ideas different from those
prevailing in Europe at present.”
Other critics agreed that the Americans had set Europe aside, and some
were indignant. “Why do they think they are painters?” asked a Parisian
critic, Claude Roger Marx, in Le Figaro Littéraire. André Chastel, of Le
Monde, was more willing to be impressed. The New American Painting dis-
plays a lively originality, he granted, adding that “the roots of this art are
European, and are called fauvism, German Expressionism, Klee, Picasso,
sometimes Matisse or André Masson’s inspired surrealism.” This was a grat-
ifyingly French echo of Barr’s line on the postwar American painting he
approved: new as it might look, it extended the logic of his genealogical chart.
The tour of The New American Painting came to a close at the Tate
Gallery in London toward the end of March 1959. Members of the Modern’s
International Committee felt extremely pleased. The exhibition had gone
abroad with a point to make, and the point had been taken. American art
was no longer dismissible. To celebrate this success, the Modern gave a party
in its sculpture garden. And so, on an evening early in the spring of 1959,

y J = ee @, :

33. Grace Hartigan, New England, October, 1957. Oil on can-

vas, 7 He AVorinn <tOstty Vining
THE ACTION PAINTER [2S

34. | Alfred EAs, Sonise Medal, 1959. Oil on canvas, 7 ft. 8 in.
xO ite line

the New York art world’s best-connected inhabitants gathered in the com-
pany of Rodin’s immense, brooding figure of Balzac and Picasso’s mother
baboon, with her head made of a toy Citroén sedan.
The art dealer Irving Blum remembers it as “an extraordinary occasion.
Just extraordinary. Everyone was there, in the garden, and really there were
only about one hundred and twenty of us. The art world was just a village
then. Yet there was a feeling that something momentous had happened.
There had been a breakthrough. It wasn’t a matter of the market. There was
still hardly any. People weren’t competitive yet. One had total access to the
entire scene, which seemed, just then, to have entered a fresh stage of its
history.”
What Paris had begun, New York was continuing. The overseas tour of
Dorothy Miller’s show had been a triumph for de Kooning, Pollock, and
their generation—deservedly so, thought Alfred Barr, though he felt doubts
about the next generation. More than a year before the celebration in the
garden of the Modern, Barr had visited the Club, on Eighth Street, and
informed the younger painters that their art was, by and large, worthless.
Their success was a kind of failure. Proper avant-gardists reject the past, said
Barr. Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, and their friends were embracing it. They
126 Tite aA RE RO sa Uae
PyA Gib

CU ie
pb TL al 3

35. Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1958. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 5% in. x 68 in.

had formed a new academy. Barr could not have made a more insulting
charge. Rebuttals were furious, driven by the suspicion that he was not en-
tirely wrong. No one denied that Leslie, Mitchell, and a milling crowd of
others were performing variations on themes established by their elders. What
these younger painters denied was Barr’s understanding of the results.
“T don’t know how I responded to Barr that night,” says Grace Hartigan.
“IT know I was furious, screaming at him.” Michael Goldberg remembers
Barr impressing him as
THE ACTION PAINTER 127,

an eloquent guy who had no idea about the mechanics of painting, no

interest in uncertainty. He was a programmatic man with this precon-
ceived idea of painting’s progress—the Freudian idea that you had to
kill your father. What he could not understand is that, downtown, one
never considered the Oedipal pattern. That’s a product of hostile feelings
about authority, which we weren’t especially interested in feeling.

As Alex Katz puts it, “We liked our father figures.”

A year later, Hess posed a question to Artnews writers: Is there a new
academy? “Of course,” wrote Elaine de Kooning. “In the ‘old’ academies,
originality was not a value: they knew that it cannot be borrowed. In the
New Academy, originality is the on/y value. And the only question is, Who’s
who—to which our New Academicians have been answering: ‘It’s me who’s
him.’” Confronting Hess’s question with a head-on evasion, de Kooning epit-
92

omized the downtown style.

In 1955 she had written that, “unless they are singing themselves to sleep,”
artists feel “engulfed in an overwhelming sense of the second-hand. Shocks
today are mock-shocks. The opponents are all straw men. Parody is king.”
If one acknowledged with enough subtlety the problem of being original, a
sort of originality might appear. Barr did not respond to ironies like these.
The downtown painters’ passion for their convoluted present looked to him
like complacency. He felt that no matter how vehemently a young painter
might attack his canvas—or her canvas, for Joan Mitchell had the most cru-
elly slashing touch—the older painters remained unchallenged. Convinced
that progress emerges only from the clash of generations, Barr wanted to find
a young New Yorker willing to rebel against the authority of de Kooning
and Pollock, an authentic avant-gardist. Before the fifties were over, Barr
found what he sought in a painter named Jasper Johns.
Hi

i] i;
 PART 3

meeps @ be Clr
ORDINARY

Beware the body and the mind. Avoid a polar situation. Think of the
edge of the city and the traffic there.
Jasper Johns
“SKETCHBOOK NorTEs’’
(1965)
36. Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic and collage on
canvas with objects, 51 x 44 in.
 18
Late in January 1958, the Leo Castelli Gallery, at 4 East Seventy-seventh
Street, presented Jasper Johns’s first solo exhibition. His Flag (1954-55), a
canvas just over five feet long, displays the Stars and Stripes with deadpan
accuracy. Another painting sets the flag afloat on a field of orange. White
Flag (1955) is, of course, all white. On square canvases called Targets, con-
centric circles appear in sets of five. Along the upper edge of Target with
Four Faces (1955) runs a row of four compartments, each containing a plaster
cast of a face. The faces are identical, expressionless, cut off at the cheekbones.
The compartments of Target with Plaster Casts (1955) contain plaster body
parts—ear, toes, penis, nose, hand, a nipple with a section of breast, the lower
half of a face. On other canvases, grids are filled by the alphabet, one letter
to an opening, or the numbers—zero to nine. Smallish canvases contain a
single biggish number or letter.
Johns made the grids, Targets, and Flags with encaustic, a mixture of wax
and pigment not in wide use after the Middle Ages. Praising his medium,
Johns said: “What it did was immediately record what you did. I liked that
quality. It drips so far and stops. Each discrete moment remains discrete.”
The effect is cool, lucid, and rubbery. Working with demonic patience,
brushstroke by careful brushstroke, Johns seemed to have calmed the turmoil
of painterly painting in New York.
As his show was being hung, Thomas B. Hess wandered into the Castelli
gallery and recognized Green Target (1955), which he had seen recently in a
group show at the Jewish Museum. Scanning the other works lined up along
the gallery walls, Hess pointed to Target with Four Faces and asked if he
could take it to Artnews. His quick eye made him abrupt. Smoothly, Castelli
said that of course he was welcome to borrow the picture for a while. These
days, artworks are assiduously documented. Galleries supply editors not with
paintings but with color transparencies; in 1958 Target with Four Faces was
oe, Lite RAI E sOir ANGE SriUiRis

casually wrapped by an assistant, then borne away in a taxi. Not long after-
ward, the painting appeared on the cover of Artnews. Hess had obeyed a sure
reflex and an odd one, for his inclination was to bask in the Abstract Ex-
pressionist heat that Johns had cooled off with the calm surfaces of his Flags
and Targets.
Drawn by the magazine cover, Alfred Barr spent three hours at Johns’s
show. Castelli was amazed. In those days, he has said, “I thought Alfred Barr
was God.” Returning to the gallery a few days later, Dorothy Miller at his
side, Barr found the artist on the premises. He asked Johns if it would be
permissible to exhibit Target with Plaster Casts with the doors of its com-
partments shut. His acquisitions committee, he feared, would balk at the
anatomical fragments, especially the green penis. Johns said that it would be
all right to close the compartments some of the time but not always.
Barr and Miller settled on three other works: White Numbers (1958), Green
Target, and Target with Four Faces. They wanted Flag but hesitated because
the McCarthyite panic about alien subversion had faded only a few seasons
earlier. Superpatriots might flare up, in anger or perplexity, at the sight of
the Stars and Stripes in a museum so unapologetically sympathetic to the
communist Pablo Picasso. Determined to have the painting, Barr persuaded
the architect Philip Johnson to buy it as a future gift to the museum. With
no enthusiasm, Johnson complied. Flag changed his feelings gradually and so
completely that he refused to let the museum have it until 1973.
Of the remaining pieces in Johns’s show, the Burton Tremaines, Ben Hel-
ler, and other leading collectors took all but two: Target with Plaster Casts,
which Castelli added to his own collection, and White Flag, which looks like
the not-quite-finished model—the fetus—of the other Flags. Or it is the
ghost they will become when authority has faded from the icons of the New
York art world. Embryo unborn or ghost persisting after death: the precision
of the symmetry is typical of Johns’s art. He kept this painting for himself.
Some visitors to Johns’s first show felt like passersby drawn to the site of
an immense erosion, as if he were undermining everything passionate and
witty in New York painting. Others saw fresh wit in his use of ready-made
images. In his restraint they glimpsed hints of deep, difficult feeling. Pleased
or not, nearly everyone suspected that Johns would become major. When his
show came down, the New York art world had two new luminaries: Johns,
who was twenty-seven, and Castelli, who had suddenly become decisive at
the age of fifty-one. Until then, he had been a vivid presence but never quite
in focus.

Leo Castelli says that Trieste, where he was born in 1907, is “a strange
and very interesting city. It is Italian, of course, and yet it was deeply influ-
enced by Viennese culture.” Once the chief seaport of the Austro-Hungarian
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY WSS

empire, Trieste had an international tone. During the First World War,
Castelli’s father took a post at the upper levels of a Viennese bank. When
the family returned home three years later, Castelli had added German
to his Italian. At the University of Milan, he studied law. Though bored,
he earned a degree, then took a job in an insurance company. Bored even
more thoroughly now, he imagined himself a professor of comparative lit-
erature.
The senior Castelli was not pleased, the dealer says. “He made a bargain
with me: if after working in a branch office of the insurance company in
Rumania for a year I still wanted a career in literature, he would be happy
to support my studies.” Castelli was then twenty-five years old. He found
insurance to be just as dreary in Bucharest, the Rumanian capital, as in Tri-
este. Happily, he met Ileana Schapira, the daughter of a Rumanian industri-
alist. Less than a year later they were married.
Castelli’s family was well-to-do. Schapira’s was rich. Her upbringing had
endowed her with fine taste in expensive things, particularly new pictures
and old furniture. The young couple had a splendid apartment in Bucharest;
they traveled; they accumulated objects of the highest quality. With his father-
in-law’s help, Castelli got a job in the Paris branch of the Banca d'Italia. He
and Ileana met Parisian designers, artists, dealers in art and antiques. Having
found that banking interested him no more than the insurance business, Cas-
telli persuaded his father-in-law to back a gallery. Opened on the place Ven-
déme, it was to establish an outpost of the Surrealist revolution. The first
show featured one work: Pavel Tchelitchew’s Phenomena (1938), a panoramic
landscape filled with foreshortened bodies and melodramatic symbols of sex-
uality and fate.
“Le tout Paris showed up for the opening,” Castelli has recalled. “We really
seemed to be on our way. That was the spring of 1939.” The war began the
following September. Castelli’s partner, an architect and designer named René
Drouin, joined the French army. The Castellis moved to the Schapira family’s
villa at Cannes. By 1941, they had arrived in New York. Not yet a citizen
of the United States, Castelli was nonetheless drafted into the American army
and sent to Rumania as an interpreter. Back in New York after the war, he
began making a place for himself among the downtown artists.
At Southampton, he opened his summer house to painters. Elaine and Bill
de Kooning spent two seasons there; Pollock was in the habit of dropping by
and behaving badly. Castelli’s respect for artists was obvious. Now and then,
he’d defray their expenses; sometimes he bought small works. He didn’t count
as a patron nor was he a colleague exactly, though he could hold his own in
the artists’ conversations at the Cedar Tavern. His manner was friendly, his
praise generous, and he carried himself with a slight excess of Old World
elegance. The artists suspected him of a seigneurial attitude. Because Castelli
134 Mate PAINE “Olp WAN ere saute

was as short as de Kooning, they called him Mighty Mouse, but not to his
face. Their jibe was not entirely cruel. Mighty Mouse is a formidable figure,
and so, it seemed, was Castelli. The art world expected much from him.
In need of work, Castelli agreed to manage a New Jersey sweater factory
partly owned by his father-in-law. To amuse himself, he arranged small proj-
ects with the dealer Sidney Janis. The sweater business had failed by 1955,
and Castelli was tired of inveigling Janis into peripheral schemes. In February
1957 he and his wife opened a gallery in their Seventy-seventh Street town
house. Their first show compared American and European artists. De Koo-
ning, Pollock, and David Smith led one side; major figures on the other side
were Alberto Giacometti, Piet Mondrian, and Jean Dubuffet. Next came solo
exhibitions of paintings by young New Yorkers—Paul Brach, Friedel Dzu-
bas, Norman Bluhm, a few others. Offering portions of their collection for
sale but finding few clients, the Castellis were playing at dealing.
A few months after launching their gallery, they visited a building on Pearl
Street, at the southern tip of Manhattan. Condemned then, vanished now, it
housed the studio of an artist named Robert Rauschenberg. Young and ex-
travagantly talented, he showed the Castellis the rarest quality of all: inde-
pendence. While others of his generation took up residence near the local
monuments—de Kooning, Kline, Guston—Rauschenberg seemed to be wan-
dering with admirable impatience into territory as yet unsettled.
A native of Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg was at once innocent and,
if not sophisticated, disinclined to be surprised by anything. The Castellis had
never met an artist quite so unabashedly American. Brash yet courteous, he
attracted them with the glitter of the exotic. And they had admired his one-
man shows uptown. Now, as peculiar as it was to be climbing the stairs of
a derelict building on Pearl Street, they felt they were on the right track.

Before she married, Dora Rauschenberg was a telephone operator; her hus-
band, Ernest, worked as a lineman for Gulf States Utilities. Their only child
was born in 1925; they named him Milton Ernest Rauschenberg. Reborn as
an artist, Milton Ernest called himself Bob, which the solemnities of the art
world expanded to Robert. As a boy, he was good at drawing, but no one
much cared. In Port Arthur, he has said, “there was no such thing as thinking
that you were an artist. There was no possibility.” The possibility occurred
to him when he was eighteen years old and newly drafted into the navy.
On leave from his post in San Diego, Rauschenberg visited the Hunting-
ton Library, just northeast of Los Angeles. There he happened upon Pinkie
(c. 1795), Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the very young Sarah Moulton-
Barrett in pink and white, and Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (c. 1769-
70), which shows the adolescent Jonathan Buttall in a suit of shimmering blue
satin. In Rauschenberg’s childhood, these figures had decorated the backs of
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY
IST,

Fulton Street. He has said that he walked there to save the

expense of a
subway ride. But the subway cost only a nickel then. Rauschenberg
enjoys
an embarrassment of energy. He may have gone on foot because
he felt the
need to burn off a bit of this surplus. At the Cedar, he said,

I always paid for my beer. One beer would last six different artists’
fantasies: Rothko, Barney Newman, Franz Kline, Bill de Kooning,
Reinhardt, and Pollock occasionally. Pollock always opened every con-
versation with me by asking, “Who are you? What do you do?”

He could never remember that they were both on the Parsons roster, nor
that Rauschenberg was making himself what Pollock never had the finesse
to be: an enfant terrible.
156 Me AE Ole ARGS UKs

placed a twelve-inch ruler—an emblem of line, to answer the sheer, envel-

oping fact of color. In Eddingsville (1965), the fourth painting in the 1966
show, According to What’s upside-down leg is rendered in paint, not wax.
Eddingsville’s gray scale is merged with the color scale, and primaries are
again high-keyed.
Toward the right, a wax cast of forearm and hand reaches over the surface.
To this object Johns bolted a yardstick. His point may be that humanity 1s
the measure of all things, though it is the fragment of anatomy that submits
to measurement. Between ruler and arm he wedged more objects—a fork, a
beer can, a shell, a sponge, an ice-cube tray. Johns once told the art historian
Roberta Bernstein a story that goes some way toward explicating this enig-
matic array.
In 1961 the artist bought a house in Edisto Beach, a small town on the
coast of South Carolina. Offshore lies an island named Eddingsville, where
the Marquis de Lafayette and his friends are reputed to have had a cham-
pagne picnic. Johns reenacted the event with friends, though the beer can
and ice-cube tray of Eddingsville suggest that he was not overly concerned
with fidelity to legend. With this painted memorial to a pleasant afternoon,
Johns opened his art to the world beyond the studio. Another interpreta-
tion—and there is always at least one other—is that he lured fragments of
the ordinary world into the hermetic zone he mapped in his elliptical way
with the four studio paintings of his 1966 show at Castelli’s.
In Studio IT (1966), the door of Studio has become a wall of windows. These
paths of vision’s escape lead to the blankness of sheer paint. Johns’s big paint-
ings of the sixties picture his ideal studio as a place of comfortable—and
comforting—isolation. Here he feels free to indulge, uninterrupted, his fas-
cination with the workings of his mind—not large gestures of thought but
small, incidental acts of scanning, noticing, remembering, matching. Willed
just barely or not at all, unremarked by most of us, acts like these are the
raw materials of Johns’s art. His studio pictures convert the idling of the
mind into images of the place where that conversion occurs.
Johns’s mind idles with compelling force and imperious reach. He says that
once, while riding in a car through Spanish Harlem, he saw flagstones painted
on the side of a building. Later, this pattern of flat, irregular ovals migrated
to the left panel of a painting called Harlem Light (1967), where it has the
look of decoration that would be noticed only if the eye could find no way
around it. On the right panel of Harlem Light, a tilted window drifts beneath
smears of blue paint.
In Untitled (1972), flagstones occupy the central panels. On the right, an
irregular scaffolding of planks supports an array of waxen body parts: toes,
fingers, a knee, a torso. To the left, a new pattern appears: short parallel lines
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY iLSVP

of color laid on in small clusters and separated by intervals of white. Oriented

this way and that, the clusters fit together like flagstones. Johns’s name for
this pattern is hatching. Usually, there are five lines to a set, each a different
length. The outer lines are often the shortest, the middle line the longest.
The suggestion is of fingers, skeletal and wet with paint, pressed to the canvas
repeatedly, until the blankness is transformed.
Johns varied this pattern for more than a decade, darkening it, lightening
it, blurring it to an afterimage of itself, then bringing it back into focus. Red
hatch marks interspersed with white call to mind the stripes of his Flag. The
Flag itself returned in paintings and prints of the seventies. An image of a
human skuil, which had looked out from the lower right corner of Arrive/
Depart (1963—64), resurfaced in a set of paintings called Tantric Detail (1980—
81). Centered now, the skull hovers near the bottom of the canvas. Above it:
a pair of testicles echoes the skull’s empty eye sockets and reverses their
meaning. Life rises above death, and from the testicles rises an erect penis,
most of its length hidden by hatch marks in black, white, and gray.
Near the upper edge of a canvas called In the Studio (1982), a nail supports
a cast of a child’s arm. Over its surface, hatching spreads like a tattoo. This
anatomical fragment reappears to the left, reversed, drawn with colored pencil

We
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38. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Oil and
pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports,
Ott Satine xs MAvingeeenin:
 19
In 1953 Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing to erase. For
reasons he never made public, de Kooning supplied one. Rauschenberg re-
membered him saying that “he wasn’t going to make it easy for me—and
he didn’t! I spent four weeks erasing that drawing.” Though it used up forty
erasers, this ceremony of rejection was not effective. Rauschenberg’s greatest
strength remained his version of the older artist’s brushwork. Despite himself,
he was the most brilliant of de Kooning’s heirs. Few noticed the relationship
then. On the downtown scene, Rauschenberg had the reputation of a joker.
He was “just fooling around,” said de Kooning. “Not really serious.”
Late in 1954 the Charles Egan Gallery showed Rauschenberg’s red paint-
ings: large canvases where crimson, scarlet, and orange pigments wage ter-
ritorial struggles with patches of striped silk, spotted gingham, and white
lace. Surging color pleases the eye; ferocities of touch suggest violence, too.
Every garish shift of hue, every dramatic wrinkle of fabric, every parade of
rivulets attracts the sort of attention we pay to the gestures of an actor going
over the top.
When Leo and Ileana Castelli visited Rauschenberg’s studio that day in
1957, they found a painter whose art had moved off the canvas into three
dimensions. Yet he hadn’t become a sculptor of any recognizable kind. Large,
gawky presences crowded his studio. Made of salvaged objects, lowly but not
always common, these new pieces were like props for a theater of exhilarated
panic. Rauschenberg called them combines. The first works to bear that title
were wall pieces built from scrap wood and bearing bits of hardware and
fabric. The Castellis had seen them at the Egan Gallery, amid the red paint-
ings. Those combines had been easy enough to place in familiar categories:
Dada collage, Surrealist assemblage. The new ones were more troublesome.
Bed (1955) is a tall canvas wrapped in a quilt and caked with violent color.
Later, the officials ofa festival in Spoleto, Italy, refused to display this object.
140 ie AERO eA Gis SPU e

With the nonchalance of an artist adept at gazing past the obvious, Rausch-
enberg claimed to “think of Bed as one of the friendliest pictures I’ve ever
painted.” Compelled, as always, to overstate his case, he added, “My fear has
always been that someone would want to crawl into it.” That is an unlikely
impulse. However the colors of Bed might interest the eye, this combine looks
like the scene of a slashing or an unspeakably violent coupling.
Rauschenberg’s big-gestured American verve, which had seemed so charm-
ing, was displaying its grisly side. Castelli felt uneasy. The new combines
were too aggressive, too derelict, too insistently sexual. Monogram (1955-59)
is a stuffed, long-haired Angora goat standing on a squarish canvas stained
with dark pigments. He wears a smattering of mock Abstract Expressionist
paint on his snout and an automobile tire around his middle. This is a frankly
phallic goat, and the tire he penetrates is not lush and vaginal but snugly
anal.
Castelli felt hemmed in by unpleasantness. His thoughts kept careening
away to a strange green painting he had seen several nights before at the
Jewish Museum. This object fascinated the dealer; the artist’s name bemused
him. Had Rauschenberg ever heard it? “Jasper Johns?” said Rauschenberg.
“His studio is just below mine.” In some tellings of the story, Johns’s name
comes up when Rauschenberg says he has to go downstairs to get ice from
a friend’s refrigerator. Or it is Johns who appears from below, with ice or
empty-handed, ready to help his friend move his big new awkward combines.
In every version, Castelli insists on an immediate visit to Johns’s studio.
The dealer has said that when he saw the Flags and Targets and grids in
Johns’s studio he was “amazed.” He was “bowled over” by “evidence of the
most incredible genius.” “It was an extraordinary experience,” for Johns’s
work was “obviously something entirely new.” It was “astonishing . . . the
most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Decades afterward, Castelli
is still trying to find words for his feeling that, the moment he saw Johns’s
paintings, his life intersected with history. Sometimes the dealer notes how
shy Johns seemed, how little he said. Sometimes he recalls that Betty Parsons
promised to visit Johns but never did, and then he mentions the persistence
of her regret. Castelli asked Johns to join the gallery and he said that he
would. Less than a year later, he made his debut with paintings that still
loom over the New York art world with the authority of landmarks.
In 1960 a visionary entrepreneur named Tatyana Grosman invited Johns
to make a lithograph at her studio in West Islip, Long Island. Johns was
reluctant. “I’d never made a print,” he said in 1973, adding, “I still don’t
know how to do it.” Larry Rivers told him that printmaking is practical; it
brings in money. Johns still wasn’t interested. If an artist balked at her offer,
Grosman would send lithographic stones to the studio. Franz Kline ignored
his. When Johns found a stack of these weighty objects sitting just inside the
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY 141

39. Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59. Oil and collage on canvas

with objects, 42 x 63% x 641 in.

door of his Pearl Street building, he recruited Rauschenberg and a vagrant

to help him haul them up to his studio. On the first stone Johns drew a zero,
possibly a sign of his interest in lithography. On the second he drew five
concentric circles. Flurries of his jittery shading turned this pattern into a
gray-on-gray Target. Next came lithographs of Flags, Numbers, Alphabets.
Johns spent three seasons transferring these trademark images from canvas
to paper.
The grids, stripes, and circles of his first show had enclosed and restrained
the currents of New York painting. Nothing confined the color that burst
across the canvases of his second show, which opened at Castelli’s early in
1960. Yet there was mockery in this new freedom. In geometry’s absence,
Johns’s touch was just as deliberate, just as cold, as before. An atmosphere
of regulation lingered. Advancing over the surface of Out the Window (1959),
the blocky letters of RED, yYELLow, and BLUE wade through patches of red,
yellow, and blue paint. Johns’s Flag is an image of an object and the thing
itself. Now he showed that a color is itself and its name, though the colors
of False Start (1959) often bear names not their own. Red is tagged ORANGE
and elsewhere siue. Though the word Buus is spelled out in blue, the letters
142 Tne PATE Cin vA Gre sieiks

of orANGE are white. Johns likes to introduce slippage into the systems of
reference that give us the impression of having a grip on things.
A year after finishing False Start the painting, he redid it as a color lith-
ograph, mimicking on stone the brush marks he had made on canvas. Then
he reprinted this lithograph in shades of gray, displacing its image to a ghostly
realm. It’s as if Johns has drained away the life of color, its prismatic blood,
leaving only the concept of color and the dreariness we expect from a con-
ceptual residue. Though the gray version of False Start is grim, it is also
delicate. It is lively. Sudden shifts from dark to light gray fill the print with
austerely sparkling weather.
Johns has said that, in his eyes, painting and lithography are “separate and
equal.” Though he makes endless distinctions, he builds no hierarchies. His
latest works are as important to him as the early iconic ones. His account of
his art and himself features no swooping dramatics, no privileged moments.
He has devised no myth of origins. Tatyana Grosman never thought of him
as having arrived in New York from anywhere in particular. “I knew him
so well through his work,” she once said, “it never occurred to me to think
about his background, where he came from. It was just his work, and what
he represented in working.”
Johns once walked with a woman through the garden of the Museum of
Modern Art. Impressed by his gentility and reserve, she said, “Jasper, you
must be from the Southern aristocracy.” “No,” he said, “I’m just trash.” The
label doesn’t fit. Johns’s father studied the law. His aunt, Gladys Johns Shealy,
taught school and inculcated in him a respect for the American flag. When
he called himself trash, Johns was dissembling, not out of modesty but on
principle. Over the years, he has provided only the most perfunctory sketch
of his background.
He was born in 1930 and grew up in Allendale, a small town in South
Carolina. As a child, he lived with his paternal grandparents, then with an
aunt and uncle. Johns has never said why he didn’t spend his early years
with his parents, though it is known that they were divorced when he was
very young. His father, William Jasper Johns, “had no real profession and
was something of a ne’er-do-well,” says the artist, and until now that is all
he has ever said on the subject.
He remembers drawing when he was three years old. At the age of five
he knew that he wanted to be an artist. The source of this ambition is a
mystery to him. His paternal grandmother painted in oils, yet Johns feels that
no inspiration came from her pictures—“swans on a stream or cows in a
meadow—things like that.” Once, an itinerant painter arrived in Allendale
to paint birds and flowers on the mirrors of the local Greek restaurant. Dur-
ing his stay, he boarded with Jasper’s grandparents. The child found the
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY

AO. Jasper Johns , False Start Il, | 962. Color lithograph hex | 3% in.
144 THE PATE OF AVGESTUINE

visitor’s supplies and stole some. “It didn’t occur to me,” Johns said, “that he
could miss the things I took—he had so much! But he did. Not knowing
that oil paint wouldn’t mix with water, I made a mess before his materials
were returned to him by our cook.”
After finishing third grade in Allendale, Johns stayed for a year with his
mother and stepfather in Columbia, the state capital. For the next six years
he lived with his aunt Gladys in a town called The Corner, where she taught
every grade at the local one-room schoolhouse. He finished high school in
Sumter during another stay with his mother and stepfather. His subjects
included art and mechanical drawing.
For three decades, critics and curators, historians and journalists have given
Johns countless opportunities to talk about his youth. Asked why he avoids
the subject, he said, “It wasn’t especially cheerful.” This is to be understood
as an understatement, and we are to understand, too, that persistent questions
will not be welcomed. Occasionally Johns volunteers a recollection. For ex-
ample, the only glamorous thing he saw as a child was a performance by
Silas Green’s dance troupe, a black ensemble that visited Allendale every year.
After high school, Johns spent three semesters at the University of South
Carolina, in Columbia. His art teachers

were not highly accomplished but they did interesting things. In the
summer, one studied with Ben Shahn in New York. Another attended
Hans Hofmann’s school in Provincetown. So I learned about fairly so-
phisticated things, though they were presented to me in diluted form.
Or, I suppose, I didn’t learn those things. So much of what I did was
just a rejection. It’s something in my character. For someone who
wanted to be an artist, I did very little about it. I had no sense that
control and accomplishment could have been useful to me. I found no
model for my own development. But I did get the idea from my teachers
at the university that, to be an artist, you would have to be somewhere
else.

In 1949 Johns moved to New York. He was nineteen. After attending a

commercial art school for half a year, he applied for a scholarship. It would
be granted, he was told, for two reasons: he was destitute, and a teacher from
South Carolina had put in a word for him. The award would not be based
on merit. This announcement so angered Johns that he still refuses to give
the school’s name. Quitting his classes, he got a job as a messenger. In 1950
the army drafted him for a two-year tour of duty. He spent the last six
months of it on a base in Japan; there he “made posters that advertised movies
and... told soldiers how not to get VD. And I painted a Jewish chapel.”
Released from the army, Johns returned to New York and enrolled at Hunter
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY 145

College under the G.I. Bill. Most New Yorkers knew that Hunter’s Park
Avenue campus was for women only. Johns was surprised to learn that he
had signed up for coeducational instruction in the far-off Bronx. On his first
day, he went to French class and understood nothing. A course in Beowulf
seems to have meant almost as little. In art class a teacher he remembers as
“a handsome, red-haired lady” told him he “drew a ‘marvelous line.’’”” Mak-
ing his way back to his apartment, on East Eighty-third Street, he passed out
from hunger and exhaustion. After a week in bed, he found a job as a clerk
on the night shift at the Marboro bookstore on West Fifty-seventh Street. His
formal education was over.
Though Johns’s wish to be an artist was persistent, he wasn’t sure what
he was wishing for. Though he visited museums and galleries, he didn’t feel
that he was becoming familiar with art. “It seemed to me to exist on a
different plane from the one I lived on,” he later said. “I remember seeing
things like Pollock’s paintings on glass and an incredible Noguchi sculpture
of balsa wood and string, but then it was hard to give what I saw a value.”
On weekends he would draw and make watercolors. He was producing art
but not, he suspected, living like an artist.
As he worked, Johns would drink a bottle of wine. He preferred the
German vintage called liebfraumilch—anyway, that is what Rauschenberg
recalled nearly three decades later. In 1954 an artist named Suzi Gablik in-
troduced him to Johns at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-seventh
Street. She and Rauschenberg had met at Black Mountain Coliege. Johns had
met her at a friend’s apartment. She thought they’d like each other; over the
next few months, it turned out that she was right. Slowly, they became the
equivalent of unidentical twins.
kd

it
 2)
Johns and Rauschenberg are tall. When they met, both were slim. With his
wide forehead and wide, finely-formed lips, Rauschenberg was reassuringly
handsome. Johns’s high and delicate cheekbones gave his face a closed-off
look. “I have photos of him then that would break your heart,” Rauschenberg
once told Calvin Tomkins. “Jasper was soft, beautiful, lean, and poetic. He
looked almost ill—I guess that’s what I mean by poetic.” Rauschenberg was
prosaic, if one limits the word to self-assured prose about enterprising heroes.
In the fifties Rauschenberg could have played the part of a charming young
man, poor but magnetic, in the sunniest of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early stories.
To Johns, Rauschenberg looked like a marvel: “the first person I knew
who was a devoted painter, whose whole life was geared to painting.” Johns
had been subsisting with breath held, an artist so ignorant of the art world
that the sight of Rauschenberg’s loft delivered a fascinating bit of news: artists
live in spaces congenial to their work. Johns acted on this knowledge with
the help of a young woman named Rachel Rosenthal. She was a friend of
Rauschenberg and, for a short while, Johns’s lover. Having studied dance and
painting, she now wanted to make sculpture. A search of Rauschenberg’s
neighborhood brought her to an abandoned building on Pearl Street, just
north of Fulton. On the top floor, she set up a studio and proposed that Johns
move into the floor below.
Years later, Rosenthal told of wishing wildly—and in vain—to continue
her affair with Johns; also, she felt “very attracted to Bob.” When Rosenthal
took a job teaching theater in California, Rauschenberg and Johns turned to
each other. In the fifties, Rauschenberg has said, “it was sort of new to the
art world that the two most well-known, up-and-coming studs were affec-
tionately involved.” The phenomenon was so new that some missed it. Johns
and Rauschenberg did not fit the era’s stereotypes of homosexuals. They acted
148 THE FATE OF A GESTURE

like “studs”—one brash, the other detached, neither less than manly in the
style of that dark-suited, narrow-lapeled time.
When Rachel Rosenthal left New York in 1955, Rauschenberg shifted his
studio to her Pearl Street loft. By then, he had taught Johns another lesson:
artists do not have steady jobs; artists make art, stopping only to scramble for
money. When Rauschenberg found work designing window displays for Tif-
fany’s on Fifth Avenue, he persuaded Johns to quit clerking at Marboro and
collaborate with him. They signed their windows with a single name: Matson
Jones. Though commercial art required an alias, it was worth doing well.
Their windows had austere pizzazz, and they found enough work to main-
tain their drab households on Pearl Street. Reaching upward, Johns could
touch the metal-lined ceiling of his loft. Lacking a bathtub, he used a tub
Rosenthal had installed on her floor.
On forays to Fifty-seventh Street, Johns and Rauschenberg kept track of
shows at Parsons, Egan, and a few other galleries. They noted shifts in de
Kooning’s manner and in the attendant mannerisms of the de Kooningesque
painters. Years later Rauschenberg stated flatly that “there wasn’t any resis-
tance to the Abstract Expressionists.” Only he and Johns had resisted, he said,
and they felt isolated by the effort. “Basically,” Johns remembered, “we were
just living and working on Pearl Street, and our world was very limited.”
The composer John Cage expanded it considerably.

Rauschenberg says that he met Cage at Black Mountain College. Another

account has Cage introducing himself to Rauschenberg at the Betty Parsons
Gallery. In this version of the story, Rauschenberg removed a white painting
from the gallery wall and gave it to Cage. However they met—and the
uncertainty suits the aesthetics of both men—Cage welcomed the younger
Rauschenberg into his small coterie. The group’s other distinguished member
was Cage’s lover, the choreographer Merce Cunningham. They lived in a
tenement on Monroe Street, deep in the Lower East Side. After tearing down
all the interior walls of their apartment, said Rauschenberg, they “had a really
incredible view of the river. John had only two pieces of furniture—a slab
of marble on a couple of bricks, which is still in the best of taste, and his
piano. Actually, he was beyond using his piano by that time. It was a great
piece for decor, however.”
Before he abandoned pianos, Cage would “prepare” them for concerts by
weaving spoons and other bits of hardware into their strings. A Cagean piano
is a machine for dismantling standard assumptions about music. Cage gave
concerts of electronically generated sound and confronted audiences with long
passages of silence. To transcribe his musical compositions, he used systems
calculated to produce works of graphic art. Cage painted, wrote, lectured,
and gave interviews. He gathered and cooked wild mushrooms. All his ac-
 FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY 149

tivities were equal, he believed. To those who questioned his intentions he

said that intentions are best avoided.
Art, said Cage, is a way to make “an affirmation of life—not an attempt
to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but
simply to wake up to the very life we’re living.” To wake up we must be
free, especially from the will’s endless prodding. Seeking freedom, Cage wan-
dered far from Western tradition to the J Ching, the Chinese book that shows
us how to take direction from the workings of chance. He attended to Zen
masters, present and past, who taught of a path beyond the self. Recognizing
no authority, his own or anyone else’s, he came to believe that he had escaped
the limits of his personality. In fact, he had arrived at a sense of self so grand,
so nearly infinite, that he took only passing notice of the difference between
his actions and the universe where he acted. His art formed a portion of what
happened, and some of what happened was his art. This grandiosity looked
indiscriminate to most New York artists of the fifties.
Sitting at a restaurant table with Willem de Kooning, Cage heard the
painter say, “If Iput a frame around these bread crumbs, that isn’t art.” But
it is art, insisted the composer; to say otherwise is to invoke the authority of
definitions, which are worse than useless because they try to impose fixity on
flux. “I would want art to slip out of us into the world in which we live,”
Cage declared. Unenclosed by categories, art belongs to life’s flow. In 1959
Rauschenberg made a statement that still resounds in the art world’s ear:
“Painting relates to both art and life. .. . I try to work in the gap between
the two.” This ambition is not quite Cagean, because it preserves the suspicion
of a difference between art and life. Nonetheless, Rauschenberg and Cage
had affinities of perception.
Cage considered all sounds and excluded none from his music. Rausch-
enberg has said, “I have a peculiar kind of focus. I tend to see everything in
sight.” Johns tends to see only the detail at the end of his visual tunnel. Hans
Namuth’s photographs of him at work show a body frozen in the anxious
hope of leaving the eye undisturbed. Of course his eye perpetually slides from
one detail to the next, bringing into focus new fragments of the ordinary and
giving Johns his own affinities with Cage. During the late fifties, Cage looked
on like a friendly elder brother as Rauschenberg widened his focus and Johns
narrowed his.
Their differences established a balance and brought them close. Rausch-
enberg once persuaded Johns to let him paint a red stripe on a Flag. Over-
awed by the honor, he got the jitters and placed a dab of red encaustic on a
white stripe. Johns made a mock-Rauschenberg or two, then quit when he
saw how thin they looked. Afterward, whenever a Rauschenbergian idea
occurred to him, he would offer it to his friend, who would then come up
with a Johnsian idea in return.
150 TE ATER OIS TAGE
Sr Unis

Rauschenberg has often drifted—or dashed—from the studio to the the-

ater, as if he could find onstage the gap between art and life. In 1953 he
designed costumes for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the next
year supplied it with a set for a work called Minutiae. Cunningham made
Rauschenberg his stage manager in 1961. He has choreographed dance pieces;
in some, he has performed. And since 1984 his Rauschenberg Overseas Cul-
ture Interchange has improvised a collaborative drama from the struggle to
make prints with local artists in Venezuela, China, Berlin, and other far-
flung places.
In 1967 Rauschenberg persuaded Johns to become an artistic adviser to the
Cunningham company. Though he invited Robert Morris, Andy Warhol,
Frank Stella, and others to design sets, Johns usually limited himself to cos-
tumes. “I don’t see the necessity for objects on the stage during a dance,” he
has said. For a series of paintings called Dancers on a Plane (1979-81), he
transposed dance patterns from the three dimensions of space to the two
dimensions of canvas. Johns does not feel at home in the theater. Asked why
not, he replied:

I don’t like the deadlines, the putting up and taking down, the success
and failure, the moving about from place to place, the wear and tear
and repair, the community of personalities with its and their aches and
pains and religions and diets, etc.

Rauschenberg skids headfirst into the currents of the mundane; Johns

draws back fastidiously. The nephew of a schoolteacher, Johns corrected
Rauschenberg’s grammar now and then. Rauschenberg chose not to be
miffed. He had found in Johns a critic worth heeding and an artist worth
criticizing. Johns had found the same in him. As they clarified their differ-
ences, each invented a more vivid idea of himself. These ideas, it turned out,
were not compatible. Their breakup was painful.
 |
The debut of Jasper Johns had prompted Alfred Barr to apply a label: neo-
Dada. His logic was clear. Johns’s ready-made images recalled the ready-
made objects the Dadaists had presented as art four decades earlier. Man
Ray’s Gift (1921) is an iron with a row of tacks affixed to its flat surface,
points outward. Dada offered puzzles and, on occasion, an affront. In 1920
Francis Picabia nailed a toy monkey to a slab of wood and called it Portrait
of Cézanne. Johns annoyed some and baffled others with his Flags and Tar-
gets, yet the neo-Dada label did not stick firmly to these paintings.
With the violence of their wit, the Dadaists tried to inflict therapy: shock
treatment for bourgeois stuffiness. Turning prickly, Dada became an exercise
in moral exasperation. Johns’s art is never that. In his self-absorption, he feels
no need to judge or improve his audience. He feels disconnected. In 1964 the
critic Gene Swenson asked him about the ale cans he had cast in bronze.
Doesn’t subject matter like that imply “‘a social attitude”? Johns deflected the
question. Swenson asked it again, and again Johns deflected it. With some
asperity, Swenson suggested that Johns transformed ale cans into sculpture
because he was too impressionable and took the environment’s most obvious
hints too easily. “Accept or reject, where’s the ease or the difficulty?” said
Johns, finally defeating the critic’s effort to elicit a comment on art and
society.
Dada was contentious, sometimes clamorous. Johns’s Flag has the calm of
an object encountered inadvertently—not that it looks like a secret revealed.
The painting isn’t shamefaced, nor does it flaunt itself. Ordinarily, the Stars
and Stripes are the emblem of the nation’s public life. Johns turned the em-
blem inward, made it private. Expecting only a few gallery-goers to take
note, he was amazed when his debut at Castelli’s became the not-to-be-missed
show of the season. “I liked the attention,” he has said. “And I thought it
was interesting that other people had a reaction to my work, because prior
12 Cts PATE Ole ASG SiUine

to that time I had assumed that it was mostly of interest to myself.” Dada is
art in the public interest. Behind the barricade of his private concerns, Johns
dismissed the neo-Dada label.
Though the label came loose, it didn’t immediately fall away, for there
appeared to be shatterproof links between Johns and the proto-Dadaist Marcel
Duchamp. Never officially one of the group, Duchamp now and then pro-
fessed his “sympathy” for the Dada spirit, which he had been the first to
display. In 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel on a wooden stool and declared
it a sculpture. By similar fiat, he conferred aesthetic status on a urinal, a snow
shovel, and other manufactured, ready-made objects. Duchamp had been 1m-
patient with the avant-garde styles of his time, especially Impressionism and
Cubism. Johns’s Flag signaled his impatience with Abstract Expressionism.
Both artists enjoyed the intellectual play that calls definitions into doubt. Made
famous by his first show, Johns was introduced to Duchamp. They liked each
other but never spent much time together.
After meeting Duchamp, Johns read Robert Lebel’s recently published
book on the artist. Soon he was filling his work with Duchampian devices
—color charts, painted shadows, real objects in place of representations. A
note in Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) describes a hinged painting. Johns used
hinges to attach a small canvas to the surface ofa big painting called According
to What (1964). Swing the small canvas outward and a Johnsian version of
Duchamp’s Self Portrait in Profile (1958) appears. This homage invites us to
see Johns as the son of the older artist. Johns himself revokes the invitation.
In 1977 he said that “when my work was first compared to Duchamp and
termed neo-Dada I didn’t know who Duchamp was.” There are two reasons
to believe him. First, Johns has a reputation for honesty; second, he displays
no deep affinity for Duchamp’s aesthetic.
With his ready-mades, Duchamp gave dramatic force to a large question:
What is art? Entangled in minutiae, Johns does not grapple with this issue.
Art is whatever artists make, he believes, and it does not trouble him that
Duchamp intended his Dadaist gestures to “destroy art.” “My interest in his
99 66

work is not from the point of view of killing art,” Johns has said. “I know
one’s not supposed to say this, it’s not quite proper, but I regard his work as
art of a positive nature. I see it as art.” With this mild impropriety, he denied
the point of Duchamp’s career.
Not long after Duchamp died, in 1968, Johns wrote in Art in America that
“it may be a great work of his to have brought doubt into the air that
surrounds art.” Duchamp’s doubts had grandeur, and he brought them to
bear on the large themes of Western thought. His oeuvre forms an involuted
system—or anti-system—of intellectual speculation. Duchamp was an archi-
tect of labyrinthine subtlety. Johns is more a carpenter, an improviser of
localized solutions—or mock solutions—to immediate problems. Duchamp-
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY foS)

ian motifs appear in his rambling oeuvre, take on a Johnsian tinge, then fade,
but never completely. The shadow of Duchamp’s wit accompanied Johns
as he advanced, slowly, into the seventies and eighties. Yet Johns is no
disciple.
He produces new works by subjecting his old ones to the faint but per-
sistent pressures of rumination. According to What’s waxen cast of a leg
evolved from the plaster body parts in his early Targets. The coat hanger
jutting from the surface of this painting is a cousin to all the cups and brooms
and other domestic objects Johns attached to his canvases in the sixties. Bent
nearly in half, this coat hanger casts a shadow almost as sturdy as itself. In
the opposite corner, the upside-down leg on its slim fragment of a chair mixes
its shadow with veils of stained-in gray paint.
Between leg and coat hanger, two vertical rows of aluminum letters jut
out from the surface. In a reprise of the inscriptions that had been appearing
on Johns’s canvases since 1959, the year of False Start, these three-dimensional
letters spell RED, BLUE, and yELLow. Their shadows tangle with the same
letters rendered in paint on canvas. Sometimes the shadow-words coincide
with the painted words, sometimes not. It depends on the lighting. From this
uncertainty came the painting’s title. In 1971 Johns told an interviewer that
“the shadows change according to what happens around the painting. Ev-
erything changes according to that.”
The artist once said, “I don’t think there is any particular right and wrong
when you’re viewing a painting.” There is, though, a mood to attain, a state
of attentiveness to slip into. One comes alive to the nuances of Johns’s paint
and the textures of feeling that run through his images, preserving them as
if they were childhood memories, and changing them, giving them at least a
tentative place in the present.
Sixteen feet wide, According to What was one of just four paintings in the
show that opened at Castelli’s early in 1966. Each is large enough to suggest
a wall. Together, they converted the gallery into something like a stage set,
an elliptical replica of the studio where they were painted. The canvas called
Studio (1964) is almost as big as According to What and far emptier. Along its
right edge, nine beer cans are strung on a length of wire; the pendant is a
paint-encrusted brush. Gray and murky white fill much of the canvas, re-
calling the neatly modulated gray scale of According to What. To the left of
Studio appears the tilted image of a door. Along the bottom edge sit three
sooty squares of primary color—red, yellow, blue. In According to What, these
patches of color are bright.
In the third of the studio paintings, Untitled (1964—65), the color samples
of the other two expand to fill the surface with squared-away expanses of
red, yellow, blue, and purple. This spectrum reappears in small swathes of
paint that arc over the canvas like rainbows. At one end of each arc, Johns
154 Pie PATE TOR VA SGiRSiiUtkte

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placed a twelve-inch ruler—an emblem of line, to answer the sheer, envel-

oping fact of color. In Eddingsville (1965), the fourth painting in the 1966
show, According to What’s upside-down leg is rendered in paint, not wax.
Eddingsville’s gray scale is merged with the color scale, and primaries are
again high-keyed.
Toward the right, a wax cast of forearm and hand reaches over the surface.
To this object Johns bolted a yardstick. His point may be that humanity 1s
the measure of all things, though it is the fragment of anatomy that submits
to measurement. Between ruler and arm he wedged more objects—a fork, a
beer can, a shell, a sponge, an ice-cube tray. Johns once told the art historian
Roberta Bernstein a story that goes some way toward explicating this enig-
matic array.
In 1961 the artist bought a house in Edisto Beach, a small town on the
coast of South Carolina. Offshore lies an island named Eddingsville, where
the Marquis de Lafayette and his friends are reputed to have had a cham-
pagne picnic. Johns reenacted the event with friends, though the beer can
and ice-cube tray of Eddingsville suggest that he was not overly concerned
with fidelity to legend. With this painted memorial to a pleasant afternoon,
Johns opened his art to the world beyond the studio. Another interpreta-
tion—and there is always at least one other—is that he lured fragments of
the ordinary world into the hermetic zone he mapped in his elliptical way
with the four studio paintings of his 1966 show at Castelli’s.
In Studio IT (1966), the door of Studio has become a wall of windows. These
paths of vision’s escape lead to the blankness of sheer paint. Johns’s big paint-
ings of the sixties picture his ideal studio as a place of comfortable—and
comforting—isolation. Here he feels free to indulge, uninterrupted, his fas-
cination with the workings of his mind—not large gestures of thought but
small, incidental acts of scanning, noticing, remembering, matching. Willed
just barely or not at all, unremarked by most of us, acts like these are the
raw materials of Johns’s art. His studio pictures convert the idling of the
mind into images of the place where that conversion occurs.
Johns’s mind idles with compelling force and imperious reach. He says that
once, while riding in a car through Spanish Harlem, he saw flagstones painted
on the side of a building. Later, this pattern of flat, irregular ovals migrated
to the left panel of a painting called Harlem Light (1967), where it has the
look of decoration that would be noticed only if the eye could find no way
around it. On the right panel of Harlem Light, a tilted window drifts beneath
smears of blue paint.
In Untitled (1972), flagstones occupy the central panels. On the right, an
irregular scaffolding of planks supports an array of waxen body parts: toes,
fingers, a knee, a torso. To the left, a new pattern appears: short parallel lines
 FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY D7

of color laid on in small clusters and separated by intervals of white. Oriented

this way and that, the clusters fit together like flagstones. Johns’s name for
this pattern is hatching. Usually, there are five lines to a set, each a different
length. The outer lines are often the shortest, the middle line the longest.
The suggestion is of fingers, skeletal and wet with paint, pressed to the canvas
repeatedly, until the blankness is transformed.
Johns varied this pattern for more than a decade, darkening it, lightening
it, blurring it to an afterimage of itself, then bringing it back into focus. Red
hatch marks interspersed with white call to mind the stripes of his Flag. The
Flag itself returned in paintings and prints of the seventies. An image of a
human skull, which had looked out from the lower right corner of Arrive/
Depart (1963—64), resurfaced in a set of paintings called Tantric Detail (1980—
81). Centered now, the skull hovers near the bottom of the canvas. Above it,
a pair of testicles echoes the skull’s empty eye sockets and reverses their
meaning. Life rises above death, and from the testicles rises an erect penis,
most of its length hidden by hatch marks in black, white, and gray.
Near the upper edge of a canvas called In the Studio (1982), a nail supports
a cast of a child’s arm. Over its surface, hatching spreads like a tattoo. This
anatomical fragment reappears to the left, reversed, drawn with colored pencil

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on a sheet of paper. Pasted to the canvas in fact, the paper is also attached
to a make-believe wall with painted nails. In Johns’s art, a fact is and is not
equivalent to an image of that fact. Similarly hedged equivalencies liken flesh
to canvas, the human body to works of art. The painter is and is not his
painting. For years, both were stubbornly reticent. “In my early works,” said
Johns in 1978, “I tried to hide my personality, the psychological state, my
emotions. This was partly due to feelings about myself and partly due to my
feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while
but finally it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the
reserve.” Johns was becoming autobiographical.
Racing Thoughts (1983) places a silk-screened image of the young Leo Cas-
telli against a background where Johns’s hatching blends with his flagstone
pattern. Nearby is the Mona Lisa. She recalls Duchamp, who supplied her
with a mustache in 1919, and Leonardo himself, Johns’s favorite Renaissance
painter. A skull lurks, this one borrowed from an Alpine sign warning skiers
of avalanches. Johns let it be known that he collected pots by a turn-of-the-
century American named George Ohr, two of whose odd designs are pictured
in Racing Thoughts. Sull the sphinx, Johns was putting his memorabilia on
display.
The image of a whale looms up in Ventriloquist (1983). Prodded, the artist
revealed that he had found it in an edition of Mody Dick illustrated by Barry
Moser. A dark rectangle split by a thin white stripe alludes to a Barnett
Newman print, as few in the art world needed to be told. Suddenly, critics
had their hands full of keys to Johns’s art. Fresh images crowded the four
canvases of The Seasons (1985-86), and Johns was willing to talk about them
all: the geometric shapes he had taken from a painting by a nineteenth-
century Zen master; the allusions to Picasso’s Minotaur; the snowman who
recalls a wintry—indeed, a deathly—poem by Wallace Stevens.
Depicting his studio in upheaval, slowly jumbled by the passage of time,
The Seasons address life and death, the past that is remembered and the future
that is feared. Earlier, Johns had only hinted at themes of this magnitude.
The sphinx, it seemed, was becoming confessional. Never, though, did he
reveal anything more than the source of an image. He explained, for exam-
ple, that he had traced certain nebulous forms in Perilous Night (1982) from
the outlines of fallen soldiers in Matthias Griinewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece
(c. 1510-15). Before he got bored with giving explanations like these, Johns
noted that the faucets and laundry hamper in Racing Thoughts and Ventril-
oquist are what he sees when he lies in his tub.
To reveal sources is not to explain meanings. Commentators eventually
understood that Johns had left his new images as securely veiled as the old
ones—the Flags and flagstones and waxen arms that returned from the past
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY ED)

to hover in his later paintings. Johns neither illuminates life and death nor
tells us how he feels about these massive and murky topics. At most, he tinges
them with his sensibility. The nature of that tinge is obscure, a matter one
cannot even begin to address before withdrawing to an inwardness as private
as Johns’s own. His art induces us to be like him: entranced by the elusive
but somehow always dependable hum of solitude.
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In Perilous Night, a companion piece to Racing Thoughts, the familiar Johnsian
melancholy darkens until velvety black absorbs all painted form. Nothing is
sharply visible but the three casts of an arm that hang from the canvas side
by side. In an untitled painting from 1988, the wall becomes a dark blue sky
filled with stars and nebulae. Night seems less perilous now, yet the hermetic
atmosphere of the studio persists. This dark immensity of sky is an enclosure,
a flat surface inscribed with patterns borrowed from Griinewald. In the first
of the studio paintings, Fool’s House (1962), shifting tones of gray suggest
sunlight finding its way through a bank of clouds. A tall canvas becomes a
high, narrow window—but only for a moment. The austere vigor of Johns’s
brushwork flattens the sky’s depths to a wall where a broom is suspended
from a hook. From the picture’s lower edge hangs a cup. A small towel,
neatly folded, occupies the corner to its left.
Next to each object the artist wrote its name. When a friend saw the word
broom beside the broom, he said, “Any fool can see that it’s a broom!” The
name of the painting followed. Johns builds the house of his art from what
any fool can see: a broom is a broom is a broom. Along the bottom of the
canvas, the artist affixed a small stretcher and painted it gray. Soaked with
the same color, the towel has the look of a paint rag. Paints were mixed in
the cup, it seems, and the broom bears signs of having served as an outsize
brush. In Fool’s House, all is known three times over—by its look, by its
name, by its use, which is to make art. Nothing here has any other use. No
house could be cozier, more perfectly fitted to its sole inhabitant. Its plenitude
sustains his isolation.
Tinged by the bitterness of his early life, Johns wanted no genealogical
connections. He wanted to be born of himself, of his private sense of order,
with no debts to anyone. That was impossible, of course. Though he stood
apart from the furor of downtown painting in the fifties, Johns accepted its
162 tine AE SO ipRAMG Es WRITE

sooty New York atmosphere as a sign of aesthetic seriousness. From Rausch-

enberg he learned bits of painting lore, and his visits to museums surely
taught him something. Yet Johns’s art is not a continuation of anything. He
is no one’s heir. Painting the American flag, he has said, “was something that
I could do that would be mine.” He did it with encaustic, a medium so long
neglected that he could find no one to teach him how to use it. He had to
teach himself from a book. Rendered in this curious mixture of wax and
pigment, the flag became his emblem. And Johns became an emblem of
independence, that favorite American virtue.
In the archives of the Castelli Gallery is a card with a single fold. The
outside bears a color reproduction of Johns’s Three Flags (1958). Inside, the
card reads, “MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY NEW YEAR, EMILY AND BURTON TRE-
MAINE. There is no date. The image of Three Flags signaled the Tremaines’
success as collectors. Also, it stood in for Jesus, Joseph, Mary, the three Wise
Men, the shepherds, Santa Claus, his reindeer, and everything else you might
see on a Christmas card. In 1980 the Tremaines decided the time had come
for Three Flags to have a public life. A painting so frankly American belonged
in the Whitney Museum of American Art, they felt.
The Tremaines chose Arnold Glimcher, of Pace Gallery, to oversee the
transaction. He suggested a price of one million dollars. Never had that much
been paid for a work by a living artist. In the phrase “one million dollars,”
Tom Armstrong, then the director of the Whitney, heard the sound of a
magic charm. Launching a fund drive, he found the charm effective. Do-
nations were quick, and Three Flags made a smooth entry into the public
realm.
With ease, the painting migrated from the Tremaines’ Christmas card to
the cover of the Whitney’s introductory brochure. It appears on the dust
jackets of American history books, American poetry anthologies, and books
about painting in America. For the show American Art in the 20th Century
at the Royal Academy in London in 1993, all official communications bore a
reproduction of Johns’s first Flag. He has given aesthetic weight to the na-
tional banner and to many other images and objects that we usually don’t
bother to notice—maps of the lower forty-eight states, twelve-inch rulers, the
letters of the alphabet, coat hangers, spoons, the cardinal numbers, paint-
brushes, beer cans, flashlights, and enough else to swamp the memory. Any
fragment extracted from the Johnsian repertory could stand for American
culture in the anthropologist’s sense: the sum of our artifacts and institutions.
Refined by Johns’s touch, his images and objects stand as well for high culture
in America.
Johns once said, “Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.” This
sounds like the confession of a fault. In fact, it is an assertion of a virtue:
superiority to the dictates of the merely natural, the instinctive. Calling his
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY 163

actions “artificial and false,” Johns notes that his civilized way of being puts
him in harmony with a world of invented things, products of artifice. Much
in his oeuvre, from hinges to gunmetal grays to the stencil style of his letter-
ing, recalls old-fashioned manufacturing, and on occasion he has played the
part of a quirky manufacturer.
In 1960 Johns produced a solid bronze light bulb. Four years later came
the aluminum letters of According to What. And from the mid-fifties until
the early eighties, he cast any number of human body parts. These anatomical
fragments do not represent the sensuous impulses of the flesh. They are signs
of a life regulated by decorum. The body inhabits the art of Pollock as a
surging force, gesturing into being an unbounded habitat. In Johns’s art, the
body is one object among others in a world where everything is subject to
the same strict—and elusive—rules of propriety. Pollock said, “I am nature.”
To this boast, Johns makes the tactfully unstated reply, “I am culture.”

Ordinary or high, culture begins where nature leaves off, and develops by
turning in on itself. Culture is an enclosure offering the comforts of well-
guarded borders, which Johns marks with the walls of the imaginary studio
invoked by Fool’s House and its variants. Nothing appears on these walls
except emblems of the American culture Johns embodies. It is difficult to
imagine a house more snug than Fool’s House, yet its comforts are entangled,
as in a troubled family, with causes for deep uneasiness.
At the left edge of Fool’s House, the artist wrote usr. The rest of the title
appears at the opposite edge. To get from usE to FooL’s Ho, the eye need only
cross the width of the canvas. But say that reading begins at the beginning
of the phrase. From Foot’s Ho, the eye would sail off the right edge of the
canvas. Afloat, you could traverse the fullness of space—the infinite—before
arriving at the left edge of the canvas and use, the completion of the phrase.
The architecture of Fool’s House opens onto other gulfs—the one separating
the word broom from a broom, for example, and the gulf between an ordinary
broom and a broom of the Johnsian kind, which is an implement of high
art. Both drafty and shipshape, Fool’s House provides a suitable home for all
the uncertainties that its sole inhabitant likes to foster.
Johns permits nothing to be simple, not even the direction of time. “I think
art criticizes art,” he said in 1973. “I don’t know if it’s in terms of new and
old. It seems to me old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new
art offers of old.” Going forward to a new image, he may reach back for an
old one—a Flag or a body part. His past is perennially present. Also, it is
absent, empty, lost beyond recall. When asked what he thought of the works
assembled for his retrospective exhibitions in Venice, London, and New
York—all in 1964—Johns said, “They just looked like a lot of old paintings.”
Did he really feel so indifferent to works he had already begun to recycle?
164 THE FATE OF A GESTURE

And how are we to take his Flags? Are they pictures of the Stars and Stripes
or actual flags, rendered in paint on canvas? This question occurred before
the doors closed on his first show at Castelli, and critics still mull it over.
Unresolvable conundrums loom up in every stretch of Johnsian terrain.
Having covered a panel with hatching, Johns would sometimes mirror its
pattern in a second panel. This doubling holds the image within the frame,
but only until you see that the doubling could be doubled and redoubled
endlessly. Though the hatching seems nestled into itself, its clustering lines
never settle into a composition—a balance of form against form that sets its
own boundaries. Nothing in the hatching calls for a halt to its spread. The
halt is imposed from without, by the edges of the canvas. If it were not for
those merely physical constraints, the hatching could go on forever. Like
Pollock’s skeins of paint, this Johnsian pattern implies an infinite.
A hatched painting called Scent (1973-74) shares its title with a Pollock
drip painting from 1955. When the critic David Bourdon asked Johns if he
had intended a reference to Pollock, the artist said, “No. The title Scent
occurred to me as the proper title for the picture, and I started not to name
it that because I thought it would make associations with the Pollock picture.”
It would draw a misleading line of genealogical descent. Johns’s hatching did
not evolve from Pollock’s pouring. Each worked from a parallel impulse, an
American bias for the unbounded.
In 1960 Johns filled a small outline map of the forty-eight states with cold
white encaustic that deepens to black along interior borders. A year later, he
transferred the map to a canvas over ten feet wide and colored in the states
with the reds, yellows, and blues of False Start. Here and there, a secondary
color emerges. Red turns orange; there are passages of green in Florida, Kan-
sas, Colorado. In False Start, a patch of blue can be labeled rep, a red YELLow.
In the Maps, the states keep their names, though much else is arbitrary in
these images of America. Johns’s brush respects one state line and blurs an-
other. Here, a state’s name pops out of the welter of paint; nearby, a name
almost vanishes.
A Map could have any dimensions whatsoever; the circles of a Target are
subject to infinite multiplication; and nothing about the look of a grid locks
it to the surface where it appears. No matter how big it may be, a grid is
always a swatch, never the whole bolt of cloth. Not long after his first show,
Johns said, “I don’t put any value on a kind of thinking that puts limits on
things.” He went on to a career of drawing lines, charting differences, setting
limits—but always tentatively. In his art, no edge is firm, no boundary is
final. Every premise is an occasion for amendment, extension, extrapolation.
Slippage is constant, and sometimes the eye feels it in the very grain of the
paint. Shaping and obscuring other forms, a brush mark may become a form
in itself. Subtleties like these do not make high pictorial drama. An inter-
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY 165

viewer once confronted Johns with the notion that art is a latter-day alchemy,
a means of revelation through wondrous transformations of the mundane.
Johns gave a deflationary response: “If you have one thing and make another
thing, there is no transformation, but there are two things.”
Though the Johnsian Flag occasionally becomes two or even three Flags,
it always seems content with whatever size it happens to be. For convenience,
one assumes that a Flag 42’4 inches high by 60% inches wide simply is a flag
of those dimensions. Read as a picture, it seems to represent a flag precisely
that big. Yet the Flag belongs to no landscape, waves in no atmosphere, open
or constricted. Nothing gives it a location or a scale. Very small American
flags appear on lapels; very large ones cover the exterior walls of massive
buildings. Floating free of all particular places, a Flag by Johns refers to flags
of every size, real and imaginary. Among the make-believe flags the artist
pictures is one of unlimited extent, a national banner infinitely large and thus
commensurate with certain fantasies about America’s power and importance.
Charged with that immensity, a Flag has the scale of a drip painting by
Pollock.
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“One thing is not another thing,” said Jasper Johns in 1965. His art celebrates
this self-evident truth. Thus a Flag, a broom, a word makes a declaration of
independence simply by being what it is. Johns doesn’t permit these decla-
rations to become overly assertive; sometimes he undermines them. Asked
why he marked with an X an image in a print called Bent “Blue” (1971),
Johns said he wanted to show that “it’s not too important what’s there.” Also,
he added, “It’s of great importance what’s there, because that is what is
there” —a scrap of the funny papers, as it happens, and for the artist an
instance of unimpeachable isness. Instances of isness serve him as emblems
of the unentangled autonomy a person might have. One might be a discrete
presence, truly and inalienably oneself.
In truth, said Johns, the scrap of the funny papers “could be anything else.”
An emblem of autonomy is replaceable, if only in principle. Though Johns
does not revise finished works, his motifs have a doubtful air. For all their
permanence, they look unstable. A whole becomes a part, a unity starts to
look like a fragment. One moment an image displays integrity, the next it is
an allegory of disintegration. Your reading depends on the focus of your eye,
and that, as Johns remarks, is always changing. Shifts in focus generate the
slow flood of nuance that fills the Johnsian infinite over which the Johnsian
Flag presides.
His Flag returns the gaze as if the viewer were nobody in particular, a
generic member of the audience—the citizen who recognizes the Stars and
Stripes, the literate person who can read the alphabet, the biological presence
whose vision hits the Target with reflexive accuracy. Performing these func-
tions, we stand outside the realm of Johns’s art. Our role is to see how
successfully he has isolated himself in that boundless zone, and how thor-
oughly he occupies it. The grain of his imagery is the grain of his presence.
He pervades his infinite as minutely as Pollock pervades his.
168 inte feyNille (OP Ny wele Sauls

I once asked Johns where he had first seen a drip painting by Pollock. At
the Whitney Annual of 1949, he said. When I asked him what he thought
of it, he said, “My immediate impression was that it wasn’t ordered enough.”
In Pollock’s pouring he found

nothing that I could use. It seemed a dead end. De Kooning was more
useful. His paintings had something you could grasp and vary, but at
first I didn’t have the knowledge to do that. By the time that I had
some sense of what was what, I didn’t want to do it. Younger artists
were doing things easy to relate to de Kooning. I was anxious to avoid
doing what everyone was doing. I was anxious to clarify for myself and
others what I was.

Americans from Henry David Thoreau to Jasper Johns have felt this anx-
iety. They have cultivated it, strengthened it, taught it to serve as the leading
principle of their lives. Arranged chronologically, these militantly independent
spirits form no line of succession, only an array of “Isolatoes,’ as Herman
Melville called them—none “acknowledging the common continent of men,
but each Jso/ato living on a separate continent of his own.” The “separate
continent” of Pollock’s art is America in a pure state of nature. For Johns, it
is American culture in a thoroughly personal state. His oeuvre is the residue
of a quiet drama, the constantly varied performance of acts that imprint the
things of high art and ordinary life with the texture of his sensibility. Assem-
bling, arranging, labeling, merging, dividing, rearranging, he constructs a
world and merges with it.
Johns’s isolation in his art is his oneness with America—not the America
overrun by others but an imaginary place made bearable by the absence of
every ego but his own. Appearing at the outer extremes of American indi-
vidualism, the Johnsian self communicates a disinclination to communicate.
Proclaiming the artist’s absolute solitude, the Flag takes on melancholy glam-
our. And there is something alluring about the nation for which it stands—
an America liberated from all social difficulties, from the very idea of society,
and endowed with the boundlessness of nature.
Pollock invaded the canvas with intimations of the raw American infinite.
The open-ended subtleties of Johns’s canvases suggest that the American in-
finite need not be raw. It can be refined, and its refinements need observe no
limits. Though culture draws boundaries, Johns is forever moving them out-
ward, claiming more terrain for his sovereign sensibility. Because he would
accept no legacy from Pollock, their succession couldn’t launch a tradition,
only a rivalry in which Johns has always been dominant. Pollock started to
turn hazy even before he died. Appearing suddenly, two years after Pollock’s
 FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY
169

death, Johns presented an enigma in sharp focus. With his opaque

gaze and
immobile face, he was an oddly unflappable figure of the artist.
This figure has not evolved; it has only become more confident and
insti-
tutional. Johns’s bursts of public laughter have a controlled, declarative qual-
ity. They are sudden and never occur at precisely the moment dictated
by
the tempo of conversation. It’s as if he knows reflexively how to keep patterns
of talk from catching him. Robert Rosenblum has vivid memories of conver-
sational difficulties with Johns. “Even the simplest thing could go completely
off track,” Rosenblum says. “Once, when Jasper was present, I happened to
ask what time it was. He said something like, “Time? I didn’t realize you
were so interested in time.’ He wasn’t being hostile or rude. Just impossible.”
With affectionate exasperation, art-world veterans talk of Johns’s “scary”
laughter and “spooky” silences. They recall his stiletto wit and then, more
often than not, remark on how rarely they see him. Johns is the absent
monument, the invisible sphinx at the heart of the New York art world. The
target of cultish respect, he may well have done more than Pollock to con-
vince viewers that the unfolding of an oeuvre can be the mapping of an
infinite.

With Rauschenberg, Johns blazed a path into the realm of the American
mundane. Those who followed were called Pop artists—Andy Warhol, Roy
Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana. Warhol,
in particular, found useful cues in Johns’s devices—his grids and his solitary
images, centered on the canvas and flattened against its surface. As the sixties
ended, a young artist named Bruce Nauman looked for ways of being Johns-
ian without becoming a Pop artist. Johns had made casts of anonymous bod-
ies. Nauman made casts of his knees, his arm and shoulder, his back. Johns’s
Flag became his oblique self-portrait. Nauman turned his signature into a
zigzagging, purple neon wall piece. Cold green emanates from Neon Tem-
plates of the Left HalfofMy Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (1967). Usually,
Nauman worked in grayed-out colors. Deforming familiar forms, devising
insoluble puzzles, he generated a variant of the Johnsian mood—inward,
melancholy, sustained by shadowy refinements.
That mood was widespread. Keith Sonnier mixed Johns-like grays and
beiges into batches of latex, which he spread on gallery walls in rectangles
the size of big New York paintings. Peeling away part of the latex, he pro-
duced a look of picturesque decrepitude. Neon tubing brightened the effect,
and lengths of see-through silk softened it to a reminiscence of the atmosphere
of Johns’s cluttered studio paintings. This homage earned Sonnier a place on
Castelli’s roster in the late sixties. Further homages appeared in the works of
Dorothea Rockburne, Paul Mogenson, David Novros, and Robert Mangold.
170 Wale AWE Ole jn le SW ie

All showed at the Bykert Gallery, an outpost of Johnsian elegance on East

Eighty-first Street.
The most refined of the Bykert artists was Brice Marden. Like Johns, he
used encaustic. His earliest works are canvases covered with a single, cautious
variant of a Johnsian green or gray. Marden proceeded with deliberation,
taking a day to mix a hue, and weeks to smooth it on with a palette knife,
layer after waxy layer. Eventually, his patience brought him to colors that
shift as the eye tries to pin them down. In his monochromes of the late sixties
and early seventies, a dense gray may seem haunted by a green, then by some
elusive shade of blue.
From the uncertainties of a Marden color came insinuations of light. Re-
calling times of day, subtleties of weather, the obdurate monochrome opened
onto airy distances. Always, the eye returned to the surface and a smoothness
like that of butter or skin or polished stone. In Marden’s paintings from this
time, sensuality was perpetually shadowed. Gloomy undertones lurked in the
loveliest of his grays, and his ochres sometimes had an exhausted look. Johns
generated moods from enigmatic words and images. Marden was more eco-
nomical. He distilled Johns’s clutter to a blankness laden with all that it
denies.
During the mid-sixties, Robert Moskowitz inflected Johnsian monochrome
with shifts in tone. These are neatly patterned and so faint that it is not
always obvious that the artist has formed the image of a room’s empty corner.
As the next decade began, Moskowitz’s paintings became walls of color bear-
ing shrunken, isolated images—a chair, the outline of a duck’s head, the
profile of a Cadillac’s tail fins. Lois Lane, Nicholas Africano, Donald Sultan,
and others displayed variations on this device, which uses monochrome paint-
ing as a backdrop for private fetishes in picture form. Dubbed “new image”
painters, these artists updated the by-then old format of Johns’s Flag on an
Orange Field (1957).
The group’s most widely admired member, Susan Rothenberg, arrived
with a single subject: horses. Standing or running, they are always in profile,
always in silhouette. Rothenberg’s brushwork is as deliberate as Johns’s but
not as refined. Under pressure from her hand, equine shapes take on the
baggy bulk called shapeless. The ungainly head and clumsy hooves of a Roth-
enberg horse give it the companionable presence of a stuffed animal. Her
paint is thick, yet it’s easy to imagine that the coats of her horses are thin,
worn down to the nap by her repetitious touch. Toward the end of the
seventies, she pictured a big teddy bear. Revamped by Rothenberg, Johns’s
austerities turned cuddly. Rothenberg won a place at the center of the art
world as a Johnsian waif.
As Rothenberg’s horses evolved, childlike variations on Johns’s example
surfaced in the works of another young painter, Donald Baechler. A desperate
FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY 171

45. Susan Rothenberg, Cabin Fever, 1976. Acrylic and tempera on canvas,
OFin <7 Hh,

sweetness, as of battered innocence, shapes Rothenberg’s images. Whether

they grin or frown, Baechler’s deliberately primitive figures look dazed by
their discontents. With a bitter, even surly economy of line, he can make a
piece of garden furniture or a toy boat look utterly bereft of any earthly use.
Amid the exuberance of the eighties, Baechler impersonated the Johnsian
painter as dysfunctional child. Transposing Johns’s tonalities from gray to
brown, Terry Winters found new subject matter—organic forms, reminiscent
of spores. Winters brought a touch of nature to Johns’s realm of ready-made
signs and symbols. James Brown gave Johnsian textures to the fetishes and
pictographs of tribal culture, motifs borrowed from the Parisian modernists
—Picasso, especially.
The elaborators of Johns’s devices form a large and tangled lineage. This
genealogical pattern is a suitable emblem of his importance but not its full
measure, for his influence reaches far beyond the works of those who have
used devices traceable to his oeuvre. The paradoxical tone of his art—its
172 Tine (ATE MOI AMG eo uWiRtE

austere sensuality, its exhilarated gloom—reverberates mutely through much

of the painting and sculpture made in New York since the late fifties. He
has become the city’s exemplary artist, though he would be the first to ques-
tion the existence of such a figure. Johns is exemplary precisely because he
cultivates his doubts with the calm persistence of a monument.
 PART 4

OD aalNKe
CenNininGgun
46. Donald Judd, Untitled 1964. Oil
on wood and enamel on iron, 19'/ in. x
AS mn. <O4 in,

47. Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (Soap Pad

1964. Synthetic polymer paint and silk-scree
inkon wood, 17 x 17 x 14 in.

48. Frank Stella, Conway |, 1966. Fluore

cent alkyd and epoxy paint on canvas, 6
Si in. «10M 24 in.

49. George Segal, Man at Table, 196

Plaster with mixed media, 28 ft. 2 in. x 25
Sane x 200. ip,
 24
Jasper Johns showed in detail how a set of well-chosen premises can sustain
a career. This was a lesson Jackson Pollock did not teach. Brushing aside his
predecessors, Pollock opened the way to an infinite and filled it with a lin-
gering, expansive present. The sweep of his arm denied the need for a future,
for descendants, and in the fifties he seemed to have none. For two successive
months in 1958, Artnews published memoirs of Pollock. The prevailing tone
was elegiac, as if a glory that had departed from the world were fading from
memory, too, and needed to be recalled. Only a young artist named Allan
Kaprow looked from Pollock to the future.
Kaprow began by arguing that Pollock had made painting into a “ritual,”
which the edges of the canvas interrupted for no good reason. To Kaprow’s
eye, the drip paintings looked truncated. Even so, he said, they feel like
“environments.” We are “confronted, assaulted, sucked in” by the swirl of
Pollock’s imagery, though Kaprow didn’t mean that a drip painting draws
us into imaginary depths. Instead, “the entire painting comes out at us...
right into the room.” The impulse to make art is stranded in real space, and
members of the audience are “participants rather than observers.” According
to Kaprow, Pollock “left us at the point where we must become preoccupied
with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either
our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street.”
This argument had precedents. “Art should not be different from life but
an act within life,” John Cage had declared at Black Mountain College. He
continued to declare it at the New School for Social Research, in Manhattan,
where Kaprow studied with him in 1957. Student and teacher were in close
but not perfect sympathy. Cage believed that if art is estranged from life, one
musn’t fuss about the situation. It is best simply to proceed with the alert
detachment he considered proper under all circumstances. This attitude didn’t
suit Kaprow, who believed that art would soon be pointless if it could not
176 VE Al ERO PANG ES nui &

reestablish its archaic unity with life. Cagean insouciance was not sufficient.
Art faced a crisis, and modernist history showed how to solve it.
Earlier in the century, Cubist collage had brought bits of the ordinary
world into the realm of high art. Now collage was becoming assemblage, as
Richard Stankiewicz, John Chamberlain, and Mark di Suvero found the raw
materials of sculpture in rusted boilers, junked fenders, and the beams of
demolished buildings. Rauschenberg—another disciple of Cage—was busily
converting urban detritus into “combine” sculptures. Galleries were beginning
to feel overstuffed with chunks of the mundane.
In 1958 Kaprow hung strips of plastic and cloth from the ceiling of the
Hansa Gallery, dividing the space into a labyrinth of aisles. He offered no
discrete works of art for contemplation, only an environment to enter and
navigate by the glow of Christmas tree lights. Of course, a gallery installation
could be seen as a work in itself—autonomous and self-contained. It seemed
that whatever qualified as “art” was removed by its label to a realm apart
from ordinary life. Art needed to break through the boundary of its own
definition, and the “environmental” feel of Pollock’s drip paintings convinced
Kaprow that it could. Yet it was an imaginary artist—Harold Rosenberg’s
action painter—who showed the way.
Rosenberg had said that the action painter “wanted his canvas to be a
‘

world,” “an arena” where acts have more than aesthetic consequences.
Though he approved of the action painter’s high purpose, Kaprow felt it was
too circumscribed. Painters needed to leave the little world of the canvas, and
move forward on the path that leads “not to more paintings, but to more
action” in the larger world. Instead of artworks, there would be Happenings,
which Kaprow described as

events that, put simply, happen. Though the best of them have a decided
impact .. . they appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular
literary point. ... They have no structured beginning, middle, or end. Their
form is open-ended and fluid; nothing obvious is sought and therefore
nothing is won, except the certainty of anumber of occurrences to which
we are more than normally attentive. They exist for a single performance,
or only a few, and are gone forever, as new ones take their place.

Kaprow presented his first Happening at the Reuben Gallery in 1959. The
setting was sparse—three clear-walled spaces distinguished chiefly by differ-
ences in the quality of light. Members of the audience were divided between
the spaces, trooping from one to the next at the direction of numbered cards.
As they moved, slides flashed from projectors, tape recorders broadcast elec-
tronic sounds, words were spoken. The work, wrote Kaprow, “is to be in-
timate, austere, and somewhat brief in duration.”
TaN a CrON NOV) WT

Happenings presented by the painter Jim Dine were quick flurries of des-
perate, strangled emotion. For The Smiling Workman (1960), he donned a
clownish version of a studio outfit, drank what seemed to be paint, poured
the liquid on his head, then plunged through his canvas. Kaprow intended
Happenings to unsettle expectations and release aesthetic energies from their
usual places of confinement. Dine was skeptical. After his fourth Happening,
he offered no more. “It was becoming so chic,” he said in 1965. That year,
John Cage objected that Kaprow and other impresarios of the Happening
were relying too heavily on scripts and rehearsals. They might as well be
producing Broadway plays. By then, Kaprow had acknowledged the obvious:
Happenings would never be mistaken for ordinary life. No less than paintings
and sculptures, they bore the “art” label. Though Kaprow made it reluctantly,
this was not a damaging admission.
In the early sixties, fresh arrivals were crowding into the art scene. Restless
and impatient, these newcomers had no very rigid ideas about the relations
between art and life. It was enough to feel embroiled as those relations shifted.
Elizabeth Baker, now the editor of Art in America, remembers the uncertain-
ties and excitements of that long, hectic moment. “Pop Art, Minimalism,
kinetic art, environments—it was all new and puzzled me greatly at first
sight,” she says. “And I was fascinated. Having come to New York in 1961,
with an art-history background, I got a job at the Martha Jackson Gallery.
The gallery director, John Weber, sent me to Oldenburg’s Store on East
Second Street, this scruffy space filled with spattered plaster versions of ev-
erything from sneakers to pieces of pie to American flags. I went to Hap-
penings all over the city, uptown and down.”
As she made the rounds, Baker noticed affinities. Andy Warhol made
plywood boxes and imprinted them with supermarket logos—Brillo, Del
Monte, Heinz. Donald Judd painted his boxes solid orange. “You wouldn’t
confuse a Warhol box with a Judd box,” says Baker, “yet a sensibility was
being shared. By the end of the decade, the styles of the sixties were strictly
differentiated. Pop Art, Minimalism, and color-field painting all became quite
separate. Earlier, there was lots of overlap. Abstract Expressionism had
opened up a wide field. The younger artists were roaming around at will,
jostling one another quite a bit. Art was spread across a wide continuum.”
Strictly abstract, Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons had Pop flair, and the
Mylar panels in Pop paintings by James Rosenquist had a blank, Minimalist
shimmer. Before they attained the austerities of their signature styles, Mini-
malists like Judd and Dan Flavin were sometimes as playful as the kinetic
sculptors who flourished in the sixties—Robert Breer, Len Lye, Takis, and
others. At certain points, the continuum stretched into the recent past. Crum-
pling fenders and other automotive body parts, John Chamberlain found
three-dimensional equivalents to Willem de Kooning’s pictorial complexities.
178 THE AE QR SANGIE SWORE

The cantilevered beams of Mark di Suvero’s sculptures sent Kline-like forms

angling into real space.
The bustle of Happenings filled one end of the sixties continuum. At the
other sat the catatonic Minimalist object. Somewhere near the midpoint lin-
gered the plaster figures of George Segal, cast from life and frozen in action.
Or you could place Roy Lichtenstein’s hard-edged Pop Art at one extreme
and Jules Olitski’s color-field mist at the other. Between them would hang
the shimmering stripes of a canvas from Frank Stella’s copper series, or an
orange and a blue maneuvered into blunt confrontation by Ellsworth Kelly.
There are any number of ways to construe the sixties continuum. Styles
formed a web of affinities and allegiances rewoven every season, sometimes
erratically and always in an overload of bright gallery light.
The atmosphere of the time is preserved in Op Art, so called because it
generates optical effects—afterimages, color reversals, dark flickering along
the border between two aggressively luminous hues. Ascending as quickly as
Pop, Op prompted the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate it in 1965 with
an exhibition called The Responsive Eye. A year later, having satiated even
the most sensation-hungry eyes in New York, Op abruptly vanished. Touted
by mainstream journalists as the successor to Pop Art, Op Art became the
insider’s standard example of a silly sixties art trend. Elizabeth Baker demurs:
“The style produced some marvelous painters—Bridget Riley, for example.
Also, Op was not confined to the work of artists who bore the Op label,”
Baker says, noting the shimmer that Lichtenstein generated, on occasion, with
his benday dots. Abutting red and green, Warhol caused visual vibrations,
and Stella’s Day-Glo colors sometimes warp under optical pressure. “Many
artists created these effects in the sixties,” Baker adds. “And that made perfect
sense. It was a flashy, glitzy time.”
Quickly, the art world’s turf spread from Fifty-seventh Street, up Madison
Avenue as far north as the Eighties. Openings were on Tuesday, starting at
five in the afternoon. Every gallery served wine, many offered hard liquor.
Invitations were not required, which meant, says Baker, that “a giant floating
party ensued every week—crowds of people drifting from show to show,
walking up and down the street with glasses in their hands.” Most men wore
standard jackets and ties. Some male artists dressed down, in studio blue
jeans. Women dressed up, assertively.
Baker recalls certain items of wardrobe—a white fishnet dress, a silver
slip-dress, extremely short, with thin straps. “Of course we all wore bouffant
hairdos,” she says, “and that pale, pearlescent lipstick, which was fitting con-
sidering that you might hear records by the Supremes blasting at you during
an opening.” In 1965 Bob Stanley filled the Bianchini Gallery with a suite of
big canvases bearing quasi-abstract, photomechanical images in Op colors. At
his opening, the Supremes themselves performed.
A DAZZLING CONTINUUM (|PY

Far from losing itself in ordinary life, art had ascended to a state of high
visibility and learned to rub elbows with the livelier elements of pop culture
and high fashion. Frank Stella, Richard Anuskiewicz, and other painters saw
no reason to deny themselves the fun of designing coats for a collector and
furrier named Jacques Kaplan. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar kept a close watch
on gallery trends. In the gossip columns of Women’s Wear Daily and The New
York Post, art stars mingled with the stars of Hollywood and politics.

During the early sixties, Robert Rauschenberg stayed at ground level, im-
mersed in the American sprawl, trying to emulate it. Between 1960 and 1965,
he oversaw a retrospective of his career at the Jewish Museum; he cofounded
an organization called Experiments in Art and Technology with Robert
Whitman and Billy Kluver; and he collaborated with three dance com-
panies—Judson Church, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor. Continuing,
throughout this half decade, to make prints, sculptures, and mixed-media
pieces, Rauschenberg moved his studio twice. Painting was the endeavor
most easily misplaced in the shuffle, so he was delighted to learn from
Andy Warhol how to automate the process with a method called photo-silk-
screening.
First, the artist selects an image and sends it to a shop for conversion to a
photographic transparency. The transparency is projected onto a screen—a
piece of silk stretched on a frame and treated with a light-sensitive emulsion.
The screen is then dipped in hot water. Areas touched by light remain, the
rest wash away. In the studio, the artist lays the screen on a canvas and forces
ink through the mesh of the silk with a rubber bar known as a squeegee.
With one gesture, an image in all its photographic detail is spread across the
surface. Warhol first used this method in the summer of 1962. Toward the
end of the year, Henry Geldzahler took Rauschenberg to Warhol’s studio for
a demonstration.
Soon Rauschenberg had filled almost one hundred screens with pictures
torn from newspapers, from Time and Life magazines, from Newsweek and
The National Geographic. His camera produced pictures of a New York street
sign, an anonymous pedestrian, Merce Cunningham and members of his
troupe. From the storehouse of museum reproductions came Rubens’s Tozlet
of Venus and the Rokeby Venus of Velazquez. George Washington stands in
marble effigy, John F. Kennedy gestures at a news photographer, an Amer-
ican eagle rests. Into this melee songbirds fly, a yacht sails, a parade bears
flags.
Rauschenberg would print an image, overlay it with another, and place
another alongside it, often at an angle. Transitions are abrupt. Sometimes a
burst of brushwork intervenes, giving a tenuous stability to the painting’s
swirl of raw documentary evidence. Once he had adapted the process to his
 1S8O ThE Rats
Ail bet@ leeARNG secomU

NS

50. Robert Rauschenberg, Barge, 1963. Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas,
ONE7e Iie S22 eosin:

quick tempo, Rauschenberg worked on several canvases at once, sometimes

a half dozen or more. He has said that, with a batch of new paintings in
progress, he was “not so likely to get hung up, or to work schemingly. . . .
Which isn’t saying you don’t sometimes get hung up on all of them at once.”
To get hung up on all of them, on everything, at once: Rauschenberg flirted
knowingly with this dilemma, which felt like a triumph in an art world
impatient with distinctions and inclined toward a promiscuity of taste. Skit-
tish, garish, overloaded, his seventy-nine silk-screen paintings are mirrors of
their aesthetic moment.
They also reflect the hectic optimism that filled the American sixties until
President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Rauschenberg’s series
continued into the following year with no change of mood. Reassembled at
the Whitney Museum in 1990, the silk-screen paintings looked like pages of
a diary filled on the run by an artist drawn into the world by his curiosity
and into himself by a fascination with his patterns of attention. Rauschenberg
likes to leave a record of the way an allusion or visual pun occurs, sets offa
flurry of images, then fades so that the mind can notice its next swift motion.
The extended high point of the series is Barge (1963). Roughly six and a
half feet high and over thirty-two feet wide, it is a dense jumble of military
hardware, sports events, house keys, trucks, astronauts, architecture, and
more, all rendered in the black and gray and off-white of a tabloid newspaper
page—or a black-and-white abstraction by Willem de Kooning. In the strug-
gle to be seen, these silk-screened images must compete with one another and
A DAZZLING CONTINUUM 181

with the artist’s brilliantly offhand slatherings, splashings, and drippings of

paint. Occasionally Rauschenberg’s brush turns calm. On this vast surface,
there is ample room for quiet passages of monochrome painting, and some
regions are completely vacant, like marginal real estate not yet ready for
development.
Barge merges the rush of city streets with the flow of the highway, the
magazine layout, the nightly news on television. Blended, these currents es-
tablish a state of equality between images of every kind—the glamorous and
the banal, the grubby and the dignified. Displaying no sign of deference, the
curves of a cloverleaf interchange mimic those of the Rokeby Venus. A head-
light pops up repeatedly, an emblem of the artist’s illuminating eye. As a
form, it echoes the shape of truck tires, an open umbrella, a dish-shaped
antenna, and the circle that directs the attention to the football in a photo-
graph lifted from the sports page. Nothing in the visual echoes and rhapsodic
drift of Barge implies a boundary. To stir up this cloudy mix of brushwork
and photomechanical litter, Rauschenberg cast himself as Pollock’s audacious
son, able to invoke the infinite and willing to taint it with the mundane.
Barge’s equal appeared two years later in F-111 (1965), by James Rosen-
quist. Named after the fighter plane that floats, in fragments, across much of
its surface, F-1/7 cannot be hung on a wall. Eighty-six feet long and ten feet
high, this canvas is itself a wall—or four walls, which form a gallery-sized
environment of hot colors and sleek forms. Interspersed with chunks of the
F-111’s anatomy are monumental images of a snow tire, a light bulb, a mush-
51. James Rosenquist, F-11171, 1965. Oil on canvas with aluminum panels, 10
x 86 ft.

room cloud. An angel food cake repeats the shape of the tire, and a smiling
infant sits beneath a shiny chromium hair dryer that bears an uneasy resem-
blance to the jet fighter’s nose cone.
Rauschenberg’s Barge has a smudged and spattered elegance. In F-//1,
Rosenquist’s hand mocks the bland impersonality of a four-color spread in a
popular magazine. Lethal or innocuous, all the objects in this painting have
a bright, dead shimmer. The artist said that he painted F-/// to alert us to
our dependence on advanced technologies, some of which “seemingly can’t
be dealt with, they’re so sophisticated.” In the mid-sixties, it was becoming
clear that the Pentagon had planned the Vietnam war as a triumph of new
hardware. With his allover imagery, military and civilian, Rosenquist argued
that war production in league with consumerism had set loose a seething
jumble of infinitely destructive forces.
Looming in close-up, his tires and cakes and fuselages are easy to read as
abstractions—which is to say, viewers tended to look past the political point
of F-IJ1 to its Pop finesse. It was admired as one of many big, formally
ambitious New York paintings that appeared in the sixties. Ellsworth Kelly’s
Spectrums of mid-decade—sequences of vertical panels, each a different
color—are frankly abstract and endlessly extendable, as are the grids that
proliferated in the work of Agnes Martin, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Patrick
Ireland, Larry Poons, and others. Like the all-white paintings of Robert Ry-
man, grids open onto the infinite, allowing artists to make use of Pollock’s
A DAZZLING CONTINUUM 183

example without mimicking his method. Of course mimicry tempted many.

Allan Kaprow had written in his memorial essay that “the great scale” of
Pollock’s paintings, “the endless tangle” of his splashes and loops “are by
now the clichés of college art departments.” In F-111, Rosenquist parodied
those clichés with a wide, writhing expanse of orange spaghetti. And with
an always-shifting degree of irony, Claes Oldenburg inflicted the splashy,
smeary look of downtown painting on his early sculptures of hamburgers,
desserts, and pieces of clothing. In 1962, the rough became smooth; suddenly,
the Oldenburgian object was as shiny and immaculate as a box by Donald
Judd.
In Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble (1963), the bed is a vinyl-covered object
with the distortions of perspective built in. A zebra-striped slab forms the
headboard. A coat made of leopard-spotted vinyl lies on an ottoman of rigidly
geometric form. On the walls hang “pictures” —pieces of fabric found in Los
Angeles shops and mounted on stretchers of modest size. Each bears a de-
signer’s neat and irredeemably banal version of Pollock’s web. With Bedroom
Ensemble, Oldenburg devised a proper environment for all the clichés that,

52. Claes Oldenburg, Bedroom Ensemble, 1963, reconstructed in 1996.

Wood, vinyl, metal, fake fur, and other materials; overall dimensions: 10 x
75-21 th
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53. Andy Warhol, Yarn, 1983. Silk-screen ink on canvas,
AO x AO in.

by 1963, had evolved from Pollock’s drip paintings. Andy Warhol didn’t get
around to his Pollock jokes until much later.
Pollock himself compared his paint-slinging method to pissing. Literalizing
the metaphor, Warhol pissed on canvases primed with copper sulfate. React-
ing to his urine, the copper turned green and gold and black. Warhol made
the first of these Oxidation paintings in 1977, the last in 1982. The following
year, a textile company in Florence commissioned him to produce a series of
canvases. To honor his patron’s interests, he produced images of yarn in airy
tangles. Designed to recall the swirls of Autumn Rhythm and One, the Yarn
paintings do the job with blithe simplicity. From the moment they appeared,
some called Pollock’s drip paintings decorative. Now Warhol had produced
a variant on Pollock that could be called nothing else.
Like the ready-made “Pollocks” in Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble, War-
hol’s Yarn paintings are works of commercial art—more attractive, more
sophisticated, but thoroughly commercial. During the last two decades of his
life, critics often dismissed Warhol as the merest of imagemongers. The
charge is true enough to have obscured a larger truth: in his way, Warhol
was as authentic an artist as Jackson Pollock, that titan of authenticity, and
their many differences hide a few resemblances. Like Jasper Johns, Warhol
devised a variant on Pollock’s infinite. To Pollock’s “nature,” Johns had re-
plied with “culture.” In place of culture, Warhol put society.
 PART 5

GIAMOUR AND DEATH

We all loved him but were a bit mystified. He never seemed to have
much to say or do, although he always sniffed out tomorrow’s news.
Diana Vreeland on Andy Warhol
(1989)
94. Andy Warhol at the Factory, 1966. Photograph by Billy Name
 Ze
Andy Warhol liked to fudge the date of his birth. It was 1929, he would say,
or 1931, or 1933. Sometimes he’d give his hometown as Providence, Rhode
Island, or Cleveland, Ohio. He died after routine gall-bladder surgery, for
reasons that are still not entirely known. The date of his death—Febru-
ary 22, 1987—-was instantly memorialized by the media here and abroad. As
reporters pieced together their obituaries of the artist, the puzzle of his age
reappeared. Soon afterward, his headstone declared that he was born on Au-
gust 6, 1928. This was Warhol’s true birth date, say his two older brothers;
they add that he was born and grew up in Pittsburgh.
Of his early years, Warhol once said:

My father was away a lot on business trips to the coal mines, so I never
saw him very much. My mother would read to me in her thick Czech-
oslovakian accent as best she could and I would always say “Thanks,
Mom,” after she finished with Dick Tracy, even if I hadn’t understood
a word.

A conspicuous detail of this account makes no sense. Czechoslovakians were

citizens of a nation but not members of an ethnic group. By saying that his
mother spoke in “a thick Czechoslovakian accent,” Warhol invites us to guess
if she was Czech or Slovak. In fact, she was neither. Born Julia Zavacky, she
and her husband, Andrej Warhola, were from Ruthenia, a land that stretches
through the Carpathian Mountains of northeastern Czechoslovakia to the
border provinces of Hungary and Poland.
The Warhols’ first son, Paul, was born in 1922; next came John, in 1925.
Andrew arrived three years later. When he was eight, he suffered the first
of his ‘nervous breakdowns’ —attacks of St. Vitus’ dance, a neural disorder
that enfeebles the limbs and leaves the skin splotchy. Warhol remembered
55. Andy Warhol, Five Boys, c. 1954. Ink and colored gouache on paper,
25 27 im:

three of these episodes. Each “started on the first day of summer vacation. I
don’t know what this meant. I would spend all summer listening to the radio
and lying in bed with my Charlie McCarthy doll and my un-cut-out cut-out
paper dolls all over the spread and under the pillow.”
He had comic books and coloring books, a camera and a cap gun. With a
toy movie projector, he ran cartoon reels over and over. His brother Paul
helped him write fan letters to movie stars. In reply, he received glossy eight-
by-ten portraits from the publicity departments of the Hollywood studios.
Mrs. Warhola encouraged all three sons to draw—it kept them amused—
though Andy was the only one with a knack for it. A grade school teacher
recommended him for free Saturday classes at the Carnegie Museum, where
he was exposed to the rituals of “art appreciation” and learned rudimentary
studio techniques. When he was seventeen, Warhol entered the pictorial de-
sign program at Carnegie Institute of Technology. Money for tuition came
from a savings bond purchased by his father, who had died three years earlier.
For extra money, Warhol worked part-time as a soda jerk and a children’s
GLAMOUR AND DEATH 189

art teacher. During the summer, he trimmed windows at a Pittsburgh de-

partment store, where his boss—“‘a wonderful man named Mr. Vollmer”—
gave him the task of flipping through old copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
“T got something like fifty cents an hour,” Warhol wrote, “and my job was
to look for ‘ideas.’ I don’t remember ever finding one or getting one. Mr.
Vollmer was an idol to me because he came from New York and that seemed
so exciting. I wasn’t ever thinking about ever going there myself, though.”

A classmate, Philip Pearlstein, recalled that “Andy’s first idea was to be an

art teacher in the public school system. .. . I talked him into going to New
York that summer of 1949. He said he wouldn’t go unless I went, he just
didn’t feel secure enough. We each had a couple of hundred dollars.” Settled
in an apartment on St. Mark’s Place near Avenue A, Warhol and Pearlstein
took their portfolios around to the offices of uptown art directors.
Warhol won his first freelance assignment in August 1949, when Tina S.
Fredericks, of Glamour magazine, commissioned him to illustrate a cluster of
short articles—“Success Is a Career at Home,” “Success Is a Job in New
York,” and so on. In the credit for these pictures, the last a was dropped
from Warhola. The artist didn’t object; he had proposed this amendment in
1941, when signing a portrait of a friend. Soon he was turning out illustrations
for Mademoiselle, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Charm, and Seventeen, for album
covers and dust jackets, for Bonwit Teller’s advertisements and Tiffany’s
Christmas cards. He had as much work as he could manage. Designed to be
quickly seen, his images were quickly made. Tina Fredericks particularly
loved the wiry, blotted lines he reeled out at high speed. They were “elec-
trifying,” she said. “They grabbed at you.”
When Andy fell ill as a child, his mother had insisted that he stay with
her at night. Her husband and two older sons slept in an attic bedroom. In
1950, she came to live with her youngest son in his apartment on East
Seventy-fifth Street. She would stay with him until 1971, when her declining
health persuaded her to return to Pittsburgh. Warhol’s mother mended his
clothes, fixed him breakfast, and labored to keep order amid the clutter of
her son’s work and his quickly growing collections of phonograph records,
picture books, antiques, and objets dart.
Some evenings, the apartment was crowded with friends and friends of
friends, young people mobilized by the will that hid behind Warhol’s diffident
facade. He would organize them into an assembly line of sorts, with each
person applying a patch of pink, green, or yellow to the pages of his privately
published books. It reassured Mrs. Warhola to know that Andy had so many
friends, and she gloated over his success, though she fretted when his career
took him away at night. Obsessively, Warhol went to parties where he might
190 Tii= PALE "O/R vA eG Esiuinets

ad

56. Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola, 1960. Oil and wax

crayon on canvas, 6 ft. x 54 in.

meet people who could give him work. He also liked to attend the Broadway
theater, but only if tickets could be had at the last moment.

Art directors understood that Warhol’s blotted line was a Ben Shahn knock-
off, and they were familiar with other illustrators who used the same
device—David Stone Martin, for instance, who did a much-noticed series of
album covers for Verve Records. Warhol worked the high end of the look,
giving an airy plausibility to promises of glamour. In 1955 Geraldine Stutz,
the head of retailing at I. Miller, hired him to picture the company’s wares
in the Sunday editions of New York’s major newspapers. This was steady,
lucrative employment.
I. Miller shoes were elegant and a touch too staid, or so some shoppers
felt. Warhol had the job of convincing these restless consumers that the com-
GLAMOUR AND DEATH POY

Coe
REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.

TRADE MARK REGISTERED

<A,

57. Andy Warhol, large Coca-Cola, 1962. Sym

thetic polymer paint on canvas, 6 ft. 10 in. x 57 in.

pany’s latest designs were fresh and bright and therefore worth the tradi-
tionally elevated I. Miller price. For years, its advertising had relied on matter-
of-fact illustrations. As Warhol’s blotted line unfurled, high heels grew higher
and slimmer; toes became more imperiously pointed. Warhol’s imagery
“made an enormous difference in how the name ‘I. Miller’ was perceived by
women,” said Stutz.
The I. Miller campaign continued for more than two years, a long time in
the fashion business, and Warhol continued to ascend. In 1952 he had received
an Art Directors Club Medal. With more commissions and larger fees came
further prizes. The Art Directors Club gave Warhol its Award for Distinctive
Merit in 1956; three years later he received his third Certificate of Excellence
from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He and his mother now lived
in a large apartment on Lexington Avenue near Thirty-fourth Street.
192 Tine BATE Or VANG Eshwin

However tight the deadline, Warhol appeared on time with fresh, unla-
bored images; when asked to revise, he’d come up with a new idea and
execute it on the spot. Warhol displayed an unusually reliable brilliance. No
matter how often he had to redo a drawing, its sparkle or buzz or silky
whisper never went dead. He didn’t put on airs or indulge in spats with art
directors; he never burned out. Tina Fredericks felt that he was “almost
nonexistent. I mean, he was so willing to go with you, like he was willing to
do anything, and that’s very different from most people.”
Warhol seemed so boyish, so fragile. He liked to give the impression of
being too dazzled or baffled or weary to talk in entirely grown-up sentences.
To call a play or a restaurant “fun” was to bestow his highest accolade. “Gee”
and “gosh” were his favorite ejaculations. To keep a conversation going, he
would ask fake-naive questions or present an anecdote about his hapless,
mock-heroic innocence. In one of these stories, he is fresh from Carnegie
Tech. Arriving at the office of Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar,
he unzips his portfolio and a cockroach crawls out. Feeling sorry for this
unfortunate waif, she gives him an assignment and he is on his way to fame
and fortune as a commercial artist. This was actually an episode from Philip
Pearlstein’s early career in New York, and it ended differently. Disgusted by
the cockroach, Mrs. Snow sent the young applicant away without a job. This
is the truth, though it is also true that the story belongs to Andy Warhol.
The image of the downtown cockroach on the uptown editor’s desk is among
the many he borrowed, in making his art and remaking himself.
As money accumulated, the artist formed a corporation: Andy Warhol
Enterprises. His name appeared in a book called 1000 Names and Where to
Drop Them. In 1959 he moved to a town house at the corner of Eighty-ninth
Street and Lexington Avenue, a substantial building in a posh neighborhood.
Warhol bought it outright. He felt prosperous but unsatisfied. The world
where people dropped his name was stylish. It was fun, to use his word, but
far too narrow. A star on the margin where preciosity met commercialism,
Warhol wanted to be a star in the world of high art, like Jasper Johns or
Robert Rauschenberg.
Emile de Antonio, a filmmaker who sometimes found window-dressing
jobs for Warhol, introduced him to Castelli’s newest star, Frank Stella. War-
hol bought six small Stella canvases. Learning the right names, getting to
know the cooled-down severity of Stella and Johns, he began to make cooled-
down paintings of his own. Warhol had spent the fifties refurbishing the look
of high glamour. For his paintings on canvas, he gathered images from the
seedy peripheries of commercial art—comic books, matchbook covers, the
yellow pages.
Often he made two versions of the same subject. He would soften the first
with drips, splashes, and scruffy imitations of Abstract Expressionist brush-
GLAMOUR AND DEATH 11DS

work. The second he would render in hard focus. Warhol liked to display
them side by side, like samples in a showroom. Confronted by a pair of Coke-
bottle paintings, de Antonio said the painterly image was “a piece of shit, a
little bit of everything. The other is remarkable—it’s our society, it’s who we
are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first
one and show the other.”
Warhol agreed uneasily and kept making the gallery rounds. Sidling into
Castelli’s one afternoon, he let his assistant, Ted Carey, indicate an interest
in a drawing by Jasper Johns: Light Bulb (1958). The price was $475. With
his implacable diffidence, Warhol bargained it down to $350. Next he asked
the gallery director, Ivan Karp, if he had anything else of interest on the
premises. Happily, Karp showed him Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl with Ball (1961),
a painting derived from an advertisement for a resort hotel. In the usual
rendering of this scene, Warhol gives a plaintive sigh—‘Ohhh”—and whis-
pers, “I’m doing work just like that myself.” Then he asks Karp to visit his
studio.
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8. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe's Lips, 1962. Silkscreen ink on synthetic

polymer paint and pencil on canvas; two panels, 6 ft. 10% in. x 6 ft. 8% in.,
Out. 112% inex Hel ain;
 20
Youngish and portly in a dark suit and dark glasses, Ivan Karp flourished a
cigar and paced or, at a minimum, jiggled on his heels, while spouting a
filigreed commentary on form, style, trends, and the sociopolitical import of
it all. With a passing and not entirely ironic reference to his “acute percep-
tion,” he would talk of the United States as “a world-cultural power,” of
“the establishment,” of “force and conviction,” and the “alienation” respon-
sible for everything from the hysteria at rock concerts to the “gothic behavior”
of the fifties painters. Karp’s conversation worked like an updraft; it lofted
listeners into a stratosphere where all was cloudy but shot through with light.
In 1961 he was broadcasting hints that, in its triumph, Abstract Expres-
sionism was no longer “a liberating force.” Further liberation would be the
work of a new style, and Ivan believed he had glimpsed it in the paintings
of Roy Lichtenstein. Now he suspected that Andy Warhol, this “very shy,
strange-looking, gray-haired man,” might show him a bit more of the future.
When Warhol invited Ivan to his studio, the director did not ask to see slides
of his work, did not assure him that the gallery would respond in due time.
He made an appointment for an immediate visit.
Karp remembered the Lexington Avenue studio as “a rather scrumptiously
bizarre Victorian setting.” The light was low. Some rooms were empty. Oth-
ers were overcrowded with shadows and jumbled Americana—gum-ball ma-
chines, merry-go-round horses, wedge-heeled shoes from the forties. Warhol
had hidden his commercial work. Karp saw only Pop paintings, some messy
and some neat. His judgment was de Antonio’s: the splashy, Abstract Ex-
pressionist ones were weak, the neat ones strong. Karp promised to bring
Castelli to the studio, then cautioned Warhol that the dealer wouldn’t take
him on. He would say Warhol’s work was too much like Lichtenstein’s.
Castelli didn’t take him on, and that was precisely the reason he gave.
Unofficially, Karp became Warhol’s agent. He brought collectors to the
196 IE A EO) EVA Gi SiWiRTE

studio, showed slides of Warhol’s paintings to dealers, and introduced him

to salient personages. Among these was Henry Geldzahler, an art historian
just out of Harvard who had recently joined the staff of the Metropolitan
Museum. Geldzahler’s title was assistant curator in the department of Amer-
ican paintings; his job, he later said, was “to be the eyes of the Met.” In
Warhol he saw the present personified. Like Karp, he talked up Warhol’s
art, and both managed to place his work in lively collections.
Warhol had transferred Dick Tracy and Superman to canvas. Now he ran
Popeye and Nancy through the same process. He painted a refrigerator, an
old-fashioned telephone, and a diagram of dance steps. Once, during lunch,
Warhol asked Geldzahler what he should paint next. Geldzahler showed him
that day’s headline in the New York Mirror—‘129 vie 1n jet!” Warhol re-
produced the full front page on a canvas over eight feet high, and Karp sold
it to the Burton Tremaines.
Warhol had admirers but still no dealer. After a visit to the Green Gallery
early in 1962, Ted Carey called Warhol to report that a painter named James
Rosenquist had covered the walls with big canvases roiled by fragments of
billboard imagery—7UP bottles, models’ smiles, automotive chrome. “I think
they’re really wonderful,” said Carey. “I think I'd like to buy one.” “If you
buy one of those paintings,’ said Warhol, “I'll never speak to you again.”
2)

Warhol had begun to panic. “I mean,” said Carey, years afterward, “it was
all happening and he was not getting any recognition. . .. He was thinking
of showing at the Bodley . . . not a gallery that would really have helped
Andy prestige-wise, but he was so desperate. .. . I think he would have even
paid the galiery to have shown him.”

Too cautious to ignore Warhol completely, the major dealers gave him
second-class treatment, accepting his pictures on consignment and making
next to no effort to sell them. “They were stacked away, all up and down
Madison Avenue,” said Eleanor Ward, director of the Stable Gallery. In the
spring of 1962, Irving Blum saw Warhol at the opening of the Guggenheim
Museum’s Philip Guston retrospective. Warhol invited the dealer to his stu-
dio, which was only a few crosstown blocks away. Upon arrival, Blum was
amazed to find images of Campbell’s soup cans by the dozens. Half a year
earlier, he had seen Warhol’s cartoon pictures and thought them “too strange,
somehow, and simple-minded.” Now Blum asked why that imagery had
disappeared. It was too much like Lichtenstein’s, said Warhol, adding that
he had dropped his advertising imagery because it brought him too close to
Rosenquist. Now he feared that dealers would see his Soup Cans as lagging
indicators of yet another trend. Just the month before, Allan Stone had pre-
sented a show of Wayne Thiebaud’s luscious oil paintings of hot dogs and
GLAMOUR AND DEATH WOT,

cakes. Claes Oldenburg had exhibited plaster-of-paris ice cream sundaes and
slices of pie a la mode.
Untroubled by Warhol’s trendiness, Blum offered him a show at the Ferus
Gallery in Los Angeles the following July; the artist accepted. In those days,
Campbell’s produced thirty-two varieties of soup. At Ferus each was repre-
sented on a canvas twenty inches high and sixteen inches wide. Hung in neat
rows, they formed a wall-sized grid. Blum recalled that artists in Los Angeles
were curious about the show but not impressed. “They tended to shrug,” he
has said. Local newspapers hooted loudly.
In 1962 all the Pop artists were coming under vigorous attack from the
press and many gallery goers. If any echoes of West Coast laughter reached
Warhol, he must have been pleased. He had made his debut. He had been
noticed. Now he needed a solo show on the East Coast. He needed to be
laughed at in Manhattan—laughed at by the wrong people, admired by the
right ones. Finally, it happened. A slot opened in the Stable Gallery’s sched-
ule, and Eleanor Ward filled it with a Warhol exhibition.
As the November opening approached, Warhol would appear at the Stable,
a rolled canvas under his arm, murmuring, “Look what the cat dragged in.”
Ward was enchanted. She liked Warhol and she was coming to believe he
was important. Then, the night of his opening, she discovered her doubts.
Fearing she had made an immense mistake, she hid in her office. In the
gallery, a crowd was gathering and taking its restless shape around that sea-
son’s notables—Emile de Antonio, Ivan Karp, Henry Geldzahler, the Pop
artist Robert Indiana, the architect Philip Johnson, and Marisol, a sculptor
who had been induced by Vogue to moonlight as a model. The writers David
Bourdon and Gene Swenson were in attendance. Warhol’s former assistant,
Nathan Gluck, and other colleagues from the fifties came by.
Ward emerged, at last, to find a triumph in progress. Standing alone in a
corner, Warhol felt quietly thrilled. He had entered the front ranks of New
York artists. Philip Johnson bought Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) that night,
though he later said that what he liked best about the event was the artist’s
presence. Relentlessly attentive, greedily there, Warhol was also absent and
unreachable, like an image of himself.

Warhol had laid on his first Pop images—airmail stamps, S&H Green
Stamps—with stamps of his own, which he cut from rubber erasers. With a
balsa-wood block, he imprinted his canvases with rows upon rows of Coca-
Cola bottles. For the Dollar Bill and Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, he used
silk-screens cut by hand. His next technological step took him to photo-silk-
screening. Now he could make a painting of anything the camera could
convert to halftones. “It was all so simple,” Warhol wrote. Pictures of Warren
198 (HE ADE OneAeGbonUins

Beatty and Troy Donahue and Marilyn Monroe accumulated quickly. Warhol
liked the “assembly-line effect.”
In 1957 Jasper Johns placed the Stars and Stripes on a large expanse of
orange. Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe substitutes the star’s face for the Flag.
In place of Johns’s orange encaustic he put synthetic polymer paint of a
metallic hue that is less golden than a wistful reminiscence of gold. The
canvas is nearly five feet wide and just under seven feet high. Floating at its
center, Marilyn’s face is a bright pink oval of silk-screen ink. Her eyeshadow
has expanded to a pair of curving aquamarine blotches. A red blotch with
an opening is her mouth, which Warhol isolated and repeated 168 times—
twelve neat rows of fourteen—in a painting called Marilyn Monroe’s Lips
(1962). Another painting from 1962 bears one hundred imprints of her entire
face, with its crown of lemony-yellow hair.
Warhol’s method required one screen for each color. With the last screen,
he would overlay the black photographic detail which converts a play of
bright colors into a familiar image—a secular icon. Yet the conversion from
abstract pattern to legible picture is never complete. If the black screen was
too heavily inked, Marilyn’s features sank into a dark smear. If too many
impressions were taken from a single inking, the details of her face turned
ghostly. Distracted by these flaws, which Warhol welcomed, you cannot bring
the star’s face to life. From the eyes of a Warhol Marilyn comes a stare so
blank you can hardly call it dismissive.
Two blocks north of Warhol’s Lexington Avenue town house stood an
empty fire station. At the start of 1963 he rented it and set up his silk-
screening apparatus on the second floor. There he made pictures of Elvis,
Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor, of Electric Chairs, Car Crashes, Race
Riots, Suicides, and Atom Bombs. To maintain a high rate of production, he
hired a young poet named Gerard Malanga as an assistant. Malanga’s pay
was $1.25 an hour, then the minimum wage.
Notified toward the end of 1963 that the firehouse had been condemned,
Warhol moved his studio to a building on East Forty-seventh Street near
Third Avenue. “The neighborhood,” he said, “wasn’t one that most artists
would want to have a studio in—right in midtown, not far from Grand
Central Station, down the street from the United Nations.” His loft was on
the sixth floor. The next floor up was occupied by a large antiques shop.
Nearby was a YMCA, a modeling agency, “and lots of photography labs.”
Warhol shrouded the windows, installed his assembly line, and works poured
out: pictures of Jackie Kennedy, self-portraits, more Campbell’s Soup Cans
—these in garish colors—more Electric Chairs. The new studio was known
as the Factory.
In a back room, a thin young man named Billy Linich took up residence
GLAMOUR AND DEATH OD

59. Andy Warhol, large Triple Elvis, 1963. Synthetic polymer paint and silk
screen ink on canvas, 6 ft. 10 in. x 6 ft. 10 in.
200 THE EAE OipeAmGiE omits

without permission. Warhol gave his approval by not objecting. Linich was
useful. He swept up. He decorated the premises, sparsely, with furniture left
on midtown streets for removal by the Sanitation Department. With alumi-
num foil and Mylar and silver paint, he gave the Factory’s surfaces a seedy
shimmer. Linich’s tireless devotion to labor-intensive tasks was a bonus of an
amphetamine habit. His previous hangout had been the San Remo Coffee
Shop in the West Village, headquarters for the local “A-men”—homosexual
speed addicts who struck the pose of outlaws surviving on sheer energy.
Dropping by now and then, Warhol had gotten to know Linich and the
other regulars—Ondine, Rotten Rita, Silver George, the Duchess. Linich’s
San Remo moniker was Billy Name. After Billy settled at the Factory,
A-men would appear and ask for him. Wordlessly, Warhol waved them
toward the back of the loft.
“They were always discreet about what they did back there,” Warhol
wrote. “No one so much as took a pill in front of me, and I definitely never
saw anyone shoot up. I never had to spell anything out, either; there was sort
of a silent understanding that I didn’t want to know about anything like that,
and Billy was always able to keep everything cool.” Of course it was Warhol
who kept things cool, with the undeclared authority of the one on whom the
scene depended. Quietly but absolutely, he was in charge. Warhol’s Factory
was a public thoroughfare: Main Street for the city’s most stylish derelicts.
The studio had a louche allure for young, well-connected figures like Mar-
guerite Lamkin and Baby Jane Holzer, who called herself a Park Avenue
housewife. With her mane of very blond hair and assortment of very short
miniskirts, the leggy Holzer spent the early sixties hopping between Mick
Jagger's London and the New York of Diana Vreeland, Vogue magazine’s
editor in chief. It was her habit to pop in at the Factory, trailing a gaggle of
Upper East Side friends. These visits continued until the Factory began to
feel, in her words, “too faggy and sick and druggy.” Until then, she found
it just faggy and sick and druggy enough—a convenient tableau of the fun
and the forbidden, never the same from one visit to the next and always
enhanced by a sound track.
On a stereo set Billy Name had retrieved from the sidewalk, Ondine played
opera at high volume. In another zone of the Factory, a radio would be
blasting out rock and roll—“Louie Louie” or “Sugar Shack.” When Warhol
wasn't painting, he

would sit in a corner for hours, watching people come and go and stay,
not moving myself, trying to get a complete idea, but everything stayed
fragmentary; I never knew what was really happening. I’d sit there and
listen to every sound: the freight elevator moving in the shaft . . . the
steady traffic down on 47th Street . . . a magazine page turning . . . the
GLAMOUR AND DEATH 201

high school typists hitting a key every couple of seconds . . . the water
running over the prints in Billy’s darkroom . . . men having sex in the
back room, girls closing compacts and makeup cases.

By now, Warhol had established his trademark outfit: black leather jacket,
dark glasses, motorcycle boots. Visitors new to the Factory could spot him in
an instant, no matter how quietly he sat and looked and listened. Sometimes,
though, he’d dress anonymously, and then the uninitiated couldn’t tell that
he was there.
60. Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964. Film stil
 hk
After divorcing Leo Castelli in 1960, Ileana Castelli married a dealer named
Michael Sonnabend. They settled in Paris and, two years later, opened a
gallery. Warhol showed his Disaster paintings there in January 1964. To the
press he announced that painting bored him. “My real interest right now is
movies,” he said. “I make a movie every day.” That was almost literally true.
After some arch experiments with a 16-mm Bolex, Warhol settled on his
cinematic technique: mount the camera on a tripod, point it, let it run. His
subjects included the shoulder of the dancer Lucinda Childs, Emile de An-
tonio drinking a bottle of whiskey, and the face of a young man getting a
blow job. In Couch (1964), the camera stares at the Factory couch, where
Malanga, a woman, and another man demonstrate sex acts. Lighting is harsh,
film quality is poor, there is no sound.
Empire (1964) shows the Empire State Building during a night in July 1964.
Shot from the forty-first floor of a skyscraper on West Fiftieth Street, the
film begins and the sun sets; the sky darkens, floodlights illuminate the sky-
scraper’s upper stories. Stars come out. Seven hours later, the floodlights go
dark; the movie continues for another hour. With its grainy stillness, Empire
is less a motion picture than a cinematic equivalent to Warhol’s paintings of
Marilyn, Elvis, and Elizabeth Taylor. “The Empire State Building is a star!”
he said. Seen through his eyes, so is a can of Campbell’s soup or a box of
Brillo soap pads.
Though he billed himself as a “retired” painter devoted to film, Warhol
was turning out canvases in a style that had become impossible to mistake
for Roy Lichtenstein’s. Leo Castelli decided that it would make sense, after
all, to represent Warhol, who was as eager as ever to show his work in the
gallery of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Half a year after closing
his last show at the Stable Gallery, Warhol opened at Castelli’s with Flowers
204 Wine ANTE (Ol WN (EleS TUNSie

(1964), pictures of four hibiscus blossoms filched from a snapshot he found

by leafing through an issue of Modern Photography.
Silk-screened onto square canvases, they had no up or down, no right or
left. One could hang them any way one liked. Blank and lovely, these paint-
ings were astonishingly popular. In the month before his debut at Castelli,
Warhol turned out as many as eighty a day, in all sizes; eventually, he sold
over nine hundred Flowers. The last of the Pop painters to be launched,
Warhol was now the hottest, yet he still insisted that he had become a
moviemaker.
Warhol’s first talkie was Harlot (1964), starring a transvestite named Mario
Montez. In white gown, platinum wig, and pearls, Mario lolls on a couch
and assumes the airs of Jean Harlow and other vamps of the thirties. After
much nostalgic posturing, Mario extracts bananas from his purse and con-
sumes them as if they were erect penises. Throughout the shooting, he is
interrogated from off-screen by Billy Name and others. Among these hecklers
is Ronald Tavel, Warhol’s screenwriter, who prods Mario into admitting that
he is a man.
Tavel remembered Warhol telling him to get rid of plot. “Of course,” the
playwright added, “Samuel Beckett had done that in the fifties, but he had
retained his characters. So I thought what I could introduce was to get rid
of character.” Kitchen, shot in 1965, ends with a motiveless murder after a
trio of unprepared actors have spent seventy minutes reading their lines from
pages of Tavel’s script. The murder that brings Kitchen to a close is not
merely unmotivated. It is hardly noticeable. To write a Factory script, said
Tavel, was “to work for no meaning.”

Toward the end of 1965, Malanga brought Warhol to the Café Bizarre on
West Third Street, where a band called the Velvet Underground was churn-
ing out an elemental rock sound and decorating it with amplifier feedback.
The lead singer was a poet and guitarist named Lou Reed. Though the
Velvets could pass for a run-of-the-mill club act, they cultivated a degree of
peculiarity. John Cale overlaid the electronic screech of the amplifiers with
the embellishments of his electric viola. Nico, a German actress with a voice
of deep, catatonic sweetness, played the role of chanteuse. The Velvets were
aloof yet aggressive. Feeling an affinity, Warhol invited them to rehearse at
the Factory.
After a few months’ immersion in the studio’s lack of routine, the Velvet
Underground found that songs were alternating with monologues by Factory
regulars. As these wore on, Gerard Malanga in leather would perform an
S&M pantomime with a bullwhip. On a screen behind the band, Warhol’s
films played continuously. A multimedia troupe had evolved: the Exploding
GLAMOUR AND DEATH 205

Hea:

61. Andy Warhol at the Flowers show; a: lleana ee a 1965.

Photograph by Harry Shunk

Plastic Inevitable. On tour, the company’s overload of music, strobe lights,

film, and live action was a hit from Ann Arbor to Boston.
Returning to New York, the EPI took up residence in the dance hall of
the Polish National Home—the Polski Dom Narodowy—on St. Mark’s
Place. In its first week at the Dom, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable took in
eighteen thousand dollars. Warhol was now a show-business impresario. “I
wanted to do everything,” he said. For him, “the ladder of success was always
much more sideways than vertical.” To paraphrase the title of the first mag-
azine piece Warhol illustrated, in 1949: Success is spreading yourself thin in
New York.
A ragged unity got the Warhol family through its Factory days. Each night
posed the same question: Where is Andy going and who will go with him?
This question became a bit easier to answer in 1966, when a restaurant called
206 nhs TNS Ole IN eile
sy7)Wise

Max’s Kansas City opened at Seventeenth Street and Park Avenue South.
Max’s became the Factory hangout, a place where regulars could spend a long
evening and feel connected to Warhol even if he happened to be absent that
night.
Danny Fields, an occasional performer with the Exploding Plastic Inevi-
table, has said that in the back room at Max’s “the point was to be fabulous
and especially when Warhol was there. He was like J Am a Camera. You sort
of played to him.” Training his lens on the routines of the moment’s favorites,
Warhol churned out The Chelsea Girls (1966). Running for three and a half
hours on a split screen, the film overflows with information about the early
Factory—its drugs, its wardrobes, its topics of conversation, which, besides
drugs and wardrobes, were few.
Announcing himself as “Pope,” Ondine is called a phony by the woman
sharing his scene. Erupting, he slaps her. There are other bursts of energy
besides Ondine’s, yet nothing can lessen for long the tedium of this film—
not the abundance of documentary fact, the split screen, the shifts from black-
and-white to color, the strobe cuts. Near the end of his life, Warhol said that
he would not attend the Whitney’s retrospective of his films. “They’re better
talked about than seen,” he explained.
In April 1966, Warhol and his entourage were on hand for the Los Angeles
opening of The Chelsea Girls. Hollywood hardly noticed. Back on the East
Coast, Warhol followed the Velvet Underground to Philip Johnson’s Glass
House, in New Canaan, Connecticut. The band had been hired to play at a
benefit for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, an event sponsored by
the Menil Foundation, of Houston. Fred Hughes, a young friend of the de
Menil family, served as liaison between the foundation and the Velvets. The
day of the benefit, he impressed Warhol with his Saville Row suit. Warhol
had impressed him with his movies, and with his paintings even more.
Hughes became a Factory fixture. Sweeping floors for a start, he quickly
ascended to the status of confidant.
Persistently and not always subtly, Hughes tried to persuade Warhol to
concentrate on painting. Preferring to stay scattered and mobile, Warhol kept
drawing new people into his gravitational field. Through Debbie Dropout,
an occasional visitor to the Factory, he met a car thief named Jimmy Smith
who liked to pick fistfights with Ondine. Other figures flashed by more
quickly. A young man calling himself Julian Burroughs appeared, claimed
he was the son of William Burroughs, then vanished. A woman named Val-
erie Solanis dropped off a script entitled “Up Your Ass.” “It was so dirty,”
Warhol later wrote, “I suddenly thought she might be working for the police
department and this might be some sort of entrapment.”
When Solanis called the Factory, she was told that her script had been
misplaced. Claiming that her bill at the Chelsea Hotel was overdue, she de-
GLAMOUR AND DEATH 207

manded money. Rebuffed, she called again and again, until Warhol, who was
filming [, a Man (1967-68), asked her to “come over and be in the movie
and earn twenty-five dollars instead of asking for a handout. She came right
over and we filmed her in a short sequence on the staircase and she was
actually quite funny and that was that.” Warhol had executed another brush-
off.
Brush-offs were a Warhol speciality, though it could be difficult to know
precisely when he had delivered one. His blank stare and drifting, tentative
voice put him at a distance too great, it seemed, for the delivery of a snub.
But Warhol had no need to take decisive action. He could reject—and
wound—a Factory regular with the subtlest adjustment of his attention.
Henry Geldzahler remembered the Factory as “a sort of glamorous clubhouse
with everyone trying to attract Andy’s attention. Andy’s very royal. It was
like Louis XV getting up in the morning. The big question was whom Andy
would notice.”

Toward the end of 1967, Warhol received notice that the Factory building
was scheduled for demolition. A panicky search led to a large sixth-floor loft
overlooking the trees and statuary of Union Square. Squabbles arose over the
decoration of the new Factory. “The Silver period was definitely over,” as
Warhol said, but no one could define the next period. By default, 33 Union
Square West assumed the look of a prosperous New York gallery: white
walls, hardwood floors beneath gleaming polyurethane, ranks of filing cabi-
nets. Desks greeted visitors disembarking from the elevators, and even if no
functionaries sat at them, these businesslike pieces of furniture announced a
new tone. The old swirl of Factory madness had been stilled.
One Monday toward the beginning of June 1968, Warhol arrived late for
work. It was about a quarter past four. Emerging from his cab, he arrived
at the entrance of the new Factory building with Valerie Solanis and Jed
Johnson, a new addition to the Warhol crew. All three took the elevator to
the sixth floor, where they found Paul Morrissey and Fred Hughes at their
desks. Mario Amaya, the editor of Art and Artists, was standing nearby, fidg-
eting; he wanted to discuss with Warhol an idea for an exhibition. There was
a call from Viva, the most recently canonized superstar. Wearying of Viva’s
gossip, Warhol handed the telephone to Hughes and heard a sharp, explosive
sound.
Turning, he saw Valerie Solanis pointing a pistol at him. She fired again.
Warhol fell, not knowing if he’d been hit. He tried to crawl under a desk.
Solanis moved closer, still shooting. Two slugs struck him, tearing into his
stomach, liver, spleen, both his lungs, and his esophagus. Solanis then shot
Mario Amaya in the hip; still able to move, he ran for a back room. Solanis
followed but couldn’t push open the doors.
208 aE BATE tO SANGCIE SIMUikst

She tried to force her way into Warhol’s office; Jed Johnson held the door
shut. When she pointed her gun at Fred Hughes, he said, “Please! Don't
shoot me! Just /eave!” Solanis went to the elevator, pressed the down button,
then returned to aim the gun at Hughes. The elevator arrived and the doors
opened. Hughes said, “Just take it!,” which she did. Three hours later, Solanis
surrendered herself to the police, explaining that she shot Warhol because
“he had too much control over my life.”

Slowly, Warhol’s wounds healed, and in September he resumed his Factory

routine. Obviously weak, easily exhausted, he would tremble whenever the
elevator arrived at the Factory. He hated to descend alone from the sixth
floor to the street. Fearing for his life, he also feared for his art. It had been
necessary to shut down the old Factory circus, yet Warhol fretted that “with-
out the crazy, druggy people around jabbering away and doing their insane
things, I would lose my creativity. After all, they had been my total inspiration
since 64, and I didn’t know if I could make it without them.”
Spick-and-span and off-limits to the freakish, Warhol’s new Factory left
Gerard Malanga with so little to do that he invented a project: inter/VIEW,
a magazine printed tabloid-style on rough newsprint and subtitled A Monthly
Film Journal. Launched in 1969, it tried to map the common ground between
Warhol’s Factory films and other varieties of avant-garde cinema. From this
mapping emerged a theory: Hollywood movies are great but passé; as the
major studios falter, their power will slip into the hands of experimenters
impatient with convention, outlaws unafraid to exploit the imagery of sex
and violence. In the pages of inter/VIEW, there were raves for Federico Fel-
lini’s Satyricon and for porno hits like Deep Throat. Malanga considered it
obvious that underground impulses could no longer be denied the light of
day; the outrageous would now be the norm. This was the old Factory atti-
tude on parade in a new venue.
By 1971 inter/VIEW had become Interview and Malanga had drifted away.
The magazine’s presiding spirit was now Bob Colacello, a graduate of
Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service whose talents for diplo-
macy were mixed with a love of the movies. A teenager in the sixties, Cola-
cello had seen reproductions of Warhol’s Pop pictures in Time and Life and
concluded that they were simply, unquestionably great. “If this is art,” he
told himself, “then I like art.” He liked The Chelsea Girls enough to sit
through it three times. Enrolled in graduate film courses at Columbia Uni-
versity, Colacello already knew the subject well enough to write movie re-
views in New Times, a short-lived rival of The Village Voice. An editor at
Interview noticed one of his pieces and asked him if he would like to con-
tribute to Andy Warhol’s magazine. Colacello’s answer was an automatic yes.
Beginning as a reviewer, he quickly made himself indispensable. His title
GLAMOUR AND DEATH 209

changed at Warhol’s whim, but Jnterview’s need for him was constant. So
was Warhol’s.
With the irascible cooperation of Fred Hughes, Colacello guided Warhol
beyond the social margin where the artist had nearly died, onto the high road
where Jackie Onassis’s sister, Lee Radziwill, jostled the fashion photographer
Francesco Scavullo as he ran into Yves St. Laurent. Chats with stars were
the magazine’s staple. Most were from Hollywood—Ryan O’Neal and his
daughter Tatum one month, Bette Davis or Lauren Bacall another. Occa-
sionally, Princess Christina of Sweden or some other royal presence would
submit to the new Factory’s version of star treatment, which mixed awe with
the interviewer’s far from negligible sense of his or her importance in the
scheme of fashionable life. An issue’s lead interview was usually conducted
by Warhol himself. The magazine put him in contact with celebrities who
might commission portraits. Also, it made him visible to those who lacked
the glitter for the Interview treatment but not the $25,000 that a Warhol
portrait cost. Copies, with variant colors, could be had for an extra $5,000
each.
 GS
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ee) a © @) WD @ oOnNw~o 5 = o ink on synthetic polymer paint
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 28

During the seventies, portrait commissions became Warhol’s chief source of

income. At every reception or dinner party, every premiere or visit to a club,
he looked for a chance to “pop the question,” as he put it. Usually he was
too edgy and awkward to get to that point. Popping the question became the
delicate task of Fred Hughes, who was at ease with such dazzling and useful
people as the de Menil children, Jack Nicholson, Angelica Huston, and the
fashion designer Halston.
Colacello calculated that, over the years, Warhol made more than a thou-
sand portraits on commission. By 1980, he was doing one a week. Most are
perfunctory. From a Polaroid snapshot of the subject he would make a photo-
silk-screen, then transfer this enlarged image to canvas. At an intermediate
step, he usually snipped away all signs of the client’s age. In the realm of
images, Warhol had the powers of a plastic surgeon. Clients hired him to
supply a new and sleeker look, just as art directors had hired him to spruce
up the image of I. Miller shoes and Chanel No. 5.
A commercial artist in the fifties, Warhol returned to commercial art in
the seventies. Claiming that he never left it, his most vehement detractors
refuse to see any value even in his iconic images of the sixties. There are
defenders of American art who despise Warhol, perhaps because he never
rejected the devices of commercial glamour. Instead, he questioned them. He
made glamour an object of aesthetic contemplation.
A Warhol Marilyn stops the eye at the surface, where the star’s face com-
petes for attention with brute pictorial facts. Colors are harsh, the veneer of
photographic detail is grainy, and there is only a nonchalant fit between the
layers of the image. Long after the old Factory shut down, Gerard Malanga
told an interviewer that
PD [Ps Tite FATE OF VA Gib
ST UIE

when you’re working with silk screen, you don’t get everything worked
out totally in advance. . . . So, everything is going to come out chancy.
I mean, sometimes we’d make a mistake. . . . It wouldn’t be a seamless
thing. And that was an accident! ... Andy took all those accidents into
account, as being part of the art.

It’s impossible to love Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe unless you like to focus
on paint and canvas and the errors that insist on the obvious: this image 1s,
after all, an image. Snagging the attention with its glitches, it is not easily
consumable. It can’t easily be had. Warhol’s Marilyns and Lizzes and Jackies
are as unyielding in their way as de Kooning’s Women.
Adamantly flat, Gold Marilyn Monroe is about glamour, but it isn’t glam-
orous in any of the usual ways. Ordinarily, glamour guides us to a zone where
gratification is reliable and the present never becomes the future, only a re-
styled version of itself. Thus glamour distracts us from the passage of time and
the approach of death. Exposing the mechanisms of the image to a morbid ap-
preciation, an aesthete’s autopsy, Warhol induced glamour to confess its
entanglement with death, the inevitability it denies—and imitates. Turning
bodies into corpses, death makes people equal to objects. Glamour enforces the
same equality. After she had been run through the Hollywood machine, Mar-
ilyn Monroe was equivalent to everything rendered glamorous by the routines
of tourism and shopping—the Empire State Building, for example, or a
Campbell’s soup can, that enduring celebrity of the supermarket shelf.
Born from the fear of dying, glamour crawls with this and every other
apprehension that drives the demand for distraction and reassurance. To pro-
vide these goods is glamour’s purpose, and that is why all glamorous images
are compatible, especially after Warhol’s art has exposed their deathliness. His
smiling Marilyn is at ease in the company of his weeping Jackie; his Camp-
bell’s Soup Can is at home with his Electric Chair, his Elvises with his Skulls,
his Lizzes with his Suicides and Disasters and Atom Bombs.
In the seventeenth century, the vanitas painters of Flanders and the
Netherlands crowded still lifes with reminders that death is certain. Beside a
jeweled crown or a bulging purse—emblems of worldly wealth and power
—they might place an hourglass or a just-snuffed candle. Flowers on the
verge of wilting suggest that, however long our days may seem, the end is
not far off. All is vanity, in the old sense of emptiness and futility. This
argument was stated in its bluntest form by an image of a human skull.
Because Warhol used this motif, too, it is tempting to suppose that he shared
the moral concerns of the vanitas painters.
In fact, he didn’t. These earlier artists made a theological argument: life
on earth is transient and ultimately worthless; therefore, we should turn away
from the things of this world to the prospect of eternal life after death.
GLAMOUR AND DEATH P21 fes3

63. Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster, 1963. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer
paint on canvas, 8 ft. 10 in. x 6 f. 10 in.
214 AE SATE "Or SANG ES UIE

Making no argument, Warhol’s deathly images propose an unnerving and

thoroughly secular variety of aesthetic delight: a savoring of our fears, of our
wish to be distracted and numbed by glamour. Not even his remakes of
Leonardo’s Last Supper count as religious pictures, though they may signal a
faint, bitter nostalgia for a time when faith could go unquestioned. Warhol’s
Last Suppers (1986) celebrate the conversion of a holy image to a domestic
cliché. Nearly forty feet wide, the largest of these canvases pays homage not
only to a banality but to the grandeur it has acquired.
The better to savor the banal, Warhol would become it. In 1981 Christo-
pher Makos photographed him in blond wig and mascara, heavy pancake
makeup and heavier lipstick. Sucking in his cheeks to make his cheekbones
higher, Warhol looked like a second-string Marilyn impersonator. Able to
bear himself only by denying himself, Warhol obsessively scanned the mo-
ment for a new image to infiltrate and turn into a disguised self-portrait. The
flow of imagery was the medium of his being, and so his feeling of oneness
with Marilyn was strongest when he imposed his will on her picture.
He did it first in 1962, soon after she committed suicide. A few years later,
Warhol said, “The Monroe picture was part of a death series I was doing,
of people who had died by different ways. There was no profound reason
for doing a death series, no ‘victims of our time’; there was no reason for
doing it at all, just a surface reason.”
That was the only sort of reason Warhol could give, for surfaces were all
he would acknowledge, even in himself. During the same interview, he said,
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my
paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” In
1969 Warhol displayed his scarred abdomen to the camera of Richard Ave-
don. He never uncovered the inward scars that led him to say, years later,
“T think it’s horrible to live.”
Of course the Warholian surface concealed much, including religious feel-
ings that became widely known only when recalled by eulogists at his funeral.
The disparity between the public and the private Warhol is immense. It
would be fascinating to know what secrets lurked behind his unflappable
facade—fascinating though not germane. Warhol is important for what he
displayed, not for what he hid. His works pose no biographical riddles, nor
did he present himself as a puzzle to be deciphered. He appeared in public
as a person with no life except as a personage, the figurehead of a career, a
logo of himself.
For a few months in 1967, a Factory regular named Allan Midgette im-
personated Warhol on the college lecture circuit. Exposed, the fraud ended,
though it wasn’t fraudulent in the usual way. Wearing a silver wig and a
leather jacket, Midgette had substituted not one person for another but one
image for another. Warhol never claimed to be anything more substantial. In
GLAMOUR AND DEATH 2AD)

public, he floated beyond reach, pale and whispery, suspended between his
need for glamour and his fear of all that glamour’s dazzle is intended to blot
out.

Warhol wanted to feel at one with every star he drew into his art, even the
soon-to-be crucified Christ of Leonardo’s Last Supper. He may have seen
himself in the apostles, too—Judas, certainly, and maybe Peter, on whom
everyone relied. It’s difficult to imagine that he wanted to see himself in his
Skulls, though they have star quality. They are the presences presiding si-
lently, as Warhol presided, over the ritual of offering up for delectation the
dead emptiness of glamour. This bitter aestheticism was the best that Warhol
could wring from our society.
One day Warhol appeared at the Factory with a shopping bag full of plastic
“space toys.” Here, he announced, was the beginning of a “new collection.”
Fred Hughes was appalled. “Why don’t you start a pins collection?” he
screamed. “A needles collection? A scissors collection? A paper-bag collec-
tion?” In the archives of the Warhol Museum sit more than six hundred
“time capsules,” cardboard cartons that Warhol filled with Factory mail—
letters from friends and fans, death threats, announcements, invitations, mag-
azines, gifts. No principle of selection was at work apparently. Nor did any
standard of taste emerge from the accumulations of furniture, artworks, objets
de vertu, watches, crockery, cookie jars, and jewelry that filled his East Sixty-
sixth Street town house and took ten days to auction, at Sotheby’s, a year
after his death.
The need to accumulate experience—or social contacts—drove him to par-
ties and receptions nearly every night. Until the mid-seventies, his tape re-
corder ran nonstop; until the end, his camera was snapping. Warhol wanted
to “get it all down,” wrote Bob Colacello. “He wanted to see everything and
record everything, know everyone, and paint, photograph, and interview ev-
eryone.” Yet he never aimed his microphone at those he considered nobodies.
When ordinary people appeared in his snapshots, he left their names out of
the captions. Under his discriminatory gaze, the anonymous didn’t exist. He
was interested, he said, in “people at the top, or around the top.” It was not
a profound thrill to meet every one of them.
After reporting that Barbra Streisand introduced him to Paul Newman,
Warhol complained that he wanted Clint Eastwood. He preferred John Len-
non to Paul McCartney, Dick Cavett to Johnny Carson, the bitchy Truman
Capote to the surly Norman Mailer. The sum of these preferences suggests
that Warhol disliked solemnity. Earnestness, perkiness, and sincerity also set
his gaze adrift. Warhol focused on celebrities too blithe, too naughty, too
jaded, too resolutely narcissistic to deny the falseness of their facades. He
liked dazzle to be deliberate, with no self-justification. Never merely indulg-
216 PRE ALLE WOR SAN GIES AUR

ing these tastes, he enforced them rigorously. Through the exercise of his
aesthetic will, Warhol surrounded himself with people who seemed, in the
flesh, as knowingly artificial as the best of his paintings.
“Everybody has their own America,” he said in 1985, “and you live in your
dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emo-
tions just as much as you live in your real one.” In this imaginary nation,
Warhol is everywhere and nowhere: the star of the show, the domineering
arbiter with life-or-death authority over each glitch or refinement, and the
adoring fan merged with the flow of imagery. The grain of his silk-screens
is the grain of his sensibility, as it spreads through his images, never feeling
any need for measure or moderation, never seeking to establish a boundary.
Warhol’s grids and series could go on, in principle, forever. His dream Amer-
ica is infinitely large, and he pervades it as thoroughly as Johns and Pollock
pervade theirs.
Though Warhol visited Aspen, Colorado, several times during the eighties,
the immensities of American space seem not to have impressed him, then or
ever. His “dream America” isn’t the work of an artist who would say, in
chorus with Jackson Pollock, “I am nature.” And Warhol was too enchanted
by glamour, too impatient with art-world proprieties, to embody high culture
in the manner of Jasper Johns. Warhol said, “I am society,’ meaning the
consumerist society of postwar America. He played the part of consumerism
alive to itself, able to take conscious delight in its own glitzy mechanisms.
Unbeknownst to itself, glamour promises to rescue us from time and from
death. Treating that promise as if it were his own bad faith, Warhol made
it the salient theme of his art. His pictures invite us to see their artificiality
in and for itself, as a quality deserving the sort of attention we might pay to
color as color or line as pure arabesque. He subjected glamour’s trance to the
cruelties of aesthetic scrutiny. At least, that is what he did in his best works,
the ones that show us an image of American society as grand and as terrifying,
in its own fashion, as Pollock’s image of New World nature.
 PART 6

THE QUEST
FOR PURITY
 a),

64. Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952. Oil on canvas, 7 ft.
258 in. x 9 ft. 9% in.
 29
Like his art, Pollock’s influence sprawled, blurring genealogical connections.
Possibly Agnes Martin’s grids are variants on Pollock’s looping tangles of
paint, though it’s just as possible that her grids evolved from the geometries
of Barnett Newman. Robert Ryman’s all-white paintings calm the furor in
Pollock’s fields of light; also, they reverse the darkness rippling through the
paintings of Clyfford Still. Who, then, are Ryman’s aesthetic predecessors?
Who are Martin’s? Amid uncertainties like these, one line of descent is clear
and fully documented. It leads from Pollock the father to Helen Franken-
thaler the daughter, and on to a small band of painters who counted for a
time as her younger brothers.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Frankenthaler graduated from Bennington
College in 1949. A last semester spent in the Fourteenth Street studio of a
painter named Wallace Harrison left her poised at the border of the art world.
She made her entry the following year, as the curator of a show of recent
work by Bennington graduates. Clement Greenberg attended the opening, at
the Seligmann Gallery, and let it be known that he particularly disliked
Frankenthaler’s contribution, Woman on a Horse (1950), a picture filled with
Cubist lessons well learned from Paul Feeley, her college teacher.
Nonetheless, she and Greenberg became friends. He introduced her to
David Smith and Franz Kline, to the de Koonings, to the Pollock-Krasner
ménage. More to the aesthetic point, he guided her through the museums
and galleries of New York. With Greenberg at her elbow, Frankenthaler
learned to see a liberating force in the light of Mird, in the color of Matisse.
Kandinsky’s early abstractions impressed her with their flat and open callig-
raphy. She liked the dissolving flow of Arshile Gorky’s later forms and the
wobble that Willem de Kooning worked into the rigid, nailed-down struc-
tures of Parisian Cubism.
Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Michael Goldberg, and others of her gen-
220 Wiehe IANS JOUR AN (Ges IWR Ie

eration had seen an opening to the future in de Kooning’s recent pictures.

Frankenthaler saw that opening in Pollock’s poured imagery, which so many
had dismissed as a high road to a dead end. “You could become a de Kooning
disciple or satellite or mirror,” she later said, “but you could depart from
Pollock.” The dead end was in de Kooning’s art, Frankenthaler came to
believe, but only after she proved herself his remarkably accomplished dis-
ciple. Steered to her studio by Greenberg, John Bernard Myers picked two
canvases for a group show that opened in May 1951 at the Tibor de Nagy
Gallery. Among the styles that drift through these pictures, de Kooning’s
grandly agitated Cubism is the presiding force.
Toward the end of 1951, Myers gave Frankenthaler her first solo exhibi-
tion. In a time crowded with notable debuts, this one stood out. The invo-
luted, quasi-abstract anatomies of The Jugglers (1951) sent Frankenthaler to
the front ranks of the moment’s young de Kooningites. And the textures
sweeping across the eight-foot width of Painted on 21st Street (1950) show how
hard she had looked at Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm and One when they ap-
peared at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950. Frankenthaler had seen how his
gesture opens the image, but she wasn’t yet ready to plunge into that open-
ness. In Painted on 2Ist Street, every surge is contained by a flourish of de
Kooningesque calligraphy.
Soon after Tibor de Nagy closed its Frankenthaler show, Parsons unveiled
Pollock’s new works in black and white—expanses of unprimed canvas filled
with streaks and pools of enamel laid on with an oven baster. Frankenthaler
saw two of these canvases for a second time the following spring, at the
Museum of Modern Art’s Fifteen Americans. That summer she traveled to
Nova Scotia with Greenberg. When she returned to New York, the memory
of that northern landscape mingled with her astonished response to Pollock,
and she painted an icon of postwar American art—a big canvas, nearly ten
feet wide, called Mountains and Sea (1952).
On its unprimed surface, a few charcoal lines make lush, wandering curves.
Guided by these lines and then ignoring them, translucent greens, blues, and
orangy reds spread into an evocation of crisp summer air, crystalline summer
light. Details of a landscape emerge. A blue edge suggests a shoreline; green
is mountain foliage far away; red is the glare of the sun or the glow of nearby
blossoms. One can’t be sure, because the picture is, after all, an abstraction
—a calm, confident argument advanced by the logic of color. Memory ani-
mates but does not constrain it. Mountains and Sea sails away from its occasion.
In 1952 Frankenthaler was sharing a West Twenty-third Street studio with
a colleague named Friedel Dzubas. The afternoon she finished Mountains and
Sea, Dzubas told Greenberg by phone that something odd and brilliant had
emerged. Arriving at the studio that evening, Greenberg agreed at first
glance. Later, the critic arranged for two painters living in Washington, D.C.,
Wins Qwiesi FOR PURNN P22]

65. Morris Louis, Point of Tranquility, 1958. Acrylic on canvas, 8 ft. 5% in. x
Jah fi3 “in:

to have a look at the picture in Frankenthaler’s studio. One of them, Morris

Louis, said that the picture formed “a bridge between Pollock and what was
possible.”
At first, Louis and Kenneth Noland, the other visitor from Washington,
were simply dazzled by Mountains and Sea. In its self-sufficiency, it didn’t
seem to lead anywhere. Even Frankenthaler felt a bit baffled. As de Kooning
flourished, his young followers became more fashionable by the season. Per-
sisting with the technique she had borrowed from Pollock, Frankenthaler
worked against the fear that she had joined him in his quandary. Not until
the fifties had nearly ended did she take more than a few tentative steps
forward. By then, Louis and Noland were crowding close behind. Dzubas
took the same path, as did Jules Olitski, Walter Darby Bannard, and a second
generation of color-field painters, as these artists came to be known.
During the late fifties and early sixties, Frankenthaler composed with blasts
of undiluted primary color—writhing, splashy blobs of red against yellow,
blue against red. To keep these clashes from settling into simple standoffs,
2: WHE (AE RO'E AmGiesd URE

she would introduce a secondary color, a green or an orange nearly identical

to a dominant red. Spreading veil after veil of watery pigment over the
canvas, Louis produced shifting floods of unidentifiable color—reds turning
orange or brownish purple, greens turning red. Next, with paints poured in
parallel stripes, he attained astonishing clarities of hue. Noland’s pouring pro-
duced concentric circles, then nested chevrons. Toward the end of the sixties,
he sent horizontal bands of color across long, narrow canvases. The allusion
to mattress ticking was unintended. For the color-field painters, the point lay
not in the image but in the chromatic relationships the image made possible.
Soaked with pigment by Frankenthaler and her aesthetic siblings, the can-
vas “becomes paint in itself, color in itself,’ said Greenberg. Moreover, the
canvas’s “threadedness and wovenness are in the color,’ making it look
“somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical.” One might won-
der how color can be disembodied if it displays the “threadedness and wo-
venness” of heavy cotton duck. Also, the color-field painters—especially
Frankenthaler—habitually generated light-dark contrasts of the kind disal-
lowed by Greenberg’s theory. Only in a few of Olitski’s big spray-gunned
canvases of the mid-sixties does color ascend to a uniformly high key. And
there are other disparities between theory and practice. In fact, there are
many. These are not as important as the excitement stirred up by Greenberg’s
doctrine and the painting it supported.
In 1971 color-field enthusiasts in Houston revamped the Deluxe, an old
movie theater, and put on a show. There were paintings by Olitski, Bannard,
Larry Poons, and others, including Noland, who helped with the hanging.
Greenberg appeared and cast an approving eye on the results. The curator
of the Deluxe show, a second-generation color-fielder named Peter Bradley,
said that he favored artists who are “constantly taking a risk.” The need is
to move forward. “Pollock-type art” established the starting point. That sort
of painting “looked good” but it was “cloudy” and “didn’t strike you as being
‘clean.’ ”’ Now “art is becoming clean and neat,” said Bradley. “Clarity moves
me. Maybe it’s a message, a prophecy.”
Greenberg had been calling for “purely optical” painting since the late
forties, when Pollock, the patriarch, was sweeping away the remnants of
Cubist architecture. His currents of color provided a glimpse of the ideal.
Nonetheless, his contrasts of light and dark stir at least the memory of figure
and ground. Because this effect suggests objects in space, said Greenberg, it
is “sculptural.” It has no place in a painting, which ought to be “a strictly
visual entity.” Even the best of Pollock’s canvases are not quite “visual”
enough. They evoke the infinite and the energy of his arm. They draw us
in bodily and send us careening through imaginary depths. A proper color-
field painting does none of that.
With its colors keyed up to high incandescence, a color-field painting pre-
iOS Te O Ra PUTRI MY, 223

vents sharp tonal contrasts. With no play of light against dark, there can be
No oppositions of figure to ground, no suggestions of objects in space. Un-
tainted by these “sculptural” effects, the painting addresses itself solely to
matters inherent in the medium. According to Greenberg’s doctrine, Frank-
enthaler and the small band she had inspired were on the verge of revealing
“the irreducible essence of pictorial art.” Here was momentous news. Out of
the seeming dead end of Pollock’s great achievement had come an achieve-
ment even greater than his.
A Greenbergian critic named Michael Fried declared in 1965 that true
progress in art models itself on the revolutionary dialectic proposed by Marxist
theory. Marxist practice failed, as Fried noted; radical politics has been a
disaster in the twentieth century. Even so, he said, the revolution is succeeding
on the plane of art. At the hands of artists favored by the Greenbergian critics,
painting had advanced to the point where further progress was difficult to
conceive. Praise of Louis, Noland, and Olitski developed a tone of millennial
fervor. Perfections had been achieved, for if their imagery did address itself
solely to vision, then it would give the viewer the experience of being removed
from space, even the space of the body. Perceiving a purely visual image, one
would become all eye, pure vision. This was the purity Pollock had proph-
esied. The color-field painters had attained it. Nonsense, said Donald Judd.
Pollock had prophesied a different and a truer purity, which he, Judd, would
attain.
 Ne
Y
G

66. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. Brass and colored Plexiglas on steel brackets;
ten units, each 6% x 24 x 27 in.; overall dimensions: 1162 x 24 x 27 in.
 SQ
In all paintings but Pollock’s, Donald Judd saw a disturbing effect: parts form
wholes, small motifs merge into the larger composition, and the eye loses track
ofspecifics. With his drip method, Pollock prevented this blending, this blurring
of the particular. Each strand and pool of pigment maintains its integrity. The
canvas, too, preserves the plain truth ofits size and rectangular shape. To Judd’s
eye, a drip painting is an array of uncompromised facts, not a field of “optical”
ethereality or an opening onto an infinite. Pollock’s great works had prophesied
a total candor of the art object. Judd’s task was to realize this prophecy.
For seven years, from 1955 to 1962, Judd struggled to exclude from paint-
ing everything but the facts of paint on canvas. He flattened forms to patches
of color. He textured the surface of his canvas. Exchanging canvas for Ma-
sonite, he roughened his textures. He reduced his forms to straight lines
parallel to the edges of the surface. Despite all he could do, effects of depth
continued to appear. Judd concluded that painting is by nature “spatially
illusionistic.” It occupies one place and refers to another. The medium should
be abandoned, like an obsolete vehicle.
The new vehicle, the one that would bear art into the proper future, was a
three-dimensional object of familiar shape. On its uniform surfaces, paint
would be smooth. Rescued from its perfidious habit ofcollaborating with line to
generate illusions, color would be one ofseveral self-evident facts that define the
work ofart as nothing more nor less than a tangible object in ordinary space. By
1963 the facts of Judd’s art were those of boxes painted in bright colors—
chartreuse or cadmium red—and inflected by eccentric details.
His slim, horizontal wall pieces played solids against voids in symmetrical
patterns. With vertical arrays of boxes, identical in size and color, he imposed
a regular pattern on the wall itself. Though Judd occasionally permitted a
curved edge to appear, he usually confined himself to straight edges, right
angles, and scrupulously flat planes. From this small repertory, he generated
226 Wile TIME (OP vA Iles WUINE

a remarkable variety of objects large and small, shiny and matte, bright and
drab. Judd’s works from the sixties have an air of substantiality, even when
they are manifestly hollow, for they are the product of his calm belief that
he knew precisely what to do with Pollock’s legacy.
The virtue of a drip painting lies in the integrity of its elements. Taking
this assumption as axiomatic, Judd argued that virtues can be improved. In-
tegrity can be made more secure. In his first major position paper, an essay
called “Specific Objects” (1965), he announced that progress had been made.
The most advanced New York artists, wrote Judd—who included but did
not name himself—had produced works in which “shape, image, color, and
surface are single and not partial and scattered. There aren’t any neutral or
moderate areas or parts, any connections or transitional areas.” All the ele-
ments of a piece are equal, hence equally able to assert the simple, incontro-
vertible facts of their physical being.
Much of the art Judd endorsed was the work of artists who had abandoned
the traditional forms of painting and sculpture. A new name was needed. “Min-
imalism” emerged and gravitated toward Judd and other makers of stark ob-
jects. For a time, critics applied the label to any work of art that dispensed with
the bravura messiness of de Kooningesque painting. In a season or two, the
Minimalists had been identified as Judd, Sol Le Witt, Carl Andre, Robert Morris,
and a few others—artists who favored blank surfaces and simple, regular out-
lines. These, said Morris, are the traits of a good “gestalt”—a shape so clear
that the mind apprehends it with speed and unassailable certainty.
Before he became a Minimalist, Morris choreographed and appeared in a se-
ries of performances at the Judson Dance Theater. With these works, Morris
pledged a temporary allegiance to Robert Rauschenberg and the Judson aesthetic
of ordinary movement. Recycling motifs from Jasper Johns and Marcel Du-
champ in small leaden sculptures, Morris linked himselfto these artists. In 1963
the Green Gallery showed his first nonderivative works: two thin, squared-away
slabs, one hovering just off the floor, the other suspended from the ceiling; a
large pair of wheels, joined by an axle; a square frame, thick enough to stand on
the floor, free of the wall; and Barrier, four beams arranged in the ticktacktoe
pattern. All these objects were made of plywood painted gray.
The next season, Morris leaned a slab against a wall. He stretched a large
square beam along the floor and angled an inverted L shape from wall to
floor. He presented smallish cubes in sets of four. There were cubes with
mirrored surfaces and former cubes, which is to say cubes with vertical planes
slanting slightly inward. Devoted to the ideal of the good gestalt, Morris was
testing the limits of goodness. How far can a form deviate from absolute
simplicity and still be immediately graspable?
Paraphrasing Judd, Morris wrote in 1967 that a painting is a retrograde
object because it cannot help referring to objects other than itself. It produces
 hE TOUWEST FOR PURITY. 227,

a “duality of thing and allusion.” The same year, he stated that a successful
artwork generates no “divisiveness of experience.” It doesn’t try to fool the
eye or plague it with ambiguities. This general agreement with Judd led to
a dispute over a particular. Judd was an exuberant colorist who liked to
juxtapose the luster of polished metal with the gleam of industrial paint—
brass against smoldering orange, galvanized iron against bright blue. Morris
dismissed color as “‘additive.” What matters, he argued, are “scale, proportion,
shape” —qualities to be made unambiguously available to the viewer “by the
adjustment of an obdurate, literal mass.”
On the need for clarity, all the Minimalists agreed. “My arrangements,”
Andre once said, “are essentially the simplest I can arrive at, given a material
and a place.” His characteristic work is a set of twelve-by-twelve-inch plates
of steel arranged in twelve rows of twelve. Occasionally, he disposes bricks
or uniform pieces of wood in orderly patterns. Simplicity is good, Andre
believes, because it defeats the temptation to “impose properties on materials.”
It is better to “reveal” their properties. A material should obviously be what
it is and a form should just as obviously be whatever it might be—or become.
Andre does not feel protective toward his floor pieces. “As people walk on
them, as the steel rusts, as the brick crumbles, as the materials weather, the work
becomes its own record of everything that’s happened to it,” he stated in 1969.
Andre accepts whatever accidents befall his works. Morris does not. He repairs
damaged pieces, or refabricates them, as he has done with many of his early
plywood pieces. Le Witt, too, keeps his lattices and permuted cubes in good re-
pair. The contingencies he is willing to accept occur in the making of an object.
According to LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1968), a work
emerges from a process launched by an idea. The dictates of the idea must
be followed “blindly” in all their particulars. “If the artist changes his mind
midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result,”
LeWitt wrote, for “the process is mechanical and should not be tampered
with. It should run its course.” The results may be surprising because “the
artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.”
Surprises should be welcomed, especially if they offer “ideas for new works.”
LeWitt’s “Sentences” pointed to a Minimalist ideal: the form that estab-
lishes a perfect fit between idea and object. To celebrate this perfection, Min-
imalists would run a form through a set of permutations. In 1967 LeWitt
built cubes of three kinds: closed on all six sides, open on one side, and open
on two sides. Then he stacked them, three high, in forty-six different com-
binations. His lattices simply repeat the form of the cube dozens, sometimes
hundreds, of times. Repetitions like these could, in principle, go on forever,
and so a work of Minimal art has a resemblance to a drip painting by Pollock:
it implies the infinite.
Invoking unbounded space and light, Pollock’s gesture sends his presence
228 Lite AAG Om AGS eos

sailing through the immensities of his image. No Minimalist ever makes that
sort of entry into his work. He stands outside it, an allegorical figure of the
idea that dictates its physical attributes. With unrelenting precision, an Andre
“carpet” of twelve-by-twelve-inch plates reiterates its premise, which is the
twelve-by-twelve pattern itself. The precision of the reiteration and its re-
lentlessness are far more to the Minimalist point than the infinite that the
carpet suggests. From formal clarity comes an effect of conceptual control.
Metaphorical play is not encouraged, and in his “Notes on Sculpture,’ Morris
disallowed it. He had no interest in the air, space, light, and bodily presence in
the drip paintings of Pollock, who remained for him and the other Minimalists
an artist of the literal and the concrete. Here is the true, the believable Pollock,
they said. From his example the best artists will advance to forms clear and
obvious enough to defeat the untruths of traditional art.
When three-dimensional form is clarified, said Morris, complexity leaves the
work and becomes “a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.”
Drawn into that field, one becomes aware of “kinesthetic demands placed on
the body.” To be ina gallery filled with Minimalist objects is to be given an acute
sense of the room’s shape, size, and degree of brightness. Minimalism heightens
our awareness of what is. In 1969 the advertisement for Andre’s yearly exhibition
at the Dwan Gallery reproduced the periodic table of the elements, from hy-
drogen to lawrencium, as if to say: Good art is like science. It presents us with
the real; it makes us more physically real to ourselves. Color-field painters and
their Greenbergian critics disagreed. Art, they said, should lift us out of our
physical state. In an essay called “Art and Objecthood” (1967), Michael Fried
explained how this transcendence of the body occurs.
Art of the right sort, wrote Fried, manifests an abiding essence—the “pure
opticality” of a Noland stripe painting, for a crucial example. To perceive this
purity is to touch, with vision alone, an absolute that resides nowhere in the
three dimensions of ordinary space. Proper art teaches us how to become all
vision and thus as intangible, in imagination, as the color effects we are
contemplating. No, said the Minimalists, good art reminds us of our tangi-
bility. It renders our bodies vivid to us.
Both parties invoked the authority of Pollock; each defined him to its own
best advantage. According to the color-fielders, Pollock was devoted exclu-
sively to vision. His allover canvases make it possible to imagine, to strive
for, paintings so purely “optical” that only the eye can enter them. The Pol-
lock of the color-field painters is an artist of the ethereal. For the Minimalists,
Pollock was an artist who grappled with matter in viscous, primordial form.
Their Pollock points the way to forms so frankly physical that vision cannot
grasp them firmly unless the entire body is engaged. These two Pollocks, the
literalist and the “optical,” had nothing in common, nor could there be any
reconciliation between Minimalism and color-field painting. Unnerved by the
 Hele Ques IF FOR IU ITY 2G

hostility of the stalemate, Fried described it as an episode in a perennial ‘“‘war”

between true and false art.
Art turns false, said Fried, when it addresses us by some dubious “theat-
rical” means. He abominated all these devices—the shock of novelty, the
charm of mimicry, the coy invitation to dream. The tactic he feared most
was the Minimalists’ overbearing presentation of literal fact in ordinary space
and time. Fried warned in “Art and Objecthood” that the art war had entered
a desperate phase. True art would not survive if the moment’s best artists
could not “defeat theater” in its latest, most insidious form. This war was
unwinnable because each side occupied a battlefield of its own.

As the sixties ended, the continuum of New York art fell into fragments,
most of which drifted to the peripheries or vanished entirely. Of the decade’s
new styles, only Pop, Minimalism, and color-field painting survived with any
vigor. Attrition had been ruthless. Surveying its aftermath, Henry Geldzahler
Saw an opportunity to define a canon. Now the Metropolitan Museum’s cu-
rator of contemporary arts, he was charged with organizing a spectacle im-
pressive enough to inaugurate the Met’s centennial celebration. His response
was New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, an exhibition that filled
thirty-five galleries with 408 works of art. The Geldzahler canon was capa-
cious but suitably cautious.
In the beginning were pictures by Pollock and sculptures by David Smith.
Then the exhibition reached back to the thirties for a trio of predecessors:
Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, and Milton Avery. Next came works by de
Kooning, Newman, Still, Rothko, Kline, Guston, and a few others of that
generation. Johns and Rauschenberg had galleries to themselves, as did five
of the color-field painters: Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Olitski, and Larry
Poons. Among the luminaries of this all-star show, these were the brightest
—or, at least, the ones most favored by Geldzahler’s installation. Of the
Minimalists, he recognized only Judd, Morris, and Dan Flavin, whose
fluorescent-tube wall pieces had one gallery to themselves and spilled into
another.
Geldzahler designed his exhibition to mark the stages of an American
advance across a wide front. Here was history on the march, as New York
art moved from obscurity in the forties to international recognition in the
sixties. And in the spaces occupied by brand-new work, the present seemed
to be edging impatiently into the future. “Henry’s show,” as it came to be
known, offered a confident, convincing account of a major triumph. Only
Frank Stella presented a problem. His importance was undisputed. The dif-
ficulty was in knowing precisely where he belonged in the struggle between
Minimalism and color-field painting—between devotion to sheer physical fact
and the redemption from fact that Michael Fried called “grace.”
ssaS

67. Frank Stella, Avicenna, 1960. Aluminum oil paint on canvas, 6 ft. 21 in.
5 Ont
 31
In 1956, when he was still an undergraduate student at Princeton University,
Frank Stella had never seen the work of Jasper Johns. In some way, though,
he knew of it. Johns’s art was “a kind of palpable reality of some sort that
was in the air,” he later said. The young painter found it “interesting to hear
about something strongly reputed to be good, and then actually see it be
good.” From Johns, Stella took cues to a career so successful that, in the
sixties, he eclipsed everyone but Andy Warhol.
After a long look at Johns’s first exhibition, Stella filled several square
canvases with horizontal stripes. Somewhere, usually near the center of the
pattern, he would place a block of solid color. Though they contained no
stars, these pictures had a conspicuous resemblance to the Flags. Stella’s in-
structor at Princeton was Stephen Greene, an Abstract Expressionist with no
sympathy for Johns. On one of his student’s new works he scrawled “God
Bless America.” Outraged at first, Stella forgave this flip assault as a sign of
the desperation felt in a rearguard position. From Greene and the writers of
Artnews, Stella had heard too much Abstract Expressionist talk of the painter
who risks all in the struggle to stay alive to his experience. Already a self-
confident skeptic, he wanted to find “a way that wasn’t so wrapped up in
the hullabaloo.” Johns showed him the way with the stripes of his Flags, the
calm of his monochrome, the restraint of his brush.
In the spring of 1958, Stella left Princeton with his bachelor of arts degree,
and set up a studio in a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Three or four days a week he painted apartment interiors for a contractor
who specialized in rush jobs for landlords under court order to refurbish
their properties. His expenses met, Stella spent his days off covering canvases
with stripes of black enamel. This was paint sold in gallon cans, not five-
ounce tubes. His early paintings have the bleak, sooty look of commercial
neighborhoods on the peripheries of Manhattan.
68. Frank Stella, Flin Flon Ill, 1969. Polymer and fluorescent polymer paint on
canvas, 8 x 8 ft.

Tomlinson Court Park (1959) is a horizontal canvas just over nine feet wide.
Its outermost stripe makes an unbroken circuit of the edge, like a thin black
frame. The next stripe makes the same circuit, just inside the first; the rest
do the same, stripe within stripe, until the canvas is occupied. An insistent
eye could see this pattern as a bird’s-eye view of a stepped pyramid. Yet the
pyramid keeps collapsing. The image is as flat as the surface it covers, and
if the eye balks at this obvious fact, the stripes overcome its reluctance with
their unswerving reiterations.
In April 1959 a group show at Tibor de Nagy included a black-stripe
painting called Club Onyx (1959). Making the gallery rounds, Dorothy Miller
looked in and was astonished by this young painter’s resistance to the au-
thority of Willem de Kooning. Quickly, she arranged for a visit to Stella’s
studio with Leo Castelli, who had just added him to his roster. Feeling her
first reaction confirmed—and reconfirmed—by the insistence of Stella’s pat-
terns, Miller declared her intention of including him in a group show at the
ii aSOWiE SM B@IR™ PURITY. 233

Museum of Modern Art. Castelli suggested that the painter, then twenty-
three years old, might be hurt by this early exposure. Turning insistent her-
self, Miller refused to consider the possibility. When her Sixteen Americans
opened in December, it included four of the black paintings.
Years later, Stella speculated at length about form in art. In 1959 he left
the commentator’s job to Carl Andre, who wrote in the catalog of Sixteen
Americans that “symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella’s
painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These
paths lead only into painting.” True, said the Greenbergian Michael Fried,
but what sort of paintings does Stella give us? Surely his canvases are not
satisfied to be objects, mere physical things immersed in ordinary space. A

69. Frank Stella, Nasielsk Il, 1972. Painted canvas, felt, Kachina board on
wood, 9 ft. 2 in. x 7 ft. 5% in. x 6 in.
234 Late PATE OV AmiCiESseUURIE

painter of Stella’s high ambition must want to do more with paint and canvas
than “reveal the properties of the material,” as Andre put it. Two decades
later, Fried said that he had spent the mid-sixties struggling with Andre for
the “soul” of Frank Stella.
Greenberg wasn’t convinced that the struggle was worth the prize. He and
most of his followers dismissed Stella as one of the Minimalist enemy, a
literalist like Donald Judd, who saw Stella’s striped canvases as objects—
“slabs” to be hung on walls in place of paintings. As if happy to be taken for
a literalist, Stella had said that, in his art, “what you see is what you see.”
The question, Fried argued, is how an artist’s works compel us to see them.
The viewer has no choice but to see a Minimalist’s box-shaped object as an
object shaped like a box. But, he said, the shape of a Stella canvas doesn’t
work that way. Because it reflects the internal pattern of the image, that

70. Frank Stella, Nogaro, 1981. Mixed media on aluminum and fiberglaee
On. 7 in x TOME x 24 in:
 71. Frank Stella, lo sciocco senza paura (#1, 4X), 1984.
Mixed media on etched magnesium, aluminum, and fiberglass /
10 ft. 10% in. x 10 ft. 64 in. x 241% in.

shape is pictorial; it is visual, not just the literal edge of an object. No, the
Minimalists replied. Stella’s stripes map palpable realities. He is one of us.
Fried would not give up. From 1963 to 1967, nearly all his many reviews,
articles, and catalog essays argued at length or in passing that Stella’s images,
no less than Olitski’s, generated a kind of “space accessible to eyesight alone.”
Thus Stella’s ancestor was the good, “optical” Pollock of the Greenbergians,
not the bad, literalizing Pollock of the Minimalists. As Fried and the Mini-
malists struggled for his soul, Stella favored neither side. He was absorbed
in the effort, more successful every season, to heighten the inexplicable clarity
of his art.
In a letter of recommendation written to the Fulbright grant committee
in 1960, Alfred Barr spoke of being “deeply impressed” by Stella’s black
paintings. “I found my eye, as it were, spellbound, held by a mystery,” he
wrote. “To me the paintings express a stubborn, disciplined, even heroic re-
jection of worldly values.” Having seen something unnamable—something
transcendent—in the very simplicity of Stella’s patterns, Barr proposed to the
trustees of the Modern that they acquire a black painting called The Marriage
of Reason and Squalor (1959). The trustees resisted. Castelli had given the
painting a price of twelve hundred dollars. If it were five hundred dollars
236 Weal WANINe OP AV Ele Sw Nels

less, Barr told him, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor could enter the Mod-
ern’s collection without the trustees’ approval. Castelli asked the director
where he would get the money to make the purchase. From his own pocket,
said Barr. Castelli lowered the price to seven hundred dollars, and the paint-
ing was acquired.
Early in 1960, Stella switched from black to aluminum enamel. In the
black paintings, stripes multiply in patterns that fit neatly onto the four-
cornered surface of the canvas. The aluminum stripes were not so accom-
modating. Each had a “jog,” a right-angled break in its ruler-straight form.
As they spread, these stripes left small patches of canvas uncovered. Stella cut
them away. Adjusting canvas to stripes instead of stripes to canvas, he had
made his first shaped paintings. A show of these works opened at Castelli’s
in September 1960, just two and a half years after Johns’s debut.
In Stella’s next series—the copper paintings—entire regions of the surface
vanished, leaving a series of right-angled L, T, and U shapes. Sometimes they
stand alone, sometimes they multiply. Four L’s form a Greek cross; a pair of
U’s back-to-back turn into a bulky H. Stella began with stark deprivations
and carried on by relieving them, one after another. Monochrome gave way
to polychrome; canvases developed extravagantly irregular outlines. Then,
suddenly, Stella set aside his ruler and took up a protractor. Once-straight
lines now curved. Begun in 1967, the Protractor paintings appeared the fol-
lowing year in Washington, D.C.; Bennington, Vermont; Los Angeles; To-
ronto; and London. Turning out canvases at a prodigious rate, Stella fell
behind the demand. Not until 1969 did Castelli have a chance to show a set
of the new paintings.
After a decade of acceleration, Stella’s rate of innovation turned manic.
With paper, felt, and painted canvas pasted to stretched canvas, he recapit-
ulated the geometries of the visionary modernists—Antoine Pevsner, Naum
Gabo, the hard-edged Wassily Kandinsky. Stella exchanged canvas for wood;
for paper and felt he substituted more building materials—Masonite and
Homasote. His collages were turning into low-relief sculptures. By 1975 Stella
was assembling his works from flat shapes made of another new material:
honeycomb aluminum. Streaking, scumbling, and sometimes simply smearing
these metal forms with steamy color, he recalled the brushy New York man-
ner he had resisted with his black stripes of 1959. The forms themselves took
a ready-made extravagance from the French curves of the draftsman’s kit.
As Stella loaded more elements into his constructions, low relief expanded
to high relief and lost all resemblance to collage. He was a sculptor now,
expert in a variety of fabrication processes. Yet he insisted that he had
never ceased to address the fundamental issues of pictorial art. In 1984 he
launched a series featuring cones and pillars. Bearing stripes of graduated
width, these forms make arch reference to academic exercises in perspective.
ieee Si WO@iR PLU Riany 237

They allude as well to the evolution of the column in Western architecture,

and to Cézanne’s remarks on the importance of the cylinder, the sphere, and
the cone. Also, Stella’s latter-day stripes recall those of his early years, when
Fried was trying to rescue him from the orbit of Andre and Judd.
Cantilevered deep into space, the pillars and cones of Stella’s maturity
offered nothing of interest to Fried, who once led the fight for purely “op-
tical” painting. Nor could Judd or Andre, those guardians of clarity and rigor,
feel much affinity for the baroque artist Stella had turned out to be. The
struggle for his soul, long abandoned, had been pointless from the start. Stella
did not enter the sixties poised between the Minimalist sculptors and the
color-field painters; he never would have joined either team. In the moment
of forming his first vague notion of ambitious painting, Stella became an
“Tsolato” as independent as Johns or Pollock.
Though Stella’s striped patterns are locked to the surface of the canvas,
they are only arbitrarily contained by its edges. One thinks of Pollock’s in-
finite, and the thought recurs whenever Stella clutters a work ingeniously
enough to bewilder the eye. Like Pollock, Stella made allover images, but
never with Pollock’s muscular urgency. At first, he restrained his arm. The
black paintings are the work of an ascetic, inventive but unrelentingly strict.
Later, he permitted himself to make sensuous art, but only on the condition
that he work at a remove from his impulses. Since the early seventies, Stella
has been displacing the energies of hand and arm into the mastery of one
advanced manufacturing technique after another.
Focusing as narrowly as he can on matters of form, he still insists that
“what you see is what you see.” Stella’s aesthetic is militantly specialized, in
principle. In practice, his idea of art is as boundless as Pollock’s idea of nature.
And the extravagance of his inventions has for years been suggesting nature’s
plenitude, as his forms and colors, combining and recombining, evolve and
mutate according to rules that also come under evolutionary pressure, one
season after the next. What you see is what you see, but what you sense is
the force of a blind vitality.
=

]
 SZ
As Robert Morris saw them, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings were almost
perfectly inert. They did not swirl with air or light or muscular energy, or
if they did, the effect was residual. Morris approved. Nearly overcoming the
“duality of thing and allusion,” the drip paintings hover at the verge of being
no more nor less than the objects they literally are. With his slabs and columns
and boxes, Morris led art across the literalist verge. To a world built from
ambiguities and outright deceptions, a gray Morris box offers the utterly
reliable truth of its boxiness. By the very candor of its presence, it illuminates
the room—the larger box—containing it.
Having made his boxes and a case for their virtue, Morris felt that he had
settled his relationship to Pollock. What the painter had promised, Morris
had delivered. Then, in 1968, he rethought the lesson of Pollock. It wasn’t
about things, it was about their substance. With this revision, Morris directed
a reproach at his boxes: they had attained unity at the price of a further
“duality”: a split between form and material; a cube “has no inherent relation”
to the wood or metal that makes it palpable, for these materials are not by
nature cubical. Always seeking the essence—or the look of it—Morris an-
nounced that materials should not be forced into geometric shapes. They need
to seek shapes of their own; they must be free to become themselves, like the
paints encrusting a Pollock canvas. Form must become “anti-form.”
Having theorized this development, Morris wanted to administer it. He
persuaded his dealer, Leo Castelli, to let nine young artists do what they liked
with neon and canvas and wire in the Castelli Warehouse, a scruffy building
on West 108th Street. Pollock had splashed paint and inspired critics to talk
of risk. Richard Serra literalized that risk by heating lead to the boiling point
and splashing it along the line where wall met floor. Elsewhere in the Castelli
Warehouse, he spread metal filings into a low-lying heap. Tagged scatter
pieces, anti-forms like these were a favorite alternative to Minimalist objects.
240 THE FATE OF A GESTURE

lh ith *

72. Richard Serra throwing molten lead, 1972. Photograph by Gianfranco

Gorgoni

In 1966 Carl Andre had strewn a floor with small plastic blocks. At the
museum of Cornell University, Morris made his own scatter piece: Thread-
waste (1968), a floorful of garment-shop leavings.
Whatever its material—tangled thread or earth or scraps of felt—a scatter
piece was to be seen as a drip painting relieved of its residual impulse to be
a picture. From his doubts about the Minimalist object, Morris had arrived
at a certainty: a random scattering of materials made a historically necessary
advance on Pollock’s slung paints. Other doubts about the object produced
other assertions about necessity. Say that it is of the essence of the Minimalist
box to be compact. If the box is dubious, its compactness is in question. It
may be of the essence for an artwork not merely to spread like a scatter piece
but to extend itself aggressively through space. At the Castelli Warehouse,
THE QUEST FOR PURITY 241

Bill Bollinger ran a length of chain-link fence from one wall to another;
halfway across the room, a single twist in this new art material produced a
graceful curve.
Another possibility arose from Morris’s revisions. He had argued that it is
of the essence for the art object to be not only compact but simply shaped, a
strong gestalt. If goodness of this sort is in doubt, it follows that the artwork
should be airy and complex—not a good gestalt, easily perceived, but an
object that eludes the eye. Alan Saret demonstrated this logic with clouds of
crumpled chicken wire. These springy, light-catching sculptures looked like
Pollock’s drip paintings in three dimensions. From the premise that any object
of whatever shape is questionable, Robert Huot arrived at the refurbished
room as a work of art. To make a piece called Two Blue Walls (Pratt and
Lambert #5020 Alkyd), Sanded Floor Coated with Polyurethane (1969), he
spruced up a corner of the Paula Cooper Gallery, then offered it as an ex-
hibition in itself.
Vito Acconci had no quarrel with objects. Still, he doubted that the Min-
imalist box was the exemplary object, the possessor of absolute thingness.
Against that claim, he asserted the thingness of his body. Lurking in his
gallery, the Sonnabend, he would wait until a viewer had taken up a position
before a work of art. Then, standing uncomfortably close to this unsuspecting
person, he would impersonate an inanimate object. In Following Piece (1969),
the body-object became ambulatory.
Every day for twenty-three days, Acconci stood on a New York street
corner and chose someone to follow. Making no contact, he’d tag along until
the person entered a private space. Once the exercise lasted for nine hours;
another time, it was over in two minutes. We are to see nothing dramatic,
nothing adventurous, in this conduct, only rules being followed with imper-
sonal precision. Acconci later described the state he entered to execute Fol-
lowing Piece: “J am almost not an ‘T anymore. I put myself in the service of
a scheme.”
One night at Max’s Kansas City in 1970, Acconci spent an hour rubbing
his arm. Acconci the artist was handling Acconci the art object. During his
next performance, he pressed the sharp edges of a bottle cap into his arm,
leaving a series of deep indentations. The artist had inscribed his art object
with a pattern. Another time he sat naked in a gallery—art objects do not
wear clothes—and marked various parts of his body with his teeth. Artists
leave personal imprints on their materials.
Carl Andre said that in planning a sculpture, “I think in terms of a physical
reality, a direct physical hefting of matter.” Suspending his sense of self,
Acconci became the physical matter he hefted, relocated, marked. No one
denied that he dehumanized himself. Yet those who were most in sympathy
with Acconci’s art felt no need to sympathize with him; rather, they felt the
242 WISE tPA (ue JN (GIES WIR te

need not to sympathize, for Acconci did not intend his behavior to be ex-
pressive. During all his performances, his face remained deader than deadpan.
Presenting himself as an object with a certain form, he offered his boredom
and pain as phenomena with forms of their own. In a piece called Claim
(1971), physical pain modulated to anxiety. At the foot of a flight of basement
stairs, Acconci sat blindfolded, brandishing lead pipes and threatening to stop
anyone who tried to gain entry to the basement. A video monitor brought
his voice and his image to viewers at the head of the stairway. With melo-
dramatic flair, Acconci enacted the idea that we all guard with unrelenting
vigilance our buffers of personal space.
He has said that, upon arriving in the art world from the world of the
New York poets, he found himself in “a field that (as far as I and other
members of my generation saw it) had no life of its own, no prescriptions of
its own, no inherent characteristics of its own, a field that existed only as it
imported from other fields in the world.” Acconci’s earliest works displaced
Minimalist traits from objects to his body. Works like Claim brought the
concepts of behavioral psychology from the clinic to the world of art.
With Space Completion Ideas (1969), a whimsical variation on an intelligence
test, Donald Burgy cast himself as a cognitive psychologist and the viewer as
his subject. The graph-paper chart Agnes Denes drew up in 1970—Dialectic
Triangulation: A Visual Philosophy into Symbolic Logic—claims a place for her
among the philosophical descendants of Alfred North Whitehead and Ber-
trand Russell. Other artists imported bits of linguistic philosophy or math.
They mimicked scientists and technicians, sociologists and demographers.
In 1969 an artist named Hans Haacke presented visitors to the Milwaukee
Art Center with a questionnaire which ranged from family matters—‘“What
is your marital status?” —to politics—“Assuming that you were Indochinese,
would you sympathize with the Saigon regime?” Responses were tabulated
from time to time and posted in the art center’s galleries. At the Museum of
Modern Art’s Information show, Haacke posed another question: “Would
the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s In-
dochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in December?” Again,
poll results were periodically posted, though no record of them re-
mains.
One January day in 1970, Peter Hutchinson threw 450 pounds of bread
into the Paricutin volcano, south of Guadalajara. He hoped the bread would
grow a forest of mold and thus “juxtapose a microorganism against a mac-
rocosmic landscape.” It did. This contrast of very small and very large was
answered by the contrast between the very old landscape of the Mexican
plateau and the very new—molten—landscape still bubbling in the pit of
Paricutin. Hutchinson’s volcano piece cast him as an antic combination of
geographer and historian.
Miele CUTEST FOR PURI 243

The previous year, Robert Barry had impersonated a science teacher, the
kind that likes to show his students the principles of physics in action. Re-
leasing a vial of argon at the ocean front in Santa Monica, he let the gas go
“from measured volume to indefinite expansion,” as he said, in the language
of textbooks. The argon was invisible in its vial, so its dispersion had to be
taken on faith. “It continues to expand forever, constantly changing,” said
Barry, “and it does all of this without anybody being able to see it.” In this
notional infinite is a memory of Pollock’s dripped imagery, which is, in prin-
ciple, unbounded.
Another link joins Pollock to Barry and to all the artists who spent the
late sixties and early seventies inventing alternatives to the Minimalist box.
To advance beyond this totemic object, each adapted for idiosyncratic use a
corollary of Morris’s anti-form theory, which defines Pollock as a painter only
slightly interested in painting. His larger interest, said Morris, was in an
“investigation of means:°tools, methods of making, nature of material.” To
advance was to position oneself as a successor to Pollock the empiricist. It
became common to talk of art as an “investigative activity.” The Minimalists
had presented the simple facts of simple forms. The successors presented
complex facts of whatever sort seemed interesting. The art world became a
stage where artists played parts ranging from Burgy’s psychologist to Accon-
ci’s psychopath waving a lead pipe in a downtown basement.
 ‘ Nes Me be SN

3. Robert Morris, Observatory, 1971-77. Earth, wood, granite, steel, and

water, 298 ft. 7 in. diameter.
 Sie
Early in April 1970, Robert Morris installed an immense jumble of timbers
and concrete blocks on the third floor of the Whitney Museum. At the end
of the month, President Nixon announced in a nationwide broadcast that the
United States had invaded Cambodia; moreover, he said, resistance to the
American presence in Vietnam required him to draft an additional 150,000
soldiers into the armed forces. College students launched protests on campuses
across the country. When protesters set fire to the ROTC building at Kent
State University in Ohio, the National Guard was called in. On May 4, a
detachment of guardsmen fired on a crowd, killing four and wounding nine.
Like many others, Morris saw in this murderous incident an allegory of the
nation’s quickening decline.
His first response was to insist that the Whitney close his exhibition three
weeks early. The press learned of this demand when the museum did. Next,
Morris informed the trustees of the Whitney that the three suddenly empty
weeks in the museum’s schedule must be filled by war protests. Also, the
trustees were to join with their counterparts at other institutions in seeking
to make their programs and policies less oppressive to artists and their au-
diences. If these instructions were not followed, Morris warned, the world
would learn that the Whitney trustees condoned repression in all its forms,
including militarism. Though the museum closed Morris’s show as directed,
his other demands were dismissed.
On May 18, 1970, a day after the Morris exhibition ended, fifteen hundred
members of the art world met at the Loeb Student Center of New York
University to plan demonstrations against the war. Morris, Carl Andre, and
others addressed the crowd. Nominations for chairperson were made. The
vote went to Morris and a young artist named Poppy Johnson. Under their
guidance, it was resolved that ten percent of all monies paid for works of art
would go into a fund for promoting peace; artists occupying galleries and
246 TUE reASE eOlr aAw Gite SanUiRae

museums would “politicize” visitors; and on the coming Friday, May 22,
artists opposed to the war would go on strike, demanding that museums and
galleries close for the day. Klauss Kertess, of the Bykert Gallery, announced
that he and other dealers would allow information about the peace movement
to be distributed on their premises.
That Friday, the Whitney and the Jewish Museum kept their doors closed.
The Guggenheim and the Modern waived their admission fees. Only the
Metropolitan tried to ignore the artists’ strike, and so it was to the Met that
Morris led a contingent of demonstrators. A line of policemen blocked their
entry. As a standoff developed, a crowd of would-be visitors formed. The
artists distributed broadsides listing their demands. The Metropolitan’s ad-
ministrators issued a counterbroadside stating that, despite their sympathy
with the protesters’ wish for peace, they thought it best to let art be seen and
“work its salutary effect on the minds and spirits of all of us.” A few members
of the museum’s staff joined in the protest. By midafternoon, some of the
original protesters had wandered away. The rest split into incompatible fac-
tions. Thoroughly inconclusive, the artists’ strike against art museums was
never repeated, and Morris’s career as a political leader was over.
In 1971 he reappeared on the coastal flats of Holland as the boss of a crew
at work on a large outdoor structure called Odservatory. Its high wall of
timber, earth, and stone curved into a circle two hundred thirty-three feet in
diameter. Slots in the wall established sightlines to sunrise at the two solstices,
summer and winter, and to sunrise and sunset at the equinoxes. Observatory
was a Minimalist sculpture enlarged and aligned to the solar system. A year
later, Morris was back in New York making graphite-on-paper rubbings of
surfaces in his studio—sections of woodwork, a patch of wall, and the like.
Rubbing is a kind of “automation,” he had written in 1970. Find the right
method, and “the work makes itself” because “the artist has stepped aside
for more of the world to enter into the art.” That, said Morris, is what Pollock
had done when he flung his paints; letting their viscosity and gravity deter-
mine the image, he, too, automated the process of making art. Morris’s Pol-
lock is not a hero of willfulness who disperses himself throughout an infinite
of his own devising. Instead, he abases his will before the will of his material,
and this abasement is what makes him heroic. As Morris rubbed his paper,
he could watch the image appear without having to shape it. He made his
next set of works—the Blind Time Drawings (1973)—by closing his eyes and
smearing powdered graphite onto paper with his fingers. Usually, drawing is
a collaboration between vision and touch. Here, touch did all the work. And
in the blind turns of the labyrinth Morris built in 1974, the viewer had the
opportunity to put touch in vision’s place.
For that year’s show at the Castelli Gallery, Morris installed a work named
Voice. From behind four blank screens, eight loudspeakers broadcast an array
 lige OWE Si (OR PUR ITY 247

of speaking voices to listeners seated on boxes covered with white felt. Sculp-
ture had become furniture, and the artist’s prose was now wave after over-
lapping wave of only occasionally intelligible sound. The poster for this show
pictures Morris from the waist up, naked and bearded. He wears dark aviator
glasses and a Nazi helmet. His muscles are flexed and glistening; manacles
bind his wrists; chains fall from the manacles. It is a portrait of the artist as
an S&M pinup. With this image, Morris confessed to a previously unacknowl-
edged impulse in Minimalist art.
Seeking a perfect fit between idea and object, a Minimalist tries to exert
control in two realms, the conceptual and the physical. The more nearly
absolute his control, the better his work. Innocently, we might assume that
a Minimalist’s absolutism affects only him and his art. Morris’s portrait of
himself in Nazi headgear suggests that we widen our view. A Minimalist
wants to bring the audience under control as well by presenting it with objects
that permit only one legitimate response. To be a proper member of Mini-
malism’s audience, one must submit one’s perceptions, one’s bodily sense,
one’s idea of aesthetic legitimacy to the dictates of the artist. Giving in utterly,
one becomes a gallery-going equivalent to a masochist in the hands of a sadist.
With his manacles, Morris argued that the sadist, too, is imprisoned by dom-
ination’s rituals.

The poster for Robert Morris’s Voice appeared in April 1974. In November,
Artforum published a color photograph of the sculptor Lynda Benglis in the
nude. Her skin looks well tanned and liberally oiled. Slim yet decidedly
feminine, she has assumed a hip-slung pose with back arched—a sexy con-
trapposto. Her hair is short and slicked back. On her lips a pout is becoming
a sneer, and there is a hint of Lolita in the white-rimmed sunglasses that
hide her eyes. From Benglis’s crotch extends a long and meticulously detailed
dildo, held in place with her right hand.
This picture appeared in the front of the issue, as an advertisement for the
artist's show at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Farther along was an essay on
Benglis by Robert Pincus-Witten, then an associate editor of Artforum. The
following month, the other associate editors—Lawrence Alloway, Max Koz-
loff, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck, Annette Michelson—published a let-
ter to the editor in chief, John Coplans, to let the art world know how deeply
they had been offended by the “extreme vulgarity” of Benglis’s picture.
It “made a shabby mockery” of “the movement for women’s liberation,”
they said. They called it an effort of “self-promotion . . . in the most debased
sense of the term,” thus an “exploitation” of the art-world audience and larger
public. Noting that one must always be on guard against “complicity” with
the marketplace, the editors declared that vigilance would have done no good
in this instance. Behind their backs, others at Artforum had made a shameful
248 Tite (PAULEMOle “ANGiE SmROits

74. Robert Morris, Untitled, 1974.

Poster for an exhibition entitled Voice.
Offset lithograph on paper, 36% x
27/8 Wie

deal to publish a completely unacceptable photograph. Though the error was

not their fault, the editors felt obliged to renounce it and to assure their
readers that in future they would bring “critical analysis” to bear on the
conditions that allowed this outrage to occur.
Benglis’s picture would unsettle anyone not fixated on precisely this mix
of sexual attributes: gorgeously female body, boyish haircut, super-masculine
phallus. The editors’ displeasure arrived on schedule, as expected. Still, it was
a mild shock to see how determined they were to feel nothing but displeasure,
disgust, indignation. A few months later, Robert Rosenblum wrote to Art-
forum with a proposal: “Let’s give three dildos and a Pandora’s Box to Ms.
Lynda Benglis, who finally brought out of the closet the Sons and Daughters
of the Founding Fathers of the Artforum Committee on Public Decency and
Ladies’ Etiquette. Too bad they weren’t around to protest when Dada and
Surrealism let those arty people run amok and do all those unspeakably
vulgar things.”
Many besides Rosenblum believed that the Artforum editors had taken a
run at Benglis, theoretical lances at the ready, and completely—hilariously—
missed her. Their aim might have been better if they had listened to the bits
hid BOWESTM EOR SPUR WN. 249

75. lynda Benglis, advertisement in Artforum, November 1974.

of the artist’s conversation that pop up in Pincus-Witten’s article. Art in New

York, says Benglis, is “all about territory,” so there is only one pertinent
question: “How big?” How big is the zone you capture and occupy with
your painting, your floor sculpture, your video piece, your public persona?
How powerful is the image that establishes your presence?
To the perennial question How big?, Benglis’s dildo gave a literal response:
This big. Ironic in her literalism, she mocked the bigness she flaunted. Eyes
bulging with horror, Artforum’s editors saw the bigness but missed the mock-
ery. Eyes averted, they gave a censorious recital of proper thoughts about
feminism, the market, and the standards of decorum that are supposed to
keep self-promotion under control.
The charges against Benglis did no damage to her already successful career.
The advertisement in Artforum was self-promotional, yes, and crass, of course.
It was shamelessly vulgar. Nonetheless, it was not merely crass, not merely
vulgar. But no one could say exactly why not. The dazzle and the bizarre
innocence of her picture teased earnest thought into doubts about its prowess.
Benglis flourished in a shimmer of misconceptions. Seen now, her self-portrait
with dildo gives her the look of an idol, the limber kind that joins contraries
into happy unions. She is male and female, grotesque and comely, enraged
and seductive, an aesthete and a political agitator. The art world couldn't
make much sense of an image that reached across so many categories, and
certain details were too obscure to be grasped.
250 THE RATEROIE ARG smu:

76. lynda Benglis, Totem, 1971. Pigmented polyurethane foam, overall dimen-
SIONS» LOX OO x Zoeth

Only recently did Benglis explain what she meant by the sunglasses with
cat’s-eye frames that she wears in the Artforum photograph. “They were sup-
posed to refer to Martha Mitchell,” she says, referring to the wife of Richard
Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell. “In 1974 everything about Watergate
was coming out, and Martha was doing a lot of the talking. They couldn’t
shut her up, so she became sort of a role model for me.” Benglis wanted to
uncover awkward truths.
As she saw it, American art in the seventies was still a “heroic, macho,
sexist game.” Was Benglis willing to play? Her gargantuan dildo answered
that question and others too. How much respect did she feel for the New
York art world’s ideal of calm gray decorum? Not much. Was she fully
committed to abstract form? It seemed not. Mainly, her dildo gave a measure
of her ambition. If American art was a “macho, sexist game,” she would play
it aggressively. Spreading latex on the floor in uncontained pools, she imper-
sonated the pissing, ejaculating Jackson Pollock of legend. Thickening her
Wels CME Si OU IPI? 55 |

material, dying it with Day-Glo colors, she made big layered sculptures that
looked like heaps of shiny dung left on gallery floors by cartoon creatures.
She was messing about with sticky stuff, as children do in the first years of
their lives, before gender is fully settled. Macho games became infantile fun.
Next she built armatures out from the gallery wall and covered them with
massive slatherings of polyurethane foam. Solidifying as it slid toward the
floor, the foam assumed shapes that whispered of bat wings, Spanish moss
dripping from branches, and slithery reptilian creatures. These sculptures
gave Benglis the feeling that “they were looking back at me.” And they
reached into the room wildly, as if the artist’s flung color had evolved the
power to fling itself at her, and at us. The wall pieces were like predators
frozen in midleap and waiting, still alive, to complete their trajectories.
Gesturing, Benglis had conjured up responses to her own gestures. A circle
had been closed and she saw no point in retracing it. She needed to “find a
new form,” she says. “I didn’t know how to go about it. When I experimented
in the studio, I had no idea of what I was doing.” She pinned bunting to a
wall in various patterns. She painted it. No satisfactory results appeared.
Nearby stood a cluster of African sculptures. Tall and thin, they suggested
that she roll her wide strips of bunting into long tubes. She did, giving the
tubes skeletal support with rolls of window screening. After knotting the
tubes, she dusted the knots with sparkles, painted them with brushes, sprayed
them with metallic pigments. These sculptures are like torsos elongated untl
they have the flexibility of arms and legs.
Benglis rolled, pleated, and knotted cotton fabric, chicken wire, and sheet
metal. Encrusted in plaster or cast in bronze, her sculptures resemble pieces
of clothing shed in a hurry. The curviest ones evoke corsets, though they
look less like devices for shaping the body than images of the body shaped
by the artist’s desires—and her sense of her desirability. Intricately wrought,
glistening with luxurious patinas, Benglis’s bronzes are hyperresponsive to the
light. They seem watchful and ravenously receptive, or somnolent, as if lost
in their own voluptuous involutions. The sober objects of the Minimalists
deny their own appeal, and this denial is what makes them appealing to a
certain taste. Casual about proprieties, Benglis shapes objects that grab our
attention and hold it caressingly. This frankness about the wish to seduce is
what makes it difficult for the art world to be entirely at ease with her.
Benglis’s reputation has been erratic, yet over the seasons she has become a
fixture in standard accounts of her generation.
Mocking male aggression, cavorting at the borders of taste, denouncing the
boom of the eighties as empty manipulation, Benglis is audacious. Always,
though, her audacity is well considered. She would never have published her
self-portrait with dildo if a precedent for it had not been set by Morris’s
portrait of himself in helmet and chains, master of the gamut running from
DOW, Lint BATE SO Re Awm Giz oun UiRvE

dominance to submission. Soon after that image appeared, he executed a series

of twelve drawings that diagram in crisp black and white The Realm ofthe
Carceral (1978), a zone where forms themselves enforce absolute control over
perception and behavior.
The coercive architecture of Morris’s “Realm” evolved from the paintings
of Morris’s Pollock, a literalist whose art permits only one correct reading.
Benglis’s Pollock is playful, a supplier of liberating precedents, and her self-
portrait defined her as a generous being of extravagantly versatile sexuality
—ready for anything, even a confrontation with the rigid, territorial male
implied by so much New York art. Benglis never dismissed her opposition.
Instead, she gave its premises new birth. What had been hopelessly macho
was now female—shamelessly, and unashamedly, too.
 34
Benglis had asked, How big? This question nagged all the artists struggling
to insert themselves in the tradition that began with the immensities of Pol-
lock, Newman, and Still. The usual answer was: The bigger the better. When
Robert Barry liberated a vial of argon on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, he
invited the imagination to follow its dispersion through the world’s atmo-
sphere. This work was as big as all outdoors, literally. In 1969 Robert Morris
proposed that heaters and air conditioners, the largest available, be buried
here and there in a square mile of undeveloped land. “One could wander
around,” he said, “and come upon these local changes in temperature—a cold
wind blowing out of an otherwise still tree or stones radiating heat.” Had
the project been funded, weather stirred up in a rural neighborhood would
have flowed into regional currents and onward, to join continental and even-
tually global patterns. And Morris had meshed the structure of his Observatory
with the motions of the solar system.
The example of Pollock and his generation dictated grandiosity. The mo-
ment recommended modesty. With America laying waste to Vietnam, the
artist of good conscience would of course be reluctant to send metal monu-
ments soaring into the air. Carl Andre was the first to gauge the moral credit
that would accrue to a male sculptor who deployed horizontal form. For a
show called Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, Andre stretched a
line of 137 bricks across the floor. Quizzed by David Bourdon, the artist
explained that he was “putting Brancusi’s Endless Column on the ground
instead of in the sky. Most sculpture is priapic with the male organ in the
air. In my work, Priapus is down on the floor. The engaged position is to
run along the earth.” In 1968 Andre placed 183 bales of hay end to end on
the campus of Windham College in Vermont; for him, sculpture must crouch
and scamper, or burrow into the ground.
Dennis Oppenheim said that, as the sixties ended, “I found myself trying
254 PE PAE (Ol AmGibsouhUihis

to get below ground level. Because I wasn’t very excited about objects which
protrude from the ground. I felt this implied an embellishment of external
space ... an unnecessary addition to what could be a sufficient space in itself.
My transition to earth materials took place in Oakland a few summers ago,
when I cut a wedge from the side of a mountain. I was more concerned with
the negative process of excavating that shape from the mountainside than
with making an earthwork as such.” Oppenheim had induced the art object
to vanish, leaving only a place—an art place.
Consulting a map of North America, he noticed that a long stretch of the
Saint John River has two chores: to separate Maine from Quebec and to mark
the international date line. In the winter of 1968, he incised three miles of
this double boundary in the frozen surface of the river. During the warm
months of the late sixties and early seventies, he planted grain in furrows
that followed the topographical contours drawn by map makers. Moving over
the earth, the work of art measures it off; and the work claims what it
measures, adding it to the realm of the aesthetic.
In Nevada, Michael Heizer scarred the desert floor with a motorcycle. His
tracks were drawings, he said. The desert had become an outsize sheet of
heavily textured paper. With earth-moving equipment, he made drawings of
another sort—shallow trenches over a hundred feet long. Shoveling heaps
of dirt from the back of a moving truck, he produced scatter pieces. “The
museums and collections are stuffed,” he said in 1969. “The floors are sagging,
but the real space exists.” According to Heizer, Pollock’s example required
artists to reject the art world. The drip paintings are “environmental,” Heizer
says. “They imply a continuum. The only way to work with that implication
was to get outside the centralized, rigidified structures of art.”
Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-70) is a pair of notches cut into the edge
of a plateau that curves through the southern tip of Nevada. Each notch is
fifty feet deep and thirty feet wide, and they face each other, in precise
alignment, across an immense gap. Imagine a beam more than fifteen hun-
dred feet long, fifty by thirty feet in cross section. This object would fit snugly
into the notches of Double Negative. Even if it could be fabricated, it would
not, of course, fit inside a gallery. It could never become a commodity. In the
desert, Heizer found an America untouched by commerce. That innocence
made it seem real.
Among Heizer’s relatives are geologists who passed along to him their
understanding of the bureaucracies that grant leases to uninhabited land in
the western states. In 1968 he helped Walter De Maria find a site in the
Mojave Desert for an outdoor piece: two lines of chalk running parallel for
a mile. A year later, De Maria directed a bulldozer to scrape four half-mile-
long lines in the floor of a valley in Nevada. The lines formed a square
oriented to the points of the compass.
[pl Ea FOREST © Res PUTRI TINY. 255.

For most sculptors, the foot is the basic unit of measurement. Oppenheim,
Heizer, and De Maria liked to think in miles. Because they are all New York
artists quick to claim descent from Pollock and his generation, their works
cannot be described merely as large. These artists took Pollock’s expansive
impulse as their premise and exaggerated it past the point where any scale
of measurement applies. Oppenheim’s outdoor works melted away in the
spring or washed away in the late summer rains. Some of De Maria’s and
Heizer’s were more permanent, like scars left by wounds. Yet those scars are
nearly invisible now, a quarter ofa century after they were made. Earthworks
tend to dissolve into the earth. Often, the only remnant of the earthworker’s
effort is the idea that drove him over the ground in what Andre called “the
engaged position.”
Since 1972 Heizer has lived in the Nevada desert, three hours north of
Las Vegas, on the site of a four-part work in progress called City. The first
part, Complex One, was finished in 1976. Built of earth, rock, and metal beams,
it is one hundred forty feet long and nearly twenty-four feet high. Though
he describes its trapezoidal shape as an echo of ancient monuments in the
Old World and the New, he does not object vehemently if it is compared to
a Minimalist sculpture. On site, says the artist,

You realize that the work is a place that has been made out of a place,
an extremely large one. Size is the issue. In European art, which is
basically decorative, there is scale. American art is always working be-
yond scale to size. In Complex One there is none of the relationship, the
ratio of object to setting, that produces scale. It is the size it is. This is
what makes it real, makes it modern, makes it pure.

Complex Two, an immense wedge of earth and rock, is still under con-
struction. When the other two parts of City are finished, the work will occupy
sixteen acres. Occasionally, Heizer scales his work down to the space of a
gallery. With his New York exhibitions, he confronts the art world with new
sculptures—craggy demonstrations showing that even if art must accom-
modate itself to an urban interior now and then, it is under no obligation to
feel comfortable there.
De Maria’s presence in the city has been steadier and ghostlier. Though
one hardly ever sees him, his Broken Kilometer (1979) has been on view since
1979 at 393 West Broadway, one of several premises the Dia Center for the
Arts maintains in New York for the display of major works in its collection.
Within, an even flow of light reveals immaculately chromed metal rods lying
on the polyurethaned floor in five long rows. Laid end to end, these rods
would measure off a kilometer. In the depths of this space, which viewers
are not permitted to enter, the kilometer’s fragments blur and become un-
256 TEE EARE Ol Aw GE SrEUikgs

countable. The idea of a kilometer, of measurement itself, becomes vague.

De Maria’s one-mile lines of chalk could have gone on for many more miles.
Broken, his kilometer at least alludes to the infinite, and the allusion gains
strength from the shrinelike calm of 393 West Broadway.
Like Heizer, De Maria has an occasional gallery exhibition in New York.
His metal objects are shiny and slim, and even the most blandly Minimalist
ones look faintly sinister to those who remember his show at the Dwan
Gallery in 1969. To enter this exhibition, one had to sign a form releasing
Dwan from all liability for personal injury. Inside lay five slabs of stainless
steel, each about six and a half feet long by three and a half feet wide—a
good size for an ascetic’s bed. From the first slab rose three ten-inch spikes,
needle-sharp and evenly spaced. Fifteen spikes rose from the second slab,
increasingly more from the third and the fourth, and the fifth bristled with
spikes, like a geometric and extremely angry hedgehog. Richard Serra’s
splashed lead had made literal the notion that radical art puts the artist at
risk. With his Beds of Spikes (1968-69), De Maria literalized the corollary:
radical art poses a risk to the viewer as well.

77. ‘Nalter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979. 500 brass rods, each
6 ft. 6 in. in length; overall dimensions: 125 x 45 ft.
nik QUE Sm OR VUIT Y. PLE

78. Walter De Maria, The lightning Field, 1977. 400 nes poles,
average height: 20 ft. 71% in.; overall dimensions: 5,280 x 3,300 ft.

In 1974 De Maria began the project of enlarging the fifth Bed of Spikes to
an outdoor piece. The spikes were to become poles tall enough to draw
lightning from the sky. First he planted thirty-five of them in the desert near
Flagstaff, Arizona. Three years later, four hundred poles spread in a gridded
pattern across a stretch of western New Mexico, not far from the Arizona
line. They stand in a valley that looks flat from a distance but isn’t. To bring
their tips into an even plane, the poles vary in height from fifteen to twenty-
six feet. The work is called The Lightning Field (1974-77).
Stabbed into the ground, the four hundred gigantic spikes also stab the
sky. Here, one might say, are four hundred phallic forms in rigid formation.
Yet the entire pattern, a mile long by a kilometer wide and only about twenty
feet high, lies as low in the desert as an Andre piece on a gallery floor. The
gigantic spikes are puny against the afternoon sky. Photographs usually show
the work at night, with a lightning bolt and its tributaries, a riverine flow of
white fire, reaching down from the zenith to the pattern of poles. These
258 THE PATTIES OR Aw Gir
Si WIRE

images bring Pollock’s drip paintings to mind: what the painter did with his
arm, the earth artist does with massive systems of violent weather.
In his notes, De Maria points out that “the observed ratio of lightning
storms which pass over the sculpture has been approximately 3 per 30 days
during the lightning season,” which lasts from May to September. Fireworks
are rare. “Light,” says De Maria, “is as important as lightning.” He expects
visitors to stay for at least twenty-four hours, to watch the poles catch the
angled light of dawn, disappear in the glare of day, then reappear at sunset.
Each pole stands two hundred twenty feet from the next. To walk into The
Lightning Field is to see it vanish. Aggrandized by De Maria, Minimalism
lost its command of literal fact. His notes remark on the reality of the
invisible.
Heizer talked of the “peaceful, religious space” of the West. Robert Smith-
son, the other pioneer earthworker, had his own brand of spirituality—melo-
dramatic, morbid, and always mindful of art-world precedent. He built Spiral
Jetty (1970) on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. In an essay on the
labor of making a film about the piece, Smithson wrote that his “sight was
saturated by the color of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pump-
ing into ruby currents, no, they were veins and arteries sucking up the obscure
sediments. My eyes became combustion chambers, churning orbs of blood
blazing by the light of the sun. All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere;
I thought of Jackson Pollock’s Eyes in the Heat.”
 aS
Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1938. During his first
ten years, he lived in Rutherford, then moved with his family to Clifton.
These are suburban towns in a bleak, shapeless zone which left Smithson
with the conviction that traditional sentiments about the American land are
“rinky-dink .. . Mickey Mouse. . . . People of my generation have grown up
in the industrial blight, and it’s not like rustic woodland that we remember.”
There were, nonetheless, picturesque vistas and sublime panoramas to visit.
When Smithson was still in grade school, he would plot the family’s va-
cation trips. One took them west on the Pennsylvania turnpike, up to the
Black Hills and Badlands of the Dakotas, on to Yellowstone National Park,
across to the redwood forests of northern California, down the Pacific coast,
and back to the Grand Canyon. As Smithson said much later, “It made a
big impression on me. I used to give these little post card shows. . . . I’d set
up a little booth and cut a hole in it and . . . show all the kids all these post
cards.”
After the family moved to Clifton, Robert’s father built him an array of
shelves and cages in the basement of their new house. Smithson called it his
museum. A snapshot shows a cowboy boot and a miniature tepee standing
side by side. On the wall nearby, he tacked a school pennant. His museum’s
main attractions were fossils, shells, and live reptiles. In high school, he de-
cided to become a naturalist. Manhattan first attracted him with its American
Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. He admired the mu-
seum’s paintings of the earth in the days of the dinosaurs, and it occurred to
him also that he might make a living as an illustrator. Smithson was good
at drawing.
In 1955 he applied for and won a scholarship to the Art Students League.
He was by now a junior at Clifton High School, bored with classwork and
at odds with his art teacher. The principal at Clifton arranged for Smithson
260 Tian AVE AOle VAN GS Exon WKS

to spend afternoons at the League. His subjects included cartooning, life

drawing, and painting. Through classmates, he got to know students at the
High School of Music and Art. He met Richard Bellamy, the director of the
Hansa Gallery, and others with links to the New York art world. Soon
Smithson had conceived a grand ambition: he would be an artist, not an
illustrator, and he would not limit himself to visual images. Many avant-
garde painters had been serious writers, he discovered. He, too, would write.
In the late fifties, Smithson moved to New York and learned the art-world
rounds. Like Leo Castelli and Thomas B. Hess, he saw Jasper Johns’s Green
Target at the Jewish Museum in 1957. He knew of Rauschenberg’s combines
and Allan Kaprow’s Happenings. Not fully settled in the city, he often went
with a friend on long hitchhiking trips through the Southwest. A jaunt to
Mexico led to a few days in jail for vagrancy. To support himself in Man-
hattan, he worked in a bookstore; he taught art at the Police Athletic League.
Moving from apartment to loft to apartment, Smithson produced art at high
volume.
Certain of his early paintings look like glib illustrations of themes that had
obsessed him since his first visits to the American Museum of Natural His-
tory: time, death, sexuality, damnation, the state of being monstrous. In
Smithson’s iconography, the museum’s dinosaurs stood for all that and more.
As a teenager in art class, Smithson had displayed a graceful touch with a
pencil. Now he was bearing down on the canvas with an awkward, over-
loaded brush. Big topics collided with homages to major figures in the history
of New York art. Purgatory (1959) shows creatures reminiscent of Pollock’s
She-Wolf entangled with vertical stripes that Smithson later said he borrowed
from Barnett Newman. Unable to get a good fit between style and his pon-
derous, interlocked subjects, Smithson wandered through widely separated
realms of reading matter. He would leap from Ad Reinhardt’s satires on the
art world, which he saw in Artnews, to books on dinosaurs to the nouveau
roman of Michel Butor.
The art critic Bill Berkson remembers Smithson at the Cedar bar in the
early sixties. “He had the look of a brooder,” says Berkson. “Always alone,
never talking to anyone.” Smithson was in his early twenties then, not yet
firmly connected to the art scene. He became a talker at Max’s Kansas City,
where he had the stature of a star, though not a brightly shimmering one.
Smithson was tall and somewhat gangling, with large features in a face that
seemed at once wide and compressed from above, narrowing his forehead
and forcing his eyebrows into a scowl. When he wasn’t talking, his lips were
set in a tense line. The grain of his being was morose.
Setting aside his brushes, he took up a fine-tipped pen to draw floating,
muscular figures with two sets of ancestors: the superheroes of action comic
books and the gods of William Blake’s invented theology. Smithson had no
hale CUUNES 1 THOR (PURI 261

reluctance to put low commercial art on a par with the illuminated poems
of Blake. After all, his other favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, had mixed any number
of modes and manners in The Waste Land (1922). Smithson liked clashes of
style, disparities of tone, any mismatch that interrupts the smooth flow of
imagery and leaves doubt in its wake. He was arriving at the suspicion that
there were no truths, only fictions lively enough to feel compelling. He found
these everywhere, in high art and lowly genres of the novel, in major poetry
and in the Hollywood movies he watched in the second-run theaters of Forty-
second Street with an artist named Nancy Holt.
In 1963 Smithson and Holt married and moved into an apartment on
Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. By Smithson’s reckoning, the next
year marks the start of his career as a mature artist. He had found a way to
induce a work of art to inspire doubt instead of trust. The Eliminator (1964)
suspends four zigzag tubes of red neon between two sheets of mirrored glass.
The reflections of the neon are as vivid as the neon itself; or the neon looks
as insubstantial as its reflection. This is a sculpture engaged in a kind of
picturing. Or is it a picture dependent on a sculptural element? It is not clear
what is what or why, and as The Eliminator flashes on and off at irregular
intervals, you feel a slight chronometric disruption. As Smithson said, “The
Eliminator is a clock that doesn’t keep time, but loses it.”
In his next sculptures, mirrors mirror mirrors, and the eye is of course
confounded. Though the dazzle of these objects gives them the slightly seedy
air of a magician’s sleight of hand, their designs originated in sober facts
about the structure of crystals—bits of science Smithson gathered from his
reading. The growth of a crystal follows no familiar, organic rhythms. Its
form is geometric but not haunted by Euclid or the canons of correct pro-
portion. Ruminating on crystals, Smithson felt himself breaking free of
history—art history, in particular—yet his freedom did not alienate him from
the art world. He found that his preoccupation with angular form gave him
affinities with the Minimalists.
In 1965 he met them all: Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Robert
Morris, Dan Flavin. Before the year had ended, they were his friends. But
he was not one of them. The Minimalists offered their objects as unimpeach-
able embodiments of a clear idea: box, grid, pillar. Smithson was too skeptical
to believe in a perfect fit between a name and the thing it names. Yet the
Minimalists’ friendship had tactical value. He needed to find a way of praising
their art. Also, he had to condemn it, for he was always true to his doubts.
Smithson’s solution to this dilemma was wonderfully duplicitous and brave,
for he presented it openly in an essay called “Entropy and the New Monu-
ments” (1966).
The Minimalists, he explained, were devotees of “mistakes and dead-ends”
who fully intended the “vapidity and dullness” of their art. Repetitive without
Zoe, THE PATE On Ag Gi Se Uines

purpose, these artists have affinities with the forces that produced “slurbs,
urban sprawl, and the infinite number of housing developments of the post-
war boom.” Minimalist objects “are not built for the ages, but rather against
the ages,” he wrote. “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old
monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.” Thus
they come to rest, inertly, in Smithson’s grim present. He had commandeered
Minimalism as decor for his mood. And he borrowed Minimalist geometry
to make Plunge, the ten-part metal sculpture he showed at the Dwan Gallery
in 1966.
The ten units stand in an orderly row. Angular, stepped, and identical in
shape, they range in height from fourteen and a half to nineteen inches. This
work disconcerts by playing a double game, at once supporting and under-
mining the habits of the eye. From each of the sculpture’s ten parts one takes
a firm sense of its volume and proportion. The eye is reassured. Uneasiness
sets in with a scan of the series, for simplicity does not govern the relations
between the sculpture’s parts. Their sizes vary at the bidding of equations
using squared factors, with results that run counter to the eye’s expectations.
From one angle, the elements of Plunge seem to zoom into the distance too
quickly—thus the title of the piece. Reverse the viewpoint and Plunge no
longer plunges. It appears to back up against space, as if the usual effects of
perspective have been stalled.
With Plunge and the three Alogon pieces he made in 1966, Smithson argued
that Minimalist form need not establish a clear and untroubled relation be-
tween objects and ideas. Encouraging geometry’s secret aptitude for obscurity,
his art takes the audience to zones where systems fail to make the sense they
promise, and eventually fail even to make promises. Smithson gloated over
those failures.
His 1969 show at the Dwan Gallery featured Nonsites, bins filled with
material collected in the places mapped by the documents he mounted on the
gallery walls. The thirty-one steel compartments of A Nonsite, Pine Barrens,
New Jersey (1968) contained sand from the wide patch of terrain represented
by the six-sided map accompanying the piece. As the artist noted in a wall
label, “Tours between the Nonsite and the site are possible.” Though few
made these treks, the Nonsites made their point: the walls of a gallery may
enclose the body of an artwork, but its mind wanders at large.
On a trip to Sanibel, an island off the west coast of Florida, Smithson
placed a row of eleven mirrors at water’s edge. Facing out to sea, addressing
themselves to immensities of water and light, they formed no link with the
enclosed spaces of the art world. The artist’s name for works like these was
“mirror displacements.” As memory can charge the present with the past, so
a sheet of reflective glass can capture fragments of sky and landscape and
disrupt the even flow of space. From disruptions like these come ambiguities
i EGNOS Ti OR SPOR Tay. 263

of vision and thought, puzzles of the kind that the Minimalists tried to pre-
vent. If audiences were to be persuaded for even a few seasons that the
Minimalist object had attained clarity, it had to stay safely indoors, enclosed
by an interior that seconded its geometries. Impatient with the yearning for
order, Smithson had taken art outdoors, to landscapes as disorderly as he
could find.
In September 1969, Artforum published “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the
Yucatan,” his account of a trip to that jungly region of Mexico. At nine sites
discovered in his wanderings through the Yucatan peninsula, he placed a set
of mirrors on the ground or amid the branches of a tree. At Palenque he
notes that “writing about mirrors brings one into a groundless jungle where
words buzz incessantly instead ofinsects.” In the terrain traversed by “mirror-
travel,” language and world collude, yielding details that are both linguistic
and not, and every hybrid nuance of the scene is afflicted by entropy, the
decay of the particular that inclines all things toward sameness.

To execute Asphalt Rundown (1969), his first earthwork, Smithson had a

truckload of asphalt dumped over an eroded cliff in an old gravel quarry
near Rome, Italy. On the campus of Kent State University he directed a
backhoe operator to pile earth on an abandoned shed until its roof beam
cracked. In 1970 he built his best-known work, Spiral Jetty, a ramp of mud
and rocks that reaches fifteen hundred feet along the surface of the Great
Salt Lake, turning in on itself as it goes. This massive form disappeared
beneath the rising waters of the lake in 1972. Distressed, Smithson devised
plans to build the jetty higher in case the lake did not recede. It didn’t. In
1973 he was killed in the crash of a small plane he had hired for an aerial
inspection of the scrubland staked out for his fifth earthwork, Amarillo Ramp.
The crash also killed the pilot and a photographer. Smithson was thirty-five
years old.
Spiral Jetty is still submerged. Smithson intended it to vanish slowly, not
in a season or two, for it was to celebrate entropy, not be its easy victim.
Though he mocked the hope of monumental permanence, the solidity of his
earthworks and his attempts to preserve them suggest that he felt this hope
as strongly as other artists do. An earthwork is an emblem of the earth-
worker’s will, and the will does not seek its own demise. Proud of his place
on the New York scene, Smithson intended his art to make him an equal of
the father figures he had recruited from among the mythical leaders of the
American avant-garde.
Spiral Jetty is a grand implication of Pollock’s gesture. Amarillo Ramp, com-
pleted to his specifications after his death, can be understood as a variant, on
dry land, of Spiral Jetty. Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, an earthwork constructed
in the Netherlands in 1971, looks like a gargantuan reprise of the quasi-
 264 THE FATE OF A GESTURE

| 79. Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Rocks, mud, precipitated salt crystals,
1,500 ft. long and 15 ft. wide.

Minimalist sculptures he built in 1966. The lumbering splendor of these earth-

works and the avant-garde logic of their development make it easy to
overlook Smithson’s dedication to the entropic forces that ruin everything
splendid and dismantle all the structures of logic.
In an essay, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), Smithson argues that the purpose
of art is to render its audience “conscious of the actualities of perception.”
Attending to minutiae, one sees through the reassurances of history and ide-
ology, aesthetic and political. One notices entropic pressures at work every-
where, and especially in places ignored by optimism and good taste. Smithson
contemplated debased imagery and ramshackle landscapes much as Saint Je-
rome contemplated the human skull he kept beside him in the wilderness.
Any reminder of the entropic end delighted him, for it sharpened his sense
of the mortality we share with everything, even dust.
Entropy is the inexorable implication of the Second Law of Thermody-
namics, which Smithson never bothered to master. It wasn’t a truth for him
so much as an image, his master fiction, the one that generated meanings
more compelling to him than any truth. To be conscious of entropy was to
le OnE Si TOR MP WIRY Tay. 265

construe consciousness as entropic, to feel decay in the processes of seeing,

thinking, remembering. “The brain,” he wrote, “resembles an eroded rock
from which ideas and ideals leak.”
The surge and fizzle of thought electrified Smithson, prompting him to
fabricate sculptures, make jaunts between sites and nonsites, perform arduous
mirror displacements, supervise the building of earthworks, write long essays,
give involuted interviews—in sum, to produce the oeuvre that equates his
doubts, uncertainties, indifference, fatigue, and forgetfulness with the power
that is reducing all things to a null state in which there is no difference
between life and death, between then and now, between anything and any-
thing else.
Smithson’s point, irritably, interminably reiterated, is that we have some-
thing to gain by facing our situation in the art world, in contemporary culture,
in a universe that is running down as surely as a badly made watch. It
illuminates us to wander through derelict sites, like Percy Bysshe Shelley in
the Roman Colosseum, musing on the idea of ruin and feeling the fact of it
in one’s bones and breathing. As Shelley wandered, he felt the consolations
of high art. His dread gave way a bit as he called up the vague and luminous
ideal of “intellectual beauty,” the redemptive “mystery.” Smithson understood
ideals and essences as demeaning temptations, buzzing errors to be swatted
away like flies.
Nothing but the promise of universal death was entirely alive for Smithson.
When a landscape meshed with his feelings, he felt that he possessed it. He
felt alone there, like Pollock in his infinite. When Pollock said, “I am nature,”
he claimed the full force of all creative energy. At his most grandiose, Smith-
son claimed to be one with nature’s destructiveness. He celebrated the force
that from the beginning of time has worked against order, intelligibility,
meaning, the force that tirelessly bears the universe back to its origins and
further, to primordial chaos. Inverted heir of Romanticism, artist of the en-
tropic sublime, Smithson was the anti-Pollock, devoted to a dream of apoc-
alypse in reverse—not the ultimate revelation but the ultimate darkness, the
state of absolute unknowability.
 f

by

fi
 PARI 7

FROM DOLDRUMS
Te BOOM
80. Miriam Schapiro, Black Bolero, 1981. Acrylic and fabric on canvas, 6 x
12 tt
 30
Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, De Maria’s Lightning Field, Heizer’s Complex
One—all were funded by private patrons, and none was ever offered for sale.
If commerce leaves a taint, as many suspect it does, then these earthworks
attained a kind of purity. Their liberation from commerce seemed a natural
benefit of the western habitat. The frontier, we like to believe, is freedom’s
homeland, though the idea of eluding the market originated in the art world’s
urban precincts. In 1961 Allan Kaprow pointed out that “a Happening is not
a commodity.” Vanishing as it appears, its only residue is “a state of mind.”
A scarcity of goods discourages markets. In 1965 the critic Barbara Rose
argued that objects, too, can resist commercial exploitation if they display a
properly off-putting attitude.
The best Minimalist sculptures, she wrote, are intentionally “difficult, hos-
tile, awkward and oversize.” Flaunting their “refusal to participate, either as
entertainment or as whimsical, ingratiating commodity,” they “blatantly assert
their unsalability and functionlessness.” Yet Minimalist objects sold well. In
fact, they created a market for artworks unwilling to exert the usual kinds
of allure. It was as if seduction by a cold presence were no seduction at all
but a refined communion between admirer and admired. Further refinement
was suggested by Sol LeWitt, maker of chilly white grids.
His “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1968) pointed to a future unencum-
bered by objects, even the least ingratiating. Section ten of his manifesto states:
“Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that
may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.” LeWitt
continued to convert some of his ideas into three-dimensional objects. Some
took ephemeral form as wall drawings, and others remained unrealized. Sull
other ideas, conceived by a generation of younger artists, formed the intan-
gible substance of their oeuvres.
Among the heirs of Minimalism, dismissals of the object became routine,
270 aves yYNIe (lr IN les Ute

then insistent, as if an addiction were being overcome. For many years, a

conceptualist named Lawrence Weiner accompanied his proposals for art-
works with this statement: “1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The
piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece may not be built.” A work of art is a
mental event; art objects are knickknacks, not always reprehensible but never
entirely necessary. Douglas Huebler was stricter. “The world is full of objects,
more or less interesting,” he said in 1970. “I do not wish to add any more. I
prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and/or space.”
Huebler’s Duration Piece #7 (1969), a sequence of photographs made at one-
minute intervals, focused on a patch of sidewalk in Central Park frequented
by eleven ducks and occasionally a pigeon. Other Duration Pieces showed
people sitting in chairs or behind the wheels of their cars.
In an office on upper Madison Avenue, Seth Siegelaub became a dealer
for artists with no objects to offer, only careers to pursue. The walls of his
gallery were incidental. What mattered was the telephone, which linked him
to artists and the printers who gave his artists’ work its tangible—rather, its
legible—form. “When art does not any longer depend upon its physical pres-
ence,” said Siegelaub, “it is not distorted and altered by its representation in
books and catalogs. .. . When information is primary, the catalog can become
the exhibition.” Moving at the speed of thought, the new art would not—
could not—be snagged and corrupted by market mechanisms. Siegelaub’s
was the only gallery of its kind, and it survived for just a few seasons.
In his last expansive mood before the boom of the eighties, Leo Castelli
found places on his roster for Huebler, Weiner, and a conceptualist named
Joseph Kosuth. Other established galleries did not follow Castelli’s lead, and
artists disinclined to make objects received only token encouragement from
museums, which exist, after all, to preserve the art object—indeed, to exalt
it. Aesthetic progress, it seemed, was being stymied. Out of this frustration
came a new institution: the alternative space.
In 1969 Holly Solomon—once a collector of Pop Art, soon to establish a
commercial gallery—put a loft on Greene Street at the disposal of perfor-
mance artists, dancers, and poets. A year later, the sculptor Jeffery Lew
launched the 112 Greene Street Workshop; its first group show repeated,
with variations, the anti-form exhibition of the Castelli Warehouse. Later
shows displayed the progeny of anti-form, that sprawling family of new me-
diums which includes video art at one extreme and the texts of hardcore
conceptualism at the other. The Kitchen, on Broome Street, specialized at
first in video then added performance to its schedule. Artists Space was
founded with a mandate to give young artists their first solo shows.
Alanna Heiss, a nonprofit entrepreneur, persuaded the city’s bureaucracy
that artists could make good use of abandoned municipal buildings. The
cavernous space at 10 Bleecker Street became the site of sculpture exhibitions
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM POLY |

and workshops from 1972 to 1975. Next, Heiss arranged for three seasons of
performance and installation works at 22 Reade Street. P.S. 1, a derelict public
school in Queens, and the Clocktower, on lower Broadway, were Heiss’s next
projects and her most successful. During the seventies, these spaces overflowed
with art of high ambition and low commercial appeal. The Clocktower tilted
from installation art, its center of gravity, toward conceptualism. Acknowl-
edging everything from paint on canvas to typescript on onionskin, P.S. |
found a place among the major institutions of the New York art world.

Those who supported conceptualism and kindred developments tended to

think of art on the model of technology: new forms rendered the old obsolete;
paintings were no longer necessary. Late in the sixties, though, dozens of
young painters appeared in New York and unfurled immense canvases filled
with what came to be known as Lyrical Abstraction. This wasn’t a style, it
was a look: big, bright, and atmospheric.
The Lyrical Abstractionists had gazed long and admiringly at the balmy
pinks and oranges of painters like Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.
Charmed by the pleasant weather of the color-field image, they felt a blithe
disregard for the notion that paint should meet canvas only under the strict
supervision of Greenbergian dogma. Lyrical Abstractionists were not purists.
“Opticality” meant nothing to them. The deeper a painting’s space, the more
dramatic its surges of light, the better. The Lyrical Abstractionists had looked
especially hard at the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. He was their favorite
model and chief progenitor. Each wanted to find a creditable variant on his
reverberating image.
To stand out in the rush for gallery representation, a painting needed a
lively surface, so the Lyrical Abstractionists tinkered extensively with tech-
nique. They poured, scraped, dabbed, stenciled, sprayed, rolled, and smeared
their paints onto the canvas. Some built their images in layers, applying each
with a different method. Always, the Lyrical Abstractionists tried to keep
their colors unmuddled. These young painters wanted to show the bright side
of Pollock’s heroism. They wanted to return to 1950 and chase the tragic
darkness from his art.
The Lyrical Abstractionists were well educated. Revisionists usually are.
Their grip on the past was confident but not always firm. For them, history
was a set of heavily annotated and often-slippery options. The happy dazzle
of their colors could look as pedantic as a third-generation work of perfor-
mance art. Nonetheless, some Lyrical Abstractionists were lively decorators.
A few tagged with this label—John Torreano, Victor Kord, Phillip Wofford,
John Seery—turned out to be good painters. Their work was noticed, but
only in passing. During the early seventies, New Yorkers found it difficult
to focus on art objects that lacked a detachable frame of ideas. Painting
Lyf Tile AE Ole A 1G Sauce

needed an intellectual complement, which some painters found in a new

brand of politics.

At the opening of the 1970 Whitney Annual, a band of female artists dashed
through the galleries blowing whistles, loudly and often. Calling themselves
Woman Artists in Revolution, they pointed to a scandal: this and every other
Annual included only a minuscule number of women artists, and in most
shows, most collections, most histories, women were shockingly underrepre-
sented. Asked why, some in the art world gave a quick response: the best
work gets the most exposure; art is art, quality is quality, and it has nothing
to do with gender. Confronted with this view in 1971, Lee Krasner said that
“any woman artist who says that there is no discrimination against women
should have her face slapped.”
There had never been a season when Pollock’s paintings did not eclipse
Krasner’s, and she could not help knowing that her neglect owed much to
the male assumption that females are by definition negligible. Men like Pol-
lock and de Kooning, Greenberg and Rosenberg competed with one another,
not with women. That Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell and Helen Frank-
enthaler were taken seriously by male artists was mentioned now and then
to suggest the absence of any real problems. But the problems are real, the
problems are crushing, insisted the art world’s feminists.
Women should be represented equally in museum collections, they argued,
not only in temporary exhibitions. Galleries ought to represent as many
women as men, and critics must apply the same standards to all artists. On
this last demand, there was disagreement. Certain feminists suggested that
women ought to be judged by female standards, just as male standards are
applied to men. Talk of female standards turned some eyes to the decorative,
domestic imagery that high art excludes. Why can’t this be the stuff of serious
art? And why can’t men make use of it too?
From these elaborations of feminist argument came the blossoming, twin-
ing imagery of P&D—pattern and decoration painting. Brushy, repetitive
motifs—mostly floral—spread over the canvas, sweeping aside the memory
of traditional composition. Here was a new kind of allover painting, a fresh
variant on Pollock. P&D was inclusive. It was egalitarian and prompted its
practitioners to reach past the boundaries that confine their medium to a
narrow strip of high-art terrain. Joyce Kozloff and Miriam Schapiro stitched
wall hangings from strips of brightly patterned cloth. Kim MacConnell made
fabric pieces that could pass for crazy quilts—that would be quilts, neither
more nor less, if they had not borne the “art” label. Robert Kushner designed
splashy, flowing costumes for performance pieces—mock fashion shows.
Once he mixed food with his fabrics, in a spectacle called Robert Kushner and
His Friends Eat Their Clothes (1972). From aluminum foil and colored cello-
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM YS}

phane, Thomas Lanigan Schmidt built witty, glittering altars and ex votos.
John Perreault, who wrote about art for The Village Voice, was among the
few critics who approved of pattern and decoration’s success in domesticating
Pollock’s legacy. P&D, he said, would rescue the New York art world from
the forces that made it so dull in the seventies: specialization, professionalism,
and the theorizing that sustains them both. Though he seemed to have set
himself up as a prophet, Perrault was expressing a wish, and it surprised him
least of all when pattern and decoration failed to move beyond the garden
where it had first sprung up. High style in New York is public. Major col-
lectors tend not to import art into cozily personal settings; they design their
apartments to look like galleries at the Modern. The unapologetic domesticity
of pattern and decoration did not comport well with the formality of a Mar-
den monochrome or the chic of Stella’s stripes. P&D survived—it even
flourished—but only in its lush, out-of-the-way corner.
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The art world had become a place of corners and niches, some more central,
more elevated than others. In the alternative spaces, the new mediums busily
evolved. Minimalism was seen chiefly at the John Weber Gallery, color-field
painting at Lawrence Rubin and André Emmerich. Lyrical Abstraction ob-
tained a foothold at Emmerich and Max Hutchinson before drifting from
sight toward the end of the seventies. Though Holly Solomon specialized in
pattern and decoration, she had room on her roster for Nicholas Africano, a
New Image painter. Others bearing that label showed at Willard.
Despite the lackluster market of the seventies, well-positioned dealers sur-
vived and some quietly flourished. By mid-decade, the institutions of the art
world, modest or grand, had settled into a stable pattern. Degrees of renown
had been assigned, careers were moving forward along well-charted paths.
For those who belonged, the art world had become a place of reassuring
certainties. Jasper Johns was, beyond question, New York’s most-respected
painter, and Leo Castelli its leading dealer. When Castelli opened the SoHo
branch of his gallery in 1971, the art world’s newest neighborhood acquired
instant legitimacy.
For several years, artists had been colonizing SoHo, the district south of
Houston Street and north of Canal. The sizable lofts in its cast-iron buildings
had become affordable now that manufacturers were abandoning them for
more up-to-date premises. Some artists lived and worked in what was known
as raw space. Others renovated their spaces, producing a latter-day version
of the “luxury loft” that Willem de Kooning had designed for himself in the
early sixties.
Shared by lofts and galleries, SoHo’s idea of luxury was severe: white walls
uncluttered by woodwork, hardwood floors gleaming with polyurethane, fur-
niture minimal in amount and style. After a few seasons of hesitation, mu-
nicipal authorities chose not to enforce the law that barred permanent
276 WHE FATE OF AGE
Sa URE

residents from this commercial neighborhood. Artists and their dealers were
reviving an area that had threatened to burden the city with a new zone of
blight. Bars appeared, then restaurants, boutiques, and home-furnishing
shops. Slowly, SoHo evolved into a community. A certain pride mixed with
the cautious professionalism of the seventies.
When a young artist named David Salle came to town in 1975, he felt only
the “dismalness” of the scene. It oppressed him. It filled him with contempt.
By what right was the New York art world dismal? Salle had abandoned
Wichita, Kansas, for the California Institute of the Arts in 1969. He earned
his bachelor of fine arts there, then his master of fine arts, then abandoned
California for New York. An artist can do good work anywhere, as Salle
knew. He also knew that the capital city is the amplifier of success. Once he
had arrived in New York and settled into a dreary sublet apartment at the
corner of Broome and Varick Streets, nothing would persuade him to retreat.
Here, if anywhere, his ambition would not seem absurdly outsize. This was
where he belonged, yet nothing could induce him to pretend that, in 1975,
New York was a happy or even an especially interesting place.
“The art world seemed incredibly insular and protectionist,” he says now.
“One felt that a tremendous effort was being expended to promote and pro-
tect a very few reputations. History was being preserved in the form of a
myth—the Castelli touch, and so on. But Leo seemed a bit like the Wizard
of Oz. Look behind the curtain, and you'd find this little man who had
learned to project an amazingly large image of himself.” The illusion had its
reality. Castelli did in fact dominate the system, which provided little room
for newcomers. “The scene was dead in 1975,” says Salle. Its tedium was
mitigated by the presence of other Cal Arts graduates—Eric Fishl, Matt
Mullican, Troy Brauntuch, and Jack Goldstein. A network of connections
formed.
In Buffalo, art students at the local campus of the State University of New
York had founded an alternative space called Hallwalls. After giving a lecture
there, Goldstein became a point of contact between his friends from Cal Arts
and members of the Buffalo group—Charles Clough, Michael Zwack, Cindy
Sherman, Robert Longo. Up in Buffalo, bored by his courses, Longo read
Artforum and built in his head an imaginary art world—a spacious hive of
bright white spaces filled with major work. “Hallwalls,” he says,

was supposed to be our part of that world. It was just the corridor
between my studio and Charlie Clough’s, in this old ice factory where
we were working at the time. We turned it into a gallery space and
invited people like Vito Acconci and Sol LeWitt to visit and install work
or do a performance or whatever. Lucy Lippard came up. Dan Graham.
Jonathan Borofsky. They were like proof that the art world existed, and
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM 277

we felt that Hallwalls was connected to it—an extension of those spaces

in Manhattan.

In 1976 Longo was invited to stage a performance piece at Artists Space

in Manhattan. At Hallwalls, he organized a group show of works by the Cal
Arts crew. “Artists Space and Hallwalls were connected by a kind of
exchange program,” says Salle. “They became sister organizations. It was so
primitive and naive, very sweet and very much of that moment.”
Salle presented an installation at the Kitchen in 1979; three years earlier,
Artists Space had shown his paintings on paper. “It wasn’t as though I was
literally nonexistent during those years,” he says. “There was some exposure
of my work. The main difficulty was knowing what my work ought to be.”
Salle paid his rent by teaching part-time in a New Jersey college. He worked
as a studio assistant for Vito Acconci and others. At Mickey Ruskin’s Lower
Manhattan Ocean Club on Chambers Street, he got a job as an assistant chef.
The head chef was a painter named Julian Schnabel. They didn’t talk much
about art, Salle remembers. Their conversations were “more about living
situations, not having a place to paint, being treated like a dog.” He adds,
not entirely convincingly, “There was also a good bit of humor about it all.”
Bitterness lurked beneath the humor; beneath the bitterness was a feeling that
anything could be done but only because nothing was required. A young
artst’s freedom rested on a vast indifference.
Before he learned to cook, Schnabel drove a cab. Discovering, one evening,
that his passenger was an art dealer, he took the opportunity to convey a
grievance. No one—no dealer, no critic, no curator—would look at his work,
said Schnabel. It was worse than unfair, it was cruel, and stupid, too, because
he was doing extremely good work. He deserved studio visits. He deserved
a gallery. He was a great artist in the making. The dealer, Julian Weissman,
still remembers the ferocity of Schnabel’s anger. Schnabel doesn’t recall the
incident. There were many like it, for he was constantly angry in those days.
In the late fifties, Allan Kaprow had argued that old distinctions were
fading. To enter the room labeled painting was not to close the door on
sculpture. To chose film was not to reject dance. One could simply be an
artist and work in whatever medium fit one’s intention. Living in Kaprow’s
future, young artists felt lost. Much later, Salle looked back on his early
seasons in New York and said,

Everybody was simply trying to find a way to say to the world that he
was an artist. That’s what was really going on. And the question of
what kind of artist, an artist to what end, why an artist—those questions
simply couldn’t be answered at that time, because all of the energy went
into simply trying to say that one was an artist.
278 acl NINE (OR IN ists UIE

Salle tried to say it with performance art and video pieces, with paintings
and drawings. He didn’t convince himself, nor did he know where to look
for models of aesthetic conviction. He had learned that many painters with
recognizable names were producing nothing. They had no compelling reason
to work. Yet artists of no reputation, absolute beginners, continued to settle
in Manhattan. It was ambition’s hometown.
Longo left Buffalo in 1977 for an apartment on Fulton Street. Making the
art-world rounds, he was baffled. The galleries felt empty, even with art on
the walls. “There was no energy,” he says.

The art world was vanishing. Just about gone. I started going to the
Bleecker Street Cinema a lot. Jean-Luc Godard is a genius, I decided.
So is Rainer Fassbinder. After the movies, I’d go to the downtown clubs.
I began to think of the art world as the day, with its white spaces. The
lighting, the quiet. The club scene was noisy and dark. That was the
night, and a lot more was going on in the night than in the day.

Longo has the short, stocky physique of a high-school linebacker. He began

to wear black. An elaborate wave piled his curly black hair up on his head.
Styling himself as a downtown musician, he got to know Sid Vicious, Joey
Ramone, Debby Harry. David Byrne, of Talking Heads, became a friend.
Longo played guitar with the Rhys Chatham Band. He organized a band of
his own called Menthol Wars. Punk was a bitter parody of rock. Though

81. Robert longo, Men Trapped in Ice, 1980. Charcoal and graphite on pa-
per; three panels, each 60 x 4O in.
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM ZALES,

Longo let the punk attitude soak through him, he wasn’t convinced by the
music. Its rage felt too shallow, too much like adolescent whining, or too
deep, like helpless fear. Playing or listening, he preferred the New Wave
displays of dark, edgy, amplified force.
At the Kitchen in 1979 Longo showed aluminum relief sculptures—vi-
gnettes of violence, with their combatants smoothed into anonymity. Swing
(1978), an image of a punch-out, began as a still from a film noir. The source
of The Wrestlers (1978) is a statuette by the fifteenth-century Florentine An-
tonio del Pollaiuolo. Longo constructed tall slabs of metal that would have
counted as pieces of Minimalist sculpture if it were not for the human forms
that plunge through their surfaces into the room. Longo lent a triptych of
large drawings, Men Trapped in Ice (1979), to a group show at the Max
Protetch Gallery. In the central panel, a figure from Fassbinder’s The Amer-
ican Soldier appeared, arching his back, touching the place where a bullet has
just entered. Nothing sold from the Protetch show. To survive, just barely,
Longo worked as Vito Acconci’s studio assistant. He and Michael Zwack
painted lofts. As the seventies ended, he was driving a taxi to support a nearly
anonymous career.
82. Julian Schnabel, Portrait of Mary Boone, 1983. Oil paint, plates, and
Bondo on wood, 24 x 24 in.
 36
Julian Schnabel’s paintings of the seventies employed the New Image format:
on a monochrome field, a schematic image or two. Often, the image is of a
torso in rough outline—whether flesh or statuary, it is impossible to tell.
Nearly always, the waxy, perfected surface of the painting shows at least one
deep gouge. In 1979 these canvases made a respectable appearance at the Mary
Boone Gallery, which had recently opened at 420 Broadway. Castelli’s SoHo
was two flights up. Later that year, Boone showed Schnabel’s The Death of
Fashion (1978), an immense painting encrusted with shards of crockery. Over
this field of broken plates and cups he painted a scrawny scimitar and a
headless, armless torso.
René Ricard, an alumnus of the first Warhol Factory, announced in the
pages of Art in America that Schnabel’s plate paintings

are really quite horrible. But not in any pejorative sense. I’ve seen the
two existing plate paintings in their homes. The first one “hangs” in
Anina Nosei-Weber’s foyer and it makes you just want to get out of
there fast, it is so big and awful.

Of The Death of Fashion, Ricard reported that it

is already owned by Bob Feldman. I saw it in his dining area. It made

a complete mockery of the usual niceties of sitting at table. It made the
very idea of hanging it in the home grotesque. In front of a thing like
this there is simply no room for personal taste.

This painting, says Ricard, is “a pet gorilla,” a “bull . . . in the china shoppe,
and we are figurines in the stampede.” Fear and courage alike require one
to give in to this plate painting utterly.
282 Pitz PATE Cr yA G eS iRUiRie

In a little over two years, prices for Schnabel’s paintings rose feverishly,
from $2,500 to $4,500 to $15,000 to twice and three times that amount. There
was talk of giddy collectors offering $60,000, $75,000 for a plate painting. The
boom of the eighties was under way, stirring activity even in regions of the
art world that lacked a market. As the Whitney Museum of American Art
raised money for the purchase of Three Flags, a publicly funded organization
called Collaborative Proyects—Colab, for short—opened its Times Square
Show in a former massage parlor at Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue.
Colab had persuaded more than a hundred young artists to offer new work
for next to nothing. Paintings, sculptures, collages, posters, installation pieces,
video, and film spread from makeshift galleries into halls and stairwells. The
spectacle received wide press coverage, which usually began with the obser-
vation that the Times Square Show was as raucous and seedy as Times
Square itself. This was nearly true. Christy Rupp showed a tableau of ma-
rauding rats. More of these plaster sculptures were on sale at the souvenir
shop for fifteen dollars each.
The Times Square Show announced that art ought to be at least as much
fun as the movies and television. And if it wasn’t fun, it ought to be pertinent.
It ought to reflect the tone of the city as accurately as subway graffiti or The
Daily News. Colab had gathered a milling crowd of artists whose ambitions
were as shapeless as the crowd itself. Many resented the established galleries
of SoHo and Fifty-seventh Street without wishing, truly, to fit comfortably
onto the rosters of those establishments. Needing an art world of their own,
the alumni of the Times Square Show invented one in the East Village, the
neighborhood where many of them lived. Its first gallery was run by Patti
Astor, an underground film actress in the Colab orbit.
When Astor felt the urge to show art, she might have extracted funds from
the nonprofit system for an alternative space. Instead, she opened a storefront
emporium on East Tenth Street, between Avenues A and B, as the 1981
season began. To explain her entrepreneurial impulse, Astor said, “I didn’t
want to bother with filling out giant forms.” Bureaucracy is tedious. Mar-
keteering is amusing. Named the Fun Gallery, her shop offered graffiti on
canvas by “writers” who had been spraying their tags on the subways for
years—Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000, Lee Quinones. Keith Haring, an art-
school graduate with a subway career, got his professional start at the Fun
Gallery. Break dancers and rap artists performed at Astor’s openings, and
her artists showed their work in one-night shows at the downtown music
clubs—Danceteria, Club 57, the Mudd Club.
Early in 1982, a painter calling herself Gracie Mansion, after the New York
mayoral residence, put on The Famous Show in a storefront on St. Mark’s
Place. A year later, she set up shop on Tenth Street. There were now nearly
three dozen East Village galleries, and more kept opening. In 1984 Astor and
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM 282

her director, Bill Stelling, took to wearing sweatshirts that read: “The Orig-
inal and Still the Best.” Talk of quality was ironic, though of course everyone
had preferences. Cliques coalesced and trends appeared. Besides graffiti, there
was cartooning, warmed-over Surrealism, mock—children’s book illustration,
picture-postcard sentimentality, and much, much more.
Some fads lasted from one season to the next; others vanished almost before
they were noticed, like quick shifts of climate. East Village styles were old
styles recycled, and the irony that drove the recycling was itself recycled from
the early days of Pop Art. A few of the new galleries—lInternational with
Monument, Pat Hearn—showed sober work of the kind one would expect
to see in SoHo. Not even seriousness felt completely out of place at the East
Village party.
Traditionally, New York galleries are closed on Sunday and Monday. By
staying open on Sundays, East Village dealers added an art day to the week.
If the weather was pleasant when that day came around, East Tenth Street
would be mobbed, as collectors descended from limousines to galleries that
had once been candy stores and shoe-repair shops. Prices were low. Stars
were emerging. The East Village attracted the better-informed European
tourist, for here was America at its most delightful—raffish, innocent, and
picturesque. As galleries proliferated, landlords raised rents, and there was
bitter talk of gentrification. Yet the East Village remained a place of burnt-
out buildings, crack dens, and Hell’s Angels, their bikes lining the curb in
gleaming array.

A leading East Village style was art-school Expressionism, with its crudely
twisted forms and scrabbling lines, its screeching purples and bleeding crim-
sons. In SoHo, Anina Nosei, Mary Boone, and a few other dealers imported
canvases by the stylistic offspring of the Germans who had invented Expres-
sionism in the early decades of this century. This was a sophisticated product.
The young neo-Expressionist Helmut Mittendorf, for instance, had obviously
looked hard at the example set by the patriarch, Emil Nolde. Mittendorf’s
jagged, splashy forms had the old fervor and finesse. Denying any debts to
the German Expressionism of earlier generations, Georg Baselitz tried to give
the style the autonomy of abstract art. Impressed by big postwar American
painting, Anselm Kiefer inflated his Expressionist heritage to the scale of
panoramic spectacle.
After the bombast of the Germans came the refinements of the young
Italian painters. Blending French Surrealism with its Italian variant, Meta-
physical Art, Enzo Cucchi’s pictures echoed with lessons New Yorkers had
learned in the galleries of the Modern. Francesco Clemente offered a delicate
mixture of mysteries, some with Surrealist flavor, others redolent of Symbolist
eccentrics like Odilon Redon and James Ensor. Playing with Fauvism, Cub-
284 TE er A EO AM GiEounUKas

ism, and other modernist styles, Sandro Chia gave his canvases the look of
updated museum pieces. For so long, painting had seemed marginal. Now it
suddenly occupied the center of attention. Painting was new again, and of
course it was old. It was the medium it had always been. Flooding into New
York from Europe, nicely worked canvases administered shocks of recog-
nition—shocks that reassured.
Ever since Dorothy Miller’s New American Painting made its triumphal
overseas tour in 1958, New Yorkers felt it was safe to ignore European art.
Now they talked of a German invasion, an Italian invasion, and dealers cast
about for young Americans who could meet these challenges. The best painter
turned up by this search was George Condo. Reworking Cubism, throwing
in memories of Surrealism and the funny papers, Condo made a quick ascent
from the East Village to SoHo. Eventually he joined the Pace Gallery on
Fifty-seventh Street. His paint-handling was brilliant, his wit alluringly bi-
zarre. Suddenly the New York art world had something it hadn’t asked for
in decades and didn’t know it wanted: an American virtuoso of the brush.
A permanent fixture at center stage, Julian Schnabel looked like a virtuoso of
Americanism—a producer ofbig, brash, overbearing paintings more adept than
Condo’s at defending New York’s position in what had suddenly become an in-
ternational art world. As his prices rose, Mary Boone prevailed upon Leo Castelli
to join her in presenting Schnabel’s new works. When he agreed to a two-gallery
show, Boone stepped into the ranks of major dealers and Castelli had a new star,
his first in years. The plate paintings, said Castelli, revived the enthusiasm he
“had felt about Jasper, Bob, Frank, and Roy when I first saw their work.”
Schnabel’s 1981 show spread from Boone’s gallery to Castelli’s upstairs.
Having gathered armfuls of praise and damnation for his plate paintings,
Schnabel began to paint on velvet. He attached the skeleton of a fir tree to
a painting called The Raft (1982). His Exile (1980) bears three pairs of antlers.
Despite Schnabel’s boisterous drawing and awkward arrangements of form,
his paintings often display an odd delicacy. It might show in his colors, as
they drift into subtle regions of beige and gray. Or two dense blotches of
rusty-red color might collide with unexpected consideration for each other’s
unwieldy bulk. Through these refinements flow currents of difficult feeling,
the runoff from an overflowing swamp of anxiety. In 1978 Schnabel wrote
that he wasn’t interested “in society, or culture.” He was concerned with
“putting a finger on biological fear.” To paint, he said, was to make “icons
that present life in terms of our death.” A panicky sense of mortality drove
Schnabel to gestures big and desperate enough to count as signs of life or, at
least, theatrical vitality.

At the newly founded Metro Pictures on SoHo’s Mercer Street, Jack Goldstein,
Troy Brauntuch, and a few others recycled ready-made images in a hard-
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM 285

83. Julian Schnabel, Exile, 1980. Oil and antlers on wood, 7 ft. 6 in. x 10 ft.

edged manner designed to put the audience at a distance. Viewing their

works across a gulf of impersonality, one was to reflect on the mechanisms
of the image. These Metro artists raised a point the Pop artists had already
made: the world comes to us now through the media. And they wanted us
to believe what we fear: living through imagery, we become little more than
images, even to ourselves. Flesh-and-blood bodies feel increasingly residual.
Another member of the Metro group, Cindy Sherman, specialized in pho-
tographs she called Untitled Film Stills (1978-80). Each shows her in a role
made familiar by the movies: would-be career girl newly arrived in the big
city; demure librarian; disenchanted vamp abandoned in the living room of
a mountain lodge. There are nearly one hundred of these excerpts from
make-believe movies. With costumes, makeup, and a disconcerting ability to
shift the tone of her features, Sherman populated a world in which she never
appeared, at least not as herself. “These are pictures of emotions personified,”
she said. “I’m trying to make other people recognize something of themselves,
rather than me.” Yet Sherman’s Film Stills and the disguised self-portraits
that flowed from them are always recognizably hers. The Metro aesthetic
posited a paradoxical ideal: an impersonality traceable, in a flash, to one or
another of the gallery’s high-profile egos.
286 THE PALE VOR Sm URE
TAGE

t
84. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Blackand-
white photograph, 8 x 10 in.

Metro’s biggest star was Robert Longo. For several seasons, he had been
working with Diane Shea, a professional illustrator with a precise touch. He
would rough out an image; she would blow it up and transfer it to paper in
charcoal and graphite. The final touches would be his. He had become an
artist of cold black and slaty gray on white. His first show at Metro Pictures
presented six drawings, each nine feet high, of men in dark suits and ties.
Like the figure from Fassbinder’s The American Soldier, they writhe, though
it isn’t clear why. Some seem to have been shot. Others might be dancing or
simply staggering, intoxicated. Their collective title is Men in the Cities. Shea
was not Longo’s only collaborator. Others helped him gather images and
materials. Longo listed their names on the gallery wall, the way a film pro-
ducer credits the members of a production crew.
Exiting briskly, the Men in the Cities were replaced by other images from
the urban landscape—equestrian statues, expressways, faces in close-up,
buildings ruined and whole. Working in a variety of mediums that ranged
from pencil on paper to cast aluminum, Longo would flatten his motifs and
arrange them in an outsize wall piece. The effect was cinematic, as if awide,
panoramic shot had been invaded, violently, by montage.
Among the founders of Metro Pictures was Janelle Reiring, who had once
worked on the staff of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Noting that the boom had
rewarded Castelli and Boone’s Schnabel show, Reiring suggested to her for-
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM 287

mer employer that he collaborate with Metro Pictures on a Longo exhibition.

Castelli agreed, and early in 1983 three of Longo’s new works crowded into
Metro’s small Mercer Street gallery. The rest appeared in Castelli’s space at
142 Greene Street, which put a floor of thirty-five hundred square feet at
Longo’s disposal. Leaving it nearly empty, he turned this polyurethaned sur-
face into a promenade where viewers could stroll and view, from a distance,
the pieces arrayed on the gallery’s eighteen-foot walls. Now Everybody (1982—
83), a four-paneled work, shows Beirut torn apart by war. In front of this
panorama, Longo placed a bronze figure of a casually dressed man. Rising
up on one foot, he arches his back. The city has reached out with a bullet.
The man’s pose makes it clear that he is dying, not dancing. One has the
melodramatic sense that the man became a monument in the moment of
death.
Early in 1984 Metro Pictures moved from Mercer Street to a space on
Greene, just up the block’ from Castelli. Longo opened a show there in April.
Deep in the gallery hung a huge work—eighteen feet wide, eleven feet
high—called Tongue to the Heart (1984). Along the lower edge of the piece
runs a horizontal panel filled with choppy water rendered in yellowish acrylics
on canvas. The central panel is a low-relief sculpture cast in lead. Oppressive

85. Robert longo, Tongue to the Heart, 1984. Acrylic and oil on wood; cast
plaster; hammered lead on wood; Durotran; charcoal, acrylic, and graphite on
canvas. Four panels; overall dimensions: 11 ft. 4 in. x 18 ft. x 25 in.
288 WEE “PATER OR A GirSiRUIRse

orthogonals inscribe this leaden surface with the image of a large, official-
looking hall. By setting its perspective slantwise to the picture plane, Longo
suggests a glance from a corner entrance—the point of view of one hesitant
to enter. Airless and filled with dull light, this room looks like the retreat of
all anonymous, heavy-handed authority.
Toward the lower left corner, a platform bears a sculptor’s version of a
painter’s traditional device: the repoussoir figure whose job is to point out
some crucial detail of the picture. Longo strands him in the room with us.
His head in his arms, he points at nothing. No image attracts him, no formal
order absorbs him. Displaced just a bit from his traditional station, this re-
poussoir figure occupies the open terrain between artwork and audience.
Though his proportions are monumental, he is much less than life-size, as if
condensed by the pressure of the image-barrage that supplies Longo with the
bits and pieces of his art.
 39
For all his operatic grandiosity, Longo generates a chill. A terror of death
haunts Schnabel’s exuberance, too. David Salle, who became the other star of
the Mary Boone Gallery, placed death at an art-historical remove. Since Du-
champ’s time, avant-gardists have announced that painting is dead. To put
the matter that way made it too public for Salle, too much a question ad-
dressed to all artists—painters, would-be painters, enemies of painting. He
preferred the issues of painting to be private, like his moods. He wrote in
1979 not that painting is dead but that “the paintings are dead” —meaning
his own. “The way this art works,” he added, “is to make you want it to
disappear so that you can mourn its loss and love it more completely.” Further
notes suggested that what was at stake was “a kind of premonition of death”
stirred up by doubts about who one is or ought to be. Salle evoked these
doubts with paintings that looked awkward, embarrassed, obsessively intro-
verted.
Drawing with the help of an opaque projector, he flaunted an exquisitely
clumsy hand. His colors were sour pastels and hot, flustered oranges and
greens mixed lugubriously with gray. Among his motifs were surly ducks
and goofy rabbits. There were bits of imagery borrowed from travelogues,
museum postcards, and family photograph albums—but not, it seemed, his
own. Salle’s imagery had an uprooted, homeless air. Amid free-floating
patches of fake-modern abstraction or pictures of once-stylish modern fur-
niture, Salle would place renderings of naked women bending at the waist
or lying on their backs in postures that expose their genitalia. Feminists at-
tacked him as a pornographer. Others noted that Salle borrowed his way of
layering his images from the German painter Sigmar Polke, who had bor-
rowed it from late works by the Dada veteran Francis Picabia. They would
point to his homages to Jasper Johns, his evocations of Cézanne and Giaco-
metti, and suggest that Salle was at best a mordantly elegant pasticheur.
86. David Salle, Cigarette lady: Blue and Yellow, 1979. Acrylic, oil, and
pencil on canvas, 51 in. x 6 ft. 8 in.

87. David Salle, Melancholy, 1983. Oil, acrylic, and umbrella on canvas,
61 in. x Of. 81% in.
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM PES)

Turning to Schnabel, detractors called him an overbearing caricature of an

Abstract Expressionist. Longo’s art was denounced as a bombastic rerun of
Pop. Yet their prices—everyone’s prices, it seemed—continued to rise.
“T don’t subscribe to the idea that a painter has to starve before he becomes
successful,” Mary Boone would say. Indeed, it seemed mean to insist that
artists endure poverty ina decade when $3.6 million was bid at auction for
Jasper Johns’s Out the Window (1962). In October 1987 the stock market
crashed, sending large amounts of speculative money in search of new in-
vestments. The following May, a bidder paid $4.18 million for another of
Johns’s paintings, Diver (1962). Then, one night in November 1988, his White
Flag went for seven million dollars at auction, and the next evening, his False
Start fetched seventeen million. Not long before, the dealer Richard Fiegan
had told Forbes magazine that “works of art have become quasi-financial
instruments’’—near-equivalents to bonds or certificates of deposit. Five-figure
prices for the works of stylish young painters did not seem absurd in a market
that valued Van Gogh’s Jrises at $53.9 million and Picasso’s Pierrette’s Wedding
at $51.3 million.
After the success of Schnabel’s two-gallery show in 1981, Castelli was eager
to collaborate with Boone in 1984, and again in 1986, on an exhibition of
Salle’s paintings. “David is an absolutely splendid young artist,” said Castelli
in the pages of Interview magazine. The eighties was the decade of shameless,
inflationary hype. So said the detractors, whose voices intensified the hubbub
of the boom.
We are witnessing “the inflation of minor talents into major ones, of mere
promise into claims on art history,” wrote Robert Hughes, the art critic of
Time magazine, in 1985. “The conditions that produce great art—patience,
internalization, relentless self-criticism”—have become impossible to sustain,
he added. Entranced by the boom, the art world has capitulated to “the
tyranny of novelty,” said Walter Darby Bannard in Arts Magazine. And when
Hilton Kramer surveyed the output of this tyranny, he concluded that “what
is at stake is the concept of seriousness.”
In full agreement with Kramer, Barbara Rose indicted the moment’s new
stars for displacing the tactics of commercial entertainment to the realm of
high art. This was the unforgivable sin, too great to be theirs alone. “We can
thank Andy Warhol for introducing the radical concept that art should be
easy, not difficult,” she wrote in the mid-eighties, when the boom seemed
unstoppable. “Easy art, of course, is dumb art, which is also the point,” Rose
explained. “You no longer need to be intelligent, sensitive, or cultivated to
participate in the happy art-world carnival of fun, fun, fun. Looking right
and having the cash are sufficient to get you a ticket to the best rides.”
When Warhol’s retrospective at the Whitney opened in 1970, a television
reporter pointed out that some critics do not consider his paintings to be art.
PRY WE PAVE Or A GireSWTUIRE

Declining to be provoked, Warhol said, “They’re probably right.” He was

less tentative with friends. The writer Victor Bockris remembers him dis-
missing certain of his productions with an arrogance worthy of a Warhol-
hater. In 1985 he designed stale but recognizably Warholian images of
Elizabeth I, Beatrix of the Netherlands, and a few of their royal colleagues.
“Andy felt complete contempt for the Queens,” says Bockris. “Usually he
would work with the printer, getting everything right, but he wouldn’t touch
these. He told me they were just trash for Europe. He felt the same way
about Kiku [1983] and Love [1983], which were silk-screen prints of flowers
and very tame nudes. These were just commercial trash.”
In 1982 Warhol had a fling with television, producing celebrity interviews
for cable stations. As art stars proliferated, he collaborated with two of the
most stylish—Francesco Clemente and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sometimes all
three would work on a canvas, sometimes only Warhol and Basquiat. In their
joint productions, there is no meshing, no interchange, only a display of
trademark styles. Each seems to be making a guest appearance in another
painter’s oeuvre.
At mid-decade, stylish dance clubs commissioned Basquiat, Clemente,
Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and other artists of the boom to convert their
trademarks into decor. Warhol declined this sort of work. He didn’t need
the exposure, a point he made with Warholian wit in 1985. In a corner of a
club called Area, he stood on a pedestal for a short time, then departed,
leaving the pedestal behind. This was his “invisible sculpture,” a reminder
that he had been the first to lead high art from the studio to the dance floor.
Area, the Palladium, the Mudd Club—all the art-smitten night spots of
the eighties were latter-day variations of the Dom, the club Warhol had
opened on St. Mark’s Place in 1966. It became routine to say that the eighties
themselves, with their frank devotion to glamour, had been prophesied by
Warhol’s art and attitudes. Visible or not, he was the decade’s tutelary spirit.
His pervasive presence was what seemed to matter, not the art he continued
to turn out.
In 1981 he ran off a series of canvases called Myths, which includes Howdy
Doody and Dracula, Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, Mickey Mouse and others.
Remarkably flat, these images could pass for the work of a moderately tal-
ented Warhol imitator, and the Endangered Species series (1983) is flatter
still. Worse yet, it’s fussy. Warhol’s pictures of tree frogs and pandas “looked
as if they had been whipped up with the children’s-bedroom market in
mind,” said Bob Colacello. Always, it seemed, the later Warhol had some
market in mind. Properly priced and distributed, a salable set of canvases
could bring in a quick $800,000.
That Warhol was a commercial artist—even a mercenary artist—is un-
deniable, yet he was never merely that. From 1961 until the end of his life,
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM 295)

88. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled

(Alert, GE), c. 1984-85. Acrylic, oil, and silk-screen ink
on canvas, 7 ft. x 6 ft. 5 in.

he played a double game. Until 1964, three years into his career as the fine
artist who produced Gold Marilyn Monroe, Warhol still employed Nathan
Gluck to assist him with thoroughly commercial projects. In 1976, as the
output of empty portraits accelerated, he painted the Skulls, those eloquent
addenda to his Death and Disaster pictures—the Car Wrecks, Suicides,
and Electric Chairs. At the height of the boom, when many saw War-
hol as the devil to whom American art had mortgaged its soul, his Last Suppers
subjected the big New York painting to a bitter and brilliant revision. Warhol
acknowledged the traditional gulf between difficult art and the glib, ingra-
tiating kind. He defied tradition only with his refusal to stay put on one side
of the gulf or the other. A commercial artist capable of fine art, he was a fine
artist willing to prettify the look of his best work for the low end of the market.
The stars of the eighties did not play this double game. For them, all
imagery appeared on a single continuum, which stretched from the painter’s
studio to the Hollywood sound stage. Feeling no estrangement from ordinary
life, they comported themselves as successful young professionals. Tradition-
294 THE FATE OF A GESTURE

ally, artists designed their own lofts; a practitioner of high art wouldn’t want
to live in a style imported from the ordinary world, no matter how elegant
that style might be. But that is precisely what David Salle wanted. His White
Street loft was designed by a fashionable young architect, Christian Hubert,
in fifties moderne. One specialist in images had employed another specialist
in images, and the results were reported in the February 1985 issue of House
and Garden. A month later, Vogue published an article on the loft of Julian
Schnabel, who had by then received so much media coverage that the writer
made the painter’s wife, Jacqueline, the nominal focus of the piece. In July
of that year, House and Garden ran its feature on Schnabel’s loft.
Schnabel lived in a nondescript neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side.
Salle, Clemente, and other artists of the boom had their studios in Tribeca,
a district to the south of SoHo which artists had colonized during the sev-
enties. Here the bars and restaurants of the eighties opened their doors. The
best-known was the Odeon on the lower reaches of West Broadway. Once,
it had been a cafeteria like the old Waldorf at Eighth Street and Sixth Av-
enue, where painters drank coffee in the thirties. Traces of that glum past
survived the remodeling, which filled the premises with knowing allusions to
Art Deco. Tables and chairs displayed an updated version of tubular mod-
erne. The Odeon’s menu invoked Paris and Milan. Its clientele tended toward
collectors, dealers, and artists pursuing, or hoping to pursue, upscale careers.
This was not a hangout for old-style bohemians and avant-gardists. Promi-
nent or obscure, veterans of other times preserved their pre-boom ways of
life in the spacious remains of former art worlds.
Piqued by the lack of contact between the generations, a writer named
Kathy Acker assembled a batch of artists, newcomers and veterans, for a
session of taped conversation. In a segment of the transcript published by
Artforum, Richard Serra tells Salle that he and painters of his generation have
accepted the history of their medium too easily; their art is the product of
style games, the clever mixing and matching of ready-made image-bits. Art
shouldn’t be that easy, Serra implies. There are large historical truths, and
artists must grapple with them.
Thus, Serra says, fashionable painting in the eighties is like a child under
pressure from two large, domineering parental figures: Pop Art and Abstract
Expressionism. So “there’s a contradiction. How do you get your feeling out
in terms of contemporary iconography? I mean how do you love Pollock and
Warhol and make a connection? ... You have Warhol and Pollock standing
for enormous notions of model figures for young painters to come up to...
I mean, that’s what we’re talking about. What do they do about that contra-
diction?” Salle interrupts: “Are you asking me who my mythological figures
are or are you imposing them on me?” “I’m not asking you,” says Serra.
“This thing is an accepted fact.” “Not to me,” Salle replies.
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM PASIS

This is what artists formed in earlier decades could not abide: the effron-
tery of artists new in the eighties, beginners who believed they could choose
at will their ancestors and their purposes. To an artist of Serra’s generation,
matters like these were determined by the high and hallowed truths of mod-
ernism. One became a serious artist by taking history’s dictates seriously. It
baffled Serra to find, in 1982, that the moment’s brightest young artists didn’t
want to be serious in the familiar modernist way. For Salle, the modernist
past was an array of options, not a source of transcendent imperatives.
The right panel of his Schizophrenia Prism (1982) is a field of gloomy green
inhabited by one of his more demure female nudes. To the left, the painter
has slathered on his paints with an abandon that stopped just short of burying
all his colors in muddy brown. You might think of Pollock, but not right
away, for this expanse of sticky pigment has a mocking resemblance to the
paintings of Jean-Paul Riopelle, a Canadian who settled in Paris toward the
end of the forties and cultivated dense variations on Pollock’s dripped
imagery.
Salle finds alloverness no more compelling than traditional composition.
Each is a possibility to be selected, or not, from a spectrum that begins with
the textures of abstract painting and leads eventually to the rhythms of com-
mercial moviemaking, which Salle employed as the director of a Hollywood
film called Search and Destroy (1994). Billed as a “screwball tragedy,” it had
a modest budget and was modestly successful. Without ceasing to be a painter,
Salle had become a thoroughly commercial movie director. This was an evo-
lution impossible for an avant-gardist in the tradition that led from Jackson
Pollock to Richard Serra, Salle’s inquisitor at the Artforum session.
Though the primmest members of the postwar avant-garde refused to
acknowledge popular culture, Willem de Kooning had an eye for glossy fe-
male images in magazine advertisements. He had an ear for songs from the
jukebox, yet he believed that his art occupied a plane far higher than that of
advertising and popular music. Avant-garde art was different in kind from
academic art, commercial art, entertainment—different and superior. De
Kooning gazed down at magazine ads from the far side of a gap that he
considered uncrossable. Pollock’s favorite kind of music, Dixieland jazz, came
to him across the same gap, which does not appear on the charts followed
by Salle and his generation. The artists of the boom were not egalitarian.
They considered some kinds of imagery more prestigious than others. Paint-
ing has more cachet than graphic design, obviously. Yet painting, no less than
design, is a process of choosing and deploying options from a continuum that
sweeps away the old faith in the irreconcilable differences between high and
low art.
89. Mike Bidlo, Jack the Dripper at Peg’s Place, 1982. Installation and perfor-
mance piece
 AQ
Salle’s use of Pollock shows oblique finesse. At another stage of sophistication,
Mike Bidlo’s exercise of the Pollock option made him an art-world equivalent
of an Elvis impersonator. In 1982 Bidlo mocked up a fireplace at P.S. | and
hung make-believe Pollock memorabilia above it. Nearby, he showed his
imitations of Pollock’s drip paintings. To complete the piece, called Jack the
Dripper at Peg’s Place, he had himself photographed while urinating in the
fireplace. Two years later, Bidlo lined a space with aluminum foil in homage
to the silver Factory and decorated it with his replicas of Warhol’s most
famous paintings. Next he copied works by Picasso, Matisse, and Léger, then
Lichtenstein, de Chirico, and Magritte. The more slavishly Bidlo tried to
embody the historically certified masters of modern art, the further he drifted
from modernism’s habit of doubt, its knack for experiment. Driven by a fan’s
uncritical faith, Bidlo could imitate but not elaborate.
Pollock’s place among the stars was acknowledged more succinctly by
Richard Prince, who simply tacked a photograph of Pollock to his studio
wall. An early member of the Metro Pictures group, Prince made his debut
with photographs of advertisements for luxury goods. Zooming in on the
image, he would reduce it to a fragment—a close-up ofa glove or a woman’s
face, with the surface texture exaggerated to bring out its seductive glow.
Liquor advertisements and raunchy photographs from biker magazines ap-
peared in his oeuvre as sumptuous Ektacolor prints. With photo-silk-screen
blowups, he transferred The New Yorker cartoons from the page to canvas.
Sometimes a one-liner from a joke book would float against blankness.
Over the seasons, Prince drew an equation between commercial images
and jokes, with their machinery of set-up and punch line. He is a Warholian,
so much so that he found a photograph of Pollock, blown up to a poster,
irresistible. His image “looked pretty good next to Steve McQueen’s, next to
298 (GE IVAIE Oly WN Giese

JFK’s, next to Vince Edwards’s, next to Jimmy Piersal’s, and so on,” Prince
wrote, adding that Pollock is an art star equal to “a TV star, a Hollywood
celebrity, a president of a country, a baseball great” and “whatever . . . used
to separate their value could now be done away with.”
Admiring Pollock as a star on the order of a ballplayer or a politician,
Bidlo and Prince ignored his claim to occupy a superior realm, beyond the
reach of ordinary life. By the old avant-garde standards of judgment, they
treated him badly. But artists like Bidlo and Prince did not apply those stan-
dards, nor did other artists of the boom. Their belief in stardom rendered all
stars equal, not in magnitude but in kind. Art stars, movie stars, stars of the
nightly news—-seen through the eyes of the eighties, every star glittered in
the same mundane heaven of celebrity.

Gianfranco Gorgoni is a news photographer with an eye for the art of

the New York avant-garde. His helicopter shots of Robert Smithson’s Spiral
Jetty gave the art world its memory of that work, and his picture of Serra
slinging hot lead has the aura of Hans Namuth’s pictures of Pollock slinging
paint. One summer day in the mid-eighties, Gorgoni found himself at the
beach in the Hamptons. His subject was Julian Schnabel, push broom in
hand, smearing color across an enormous canvas. Schnabel was playing
Pollock.
A woman strolled by and asked him what he was doing. “Painting,” said
the painter. “Oh,” said the woman, “where could I see some of your work?”
“Someday,” said Schnabel, “you'll see it in the Museum of Modern Art.”
Revising Pollock’s method, he would receive recognition equal to Pollock’s.
Since then, Schnabel has compared himself to Picasso. And he, too, has di-
rected a Hollywood movie, a film biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who
began as Samo the graffiti writer, became an artist of the boom, and died of
a drug overdose in 1988. Also, Schnabel produced for commercial distribution
an album of himself singing his own pop songs.
Whatever an old-line modernist might think, Schnabel is not splitting him-
self between irreconcilable worlds. He is realizing ambitions that acknowledge
no crucial difference between the art world and Hollywood and the world
of popular music. The art world was the site of his early success. It was not,
for him, a realm of transcendence reserved for initiates. Schnabel and other
artists of the boom see the art world as an upscale sector of the culture we
all share. Thus the narrative devices of the film biography appear on a
continuum with Pollock’s webs of paint, about which Schnabel has been
articulate.
In C.V.J.: Nicknames of Maitre d’s & Other Excerpts from Life (1987), Schna-
bel notes that “in Pollock’s work every element is subordinate to every other
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM 2D

element.” Or, every element has the power to “disrupt” other elements
nearby, and “their cumulative ability to disrupt each other” gives the image
its unity. This is a good account of the allover image, a formal option well
exercised by Schnabel’s plate paintings. Usually, the array of broken plates is
the ground for a milling crowd of figures, fragments of a compositional struc-
ture at odds with alloverness. When this crowd flashes too wide a variety of
styles, alloverness itself falls into fragments and is lost. Exercising the Pollock
option, swamping it with other options, Schnabel sometimes gives a painting
the look of an overdesigned, overdirected movie.
Robert Longo, too, tends toward cinematic excess. At the center of All You
Zombies: Truth Before God (1986) he placed a larger-than-life figure on a
slowly revolving platform. Cast in bronze from a grotesque assemblage of
military hardware, sports equipment, and household clutter, the creature as-
sumes a Quasimodo crouch, with one arm raised in the follow-me gesture of
an infantry leader. Wearing a parody of a Viking helmet, his two fanged
mouths open in violent grimace, he is an allegorical image of the spirit of
war. Behind him curves an immense canvas bearing an image of the loggias
at La Scala in Milan. Opera plus war comics plus horror movies plus big
New York painting plus the homage to Minimalism offered up by the steel
slab where the monster stands—A// You Zombies puts the entire jumble at
the service of an anti-war message.
Longo’s Heads Will Roll (1984-85) is a wall piece over twenty-six feet wide.
On the left, an immense medallion bristles with bladelike forms. To the

90. Robert longo, Heads Will Roll, 1984-85. lacquer and acrylic on wood,
epoxy on fiberglass and aluminum, and Plexiglas, 12 ft. x 26 ft. 1 in. x 46 in.
300 EE eA hE Ol AM Cle Sea Rie

right hangs a canvas where images of tract houses march in orderly rows. A
patch of these geometric forms is hidden by a white silhouette of David Byrne,
the lead singer of Talking Heads. He is frozen in a sprinter’s tilt: punk rocker
flees suburbia. Dissatisfied with the gray of the houses, Longo repainted them.
Then he ascended a ladder and, with the canvas flat on the studio floor,
flicked “red and white and gold paint across the landscape. I was in a Jackson
Pollock mood.”
Longo is pleased when viewers recognize his allusion to Pollock, yet he
doesn’t feel that Heads Will Roll is poorly seen if the provenance of his dripped
paint is overlooked. Nor does Salle object vigorously if viewers fail to see a
reference to Cézanne’s middle period in the dish of apples that hovers against
the background of the painting called Black Bra (1983). Addressing memory
with asides, these artists directed the full force of their imagery toward the
moment—toward an audience primed for an immediate response, as at the
movies, as when flipping through a magazine. This willingness to slight mem-
ory, to make it a plaything of moods, showed how thoroughly the young
artists of the boom had rejected the modernist ideal of high seriousness. For
that ideal is sustained not only by memory but by a solemn, even a fanatic
respect for the act of remembering.
At most, commercial artists encourage dim recollections of the past, vague
memories in the soft focus of nostalgia. And much commercial imagery tries
to lock us into a present filled with the dazzle of glamour. Artists in the
modernist tradition consider themselves superior to commercial artists because
they offer an escape from that dazzle. They offer to loft us to the far side of
a gulf that will protect us, absolutely, from the manipulations of consumerist
imagery. Though the artists of the boom recognized no such gulf, they were
not apologetic. Their art, they felt, deserved respect for its polish and its
power, which were considerable. Working the sophisticated end of a contin-
uum that reaches to the movies and beyond, to soap opera and television
advertising, they were well rewarded in the art market and by sympathetic
critics. Always, though, they felt the pull of the continuum’s most lucrative
end, and none felt it more powerfully than Longo.
His earliest works emerged from movie stills, and his most spectacular
ones, the wall pieces that made him a star, seemed to yearn for the scale of
the movie screen. As his career careened ahead, he kept an eye out for the
chance to make a feature film. In 1986 and again the following year, he
directed music videos that ran on MTV. In 1987 the New York Film Festival
presented his Arena Brains, a collection of short episodes in a variety of Hol-
lywood genres, from domestic romance to film noir. Then, in 1989, he bought
the screen rights to “Johnny Mnemonic,” a story by the science fiction writer
William Gibson. Longo’s feature-length, studio-produced version of the story
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM 301

premiered in 1995. Though his Johnny Mnemonic did only moderately well,
he had entered the ranks of Hollywood directors. Positioned now to make
more commercial movies, Longo had traveled so far along the image-
continuum that his claim on the artist’s role had all but faded. Recollecting
his life as a star of the art boom, he expresses more nostalgia than regret.
 Uj
7a
__
7

_
NS

| “i 7 7
91. Brice Marden painting, 1990. Photograph by Bill Jacobson
 EPILOGUE

For there to be a gulf between high art and low, one must believe in it.
During the eighties, the fate of Pollock’s gesture fell into the hands of those
who did not. Yet aesthetic beliefs are like styles. They fade only with reluc-
tance, and hardly ever vanish entirely. Painters young in the 1950s are still
elaborating de Kooning’s example. De Kooning himself was reworking his
own premises until just a few seasons ago. Lichtenstein continues to refine
the clarities of Lichtensteinian Pop. Rauschenberg’s flurry of images is un-
abated, as is the hum of Johns’s quietude. All these artists—in fact, most
artists—believe that there is a difference in kind between their images and
those of advertising and entertainment. They still believe in the gulf between
high and low art. Or one could say that they create this uncrossable gulf by
believing not only that it does exist but that it should. Some who sustain this
faith have recently put the legacy of Pollock to use.
In 1994 Robert Zakanitch exhibited a set of four canvases, each thirty feet
wide and filled with motifs borrowed from chinaware, upholstery, and wall-
paper. Manufacturers transpose handmade designs into mechanical idioms.
Zakanitch transposes them back into the idiom of painterly finesse, distrib-
uting them over the canvas with an evenness that settles a lingering question:
there is, after all, a resemblance between fabric design and the allover image.
Two decades ago, Zakanitch was among the leading proponents of pattern
and decoration. Since then, he has slowly raised P&D to the scale of the
domestic sublime, which is to say that he has infiltrated the region of the
easy chair and the china cabinet with the immensities of Pollock’s “nature.”
In Pat Steir’s latest works, paint drips and splashes over the canvas with
a grace that is almost arch. Against dark backgrounds, bright colors unfurl
in bursts that recall the fireworks in James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturnes of
the 1880s. It’s as if Steir had given Pollock new birth as a nineteenth-century
dandy. In Sean Scully’s paintings of the past decade or so, patterns of stripes,
304 THE FATE OF A GESTURE

light alternating with dark, make a familiar point: a painter’s repetitions could
go on forever if they were not halted, arbitrarily, by the canvas’s edge. A
Scully canvas has many edges, interior borders where one stripe-pattern meets
another and another. Often, the play of pattern against pattern generates the
stability, the sense of enclosing harmony, that we expect from a properly
composed picture of the Old World kind. Scully confronts Pollock with Mon-
drian, alloverness with composition, and in his best paintings neither of these
incompatible possibilities defeats the other.
In its way, a monochrome panel is an allover image—a potentially un-
bounded field gestured into visibility by a hand intent on obscuring its energy,
the more forcefully to insist on a solitary color. For two decades and more,
Brice Marden was New York’s premier monochromist. No hand was more
tactfully retiring than his. One could form simply no idea about his gesture.
After a time, he took to abutting two or more panels in a single work. In
the early eighties, long, narrow surfaces appeared in post-and-lintel patterns.
Marden was now making gestures of placement, like those of an ancient
architect. Then, as the eighties ended, his gestures became painterly in the
postwar American manner.
Applying his colors with a stick, Marden filled his canvases with an airy
tangle of sliding, swerving, curving lines. These webs didn’t resemble Pol-
lock’s denser ones so much as bring them to mind for comparison. Marden
did not become a Pollock imitator. His implement prevented that. Long and
limber, his stick puts him at a distancefrom the canvas, as Pollock’s stick
had done. Yet Marden’s maintains contact with the canvas, as Pollock’s did
not. Photographs of Pollock at work are filled with the tension of motion
suspended. The analogous photographs of Marden are serene, for his stick is
an instrument of contemplation. It turns painting into a meditation on the
process that leads from impulse to gesture to mark. In his recent paintings,
Marden does not confront Pollock with Old World composition. He is not
claiming Pollock’s “nature” for dandyism or domesticity. With the grayed-
out refinement of his colors, the self-conscious hesitations of his line, and
the judicious touch that gives each mark the feel of a corrective, he recalls
the subtleties of Johns. Marden has found a place for Pollock’s gesture in the
realm of Johnsian refinement.
Always honored by the New York art world, Pollock was never entirely
assimilated. His brilliance had a primordial feel. As Marden said in an in-
terview with Pat Steir, Pollock’s strength flowed from a “kind of innocence
and total conviction.” Sometimes, of course, Pollock fell into utter, abysmal
doubt. Yet, as Marden suggests, Pollock remained an innocent. Careening
between extremes, he never felt the fastidious compunctions, the hedged con-
victions, that produce urbanity like Johns’s. A quick plunge into Pollock’s
92 Brice Marden, Presentation, 1990-92. Oil on inen, 7 ft. | O% |i:
306 TRE FATE Or AGE Sure

ey . i ? a

ic ge | So
93. Robert Rahway Zakanitch, Big Bungalow Suite IV, 1992-93. Acrylic on
canvas, 11 x 30 ft. (artist in foreground)
FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM SOY.

ae LU \
. ap

maelstrom exhilarates us, but for long visits we prefer the infinite of Johns’s
imaginary studio. This is the realm of culture—of high culture, American-
style—and it is Marden’s astonishing accomplishment to have taught Pol-
lock’s image of unbounded nature to comport itself properly there.
In art, no fate is final. Yet for now the fate of Pollock’s gesture in Marden’s
hands feels decisive. The unassimilable has been assimilated. Culture has not
so much triumphed over nature as appreciated it into a state of compatibility
with the taste that has guided the appreciation all these years. Instead of
triumph there is a reconciliation of a thoroughness, a perfection, that only
high art can achieve. If the tone of it is melancholy, in the Johnsian style,
that is only a reminder that culture’s perfections, even when unbounded, have
their limitations.
 NOTES

CuHapTER |
7 “Tom wanted to show”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992,
and March 1, 1992.
7 “astonishing speed”: Elaine de Kooning, “Hans Hofmann Paints a Picture” (1950), The
Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings (New York: George Braziller, 1994),
67-73.
N “He told me”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992, and
March 1, 1992.
8 “Pollock’s barn didn’t make”: Robert Goodnough, interview with the author, January 22,
1992.
oo Pollock’s property: Helen A. Harrison, “On the Floor,” The Long Island Historical Journal
37 no, 2 (Spring 1991)3 1165 in, 7,
oo a kerosene stove: Barbara Rose, “Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Lee Kras-
ner,” Partisan Review 47 (Winter 1980): 86.
oo “T have no fears”: Jackson Pollock, statement, Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947-48): 79. Re-
printed in Adstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1990), 139-40.
oo “Pollock said he liked”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992,
and March 1, 1992.
\o she had a homely face: Eleanor Ward, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral
Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 174.
\o “knew all the abstract artists”: Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, “Who Was Jackson
Pollock?,” interview with Lee Krasner, Art in America 55 (May-June 1967): 49.
\o “To say that I flipped”: Lee Krasner, in John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now: Reminiscences
of the Fifttes—New York's Artists, Writers, Musicians, and Their Friends (Wainscott, N. Y.:
Pushcart Press, 1967), 230.
9 Pollock ... impressed her: Betsy Zogbaum, in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith,
Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 394-95.
10 “I was terribly drawn”: Lee Krasner, in Gruen, The Party’s Over Now, 230.
10 “After dinner”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992, and March
1, 1992.
10 “Is He the Greatest?”: “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United
States?” Life 27 (August 8, 1949): 42-43, 45.

CuHapTER 2
13 boots and a cowboy hat: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An
American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 186. Pollock didn’t know how to
ride a horse. See Paul Brach, review of Jeffery Potter’s To a Violent Grave, in Art in
America 74 (April 1986): 11.
14 photographs of . . . farmhouses: Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Draw-
SIO INOW EES

ings, and Other Works, 4 vols., ed. Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), vol. 4, 204, figs. 3 and 4.
wanted to study art: Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, 21.
“freedom and rhythem”: Jackson Pollock, letter to Charles Pollock, January 31, 1930, in
O'Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 4, 209.
“an Artist of some kind”: Jackson Pollock, letter to Charles and Frank Pollock, Octo-
ber 22, 1929, in O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 4, 208.
“There was a rhythm”: George McNeil, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral
Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 36.
six feet tall: Potter, To a Violent Grave, 18.
Benton’s slurs: Philip Pavia, in Potter, To A Violent Grave, 36.
Struggling to draw: Peter Busa, in Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,
164.
Historians have argued: See, for example, Stephen Polcari, “Jackson Pollock and Thomas
Hart Benton,” Arts Magazine 53, no. 7 (March 1979): 120-24.
“of a most minimal order”: Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, rev. ed. (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1983), 332.
“found their essential rhythms”: Thomas Hart Benton, letter to Francis V. O'Connor
(1962), quoted in Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987), 53.
16 “it was obvious”: Thomas Hart Benton, in Polly Burroughs, Thomas Hart Benton: A Por-
trait (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 118.
16 “mother had to know”: Frank Pollock, in Potter, To A Violent Grave, 27.
ie a speakeasy: Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, 167-68.

CHAPTER 3
19 Museums . . . were sanctuaries: Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, rev. ed.
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 265.
19 “native painters”: Thomas Hart Benton, “Form and the Subject,” Arts Magazine 5 (June
1924): 303-8.
20 “protesting too much”: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An
American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 185.
“the country began”: Jackson Pollock, letter to Charles Pollock, July 1931, in Francis V.
O'Connor, Jackson Pollock, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1967), 16.
NO — Painting . . . all day: Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 200.
22 “Benton is beginning”: Jackson Pollock, letter to Roy Pollock, February 3, 1933, in Jackson
Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols., ed. Francis
Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978),
vol. 4, 214.
Time magazine: “U.S. Scene,” Time 26 (December 24, 1934): 24.
“Any fascist or semi-fascist”: Stuart Davis, “Rejoinder to Thomas Benton,” Art Digest 9
(April 1935): 13.
a Marxist history: Leo Huberman, We, the People, with illustrations by Thomas Hart
Benton (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932). For Benton’s Marxism, see Ellen G.
Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 25 n. 9.
“(Rapp, Owen, Amana)”: These are nineteenth-century settlements in Indiana and Iowa;
in each of them, property was held in common. See Thomas Hart Benton, statements
NOTES
Sal

(1935), in. A Thomas Hart Benton Miscellany: Selections from His Published Opinions 1916—
1960, ed. Matthew Baigell (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1971), 64.
23 the Bentonite ideal: Thomas Hart Benton, statements (1935), in Baigell, A Thomas Hart
Benton Miscellany, 23, 78.

Cuapter 4
25 “parties were never as wonderful”: David Smith, in Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning,
exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 18.
25 strikers charged by mounted police: Jimmy Ernst, A Nor-So-Still Life: A Memoir (New
York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984), 194.
25 “You learned to eat practically nothing”: Harlan Phillips, “Interview with Burgoyne
Diller” (October 2, 1964), typescript, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution,
i, pe
26 earned his meals: Barbara Haskell, Burgoyne Diller, exhibition catalog (New York: Whit-
ney Museum of American Art, 1990), 165. See Phillips, “Interview with Burgoyne
Diller,” 15.
26 a courageous choice: Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1987), 112.
26 Mark Rothko: Diane Waldman, Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: A Retrospective, exhibition cat-
alog (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1978), 266.
26 Some city inspectors: Ernst, A Not-So-Suill Life, 185.
26 a gallery open to all applicants: Phillips, “Interview with Burgoyne Diller,” 11.
26 an out-of-work artist: Harold Rosenberg, “The Profession of Art: W.P.A. Art Project,”
Art on the Edge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 195-97.
26 “We want bread”: Hayden Herrera, “John Graham: Modernist Turns Magus,” Arts Mag-
azine 51 (October 1976): 105.
26 “WE WANT BON-VIVANT Joss”: Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, 18.
26 “can be as ruggedly individualistic”: Phillips, “Interview with Burgoyne Diller,” 10-11.
‘if “encouragement of the fine arts”: L. W. Robert, Jr., statement to the press (1933), quoted
in Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American
Thought (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), 145.
DY “in keeping with our highest democratic ideals”: Franklin Roosevelt, letter to Edward
Bruce, 1939, quoted in Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, New Deal for Art: The
Government Art Projects of the 1930s with Examples from New York City and State, exhibition
catalog (Hamilton, N.Y.: Gallery Association of New York State, 1977), 11.
27 “if the salesgirls went out on strike”: Joseph Solman, “The Easel Division of the WPA
Federal Arts Project,” The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, ed. Francis
V. O'Connor (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1973), 120.
27, artists on the Federal Arts Project: Park and Markowitz, New Deal for Art, 16.
27 a standard of seriousness: Willem de Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse .. . ,” interview
with David Sylvester (1960), ed. Thomas B. Hess, Location 1 (Spring 1963). Reprinted in
Willem de Kooning: Pittsburgh International Series, exhibition catalog (Pittsburgh: Museum
of Art, Carnegie Institute, 1979), 25.
28 “This was around 1936”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992,
and March 1, 1992.
28 occasionally delayed sum: Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life, 191; William Baziotes, William
Baziotes Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, microfilm
N70-24.
28 his time on the WPA: Ethel Baziotes, interview with Nancy R. Versaci, May 22, 1984,
SZ INOS

quoted in Nancy R. Versaci, “Flying Tigers,” Flying Tigers: Painting and Sculpture in New
York 1939-1946, exhibition catalog (Providence, R.I.: Bell Gallery, Brown University,
1935) os
i)co a Bogart-like figure: Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life, 187.
“personal code” of “ascetic discipline”: Harold Rosenberg, “The Thirties,” The De-
definition of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 186.
“when de Kooning was very upset”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January
15, 1992, and’ March 1) 1992:
“T often heard him say”: Edwin Denby, “On Painting: The Thirties,” Dancers, Buildings
and People in the Streets (New York: Curtis Books, 1965), 202-3.
“worn-down cafeteria fork”: Edwin Denby, “The Climate,” Collected Poems (New York:
Full Court Press, 1975), 3.
“Maybe the talking”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992, and
March 1, 1992.
“the years of hanging around”: B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible,
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 68.
“of the people and for the people”: Sol Wilson, in Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life, 187.
avant-gardists in “ivory towers”: Phillips, “Interview with Burgoyne Diller,” 12.
“T, for one,”: Lee Krasner, in Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, exhibition catalog
(Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983), 37.

CHAPTER 5
31 “anticipated Cubist-Constructivist esthetics”: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art
(1936), exhibition catalog, reprint (Cambridge, Mass.: Belnap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1984), 221.
3] Dorothy Miller: Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of
Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 137-38.
32 “There was little support”: Carter Ratcliff, interview with Lee Krasner, Art in America 65
(September/October 1977): 82.
Krasner’s schooling: See Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective (Houston: Museum of
Fine Arts; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983), 163; and Cynthia Goodman, Hans
Hofmann, exhibition catalog (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), 187—
88.
Hofmann in Paris: See William C. Seitz, Hans Hofmann, exhibition catalog, with selected
writings by the artist (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963); and Ellen G. Landau,
“The French Sources for Hans Hofmann’s Ideas on the Dynamics of Color-Created
Space,” Arts Magazine 51 (October 1976): 76-81.
“no explanations”: Hans Hofmann, in Dorothy Seckler, “Can Painting Be Taught?
1. Beckman’s Answer 2. Hofmann’s Answer,” Artnews 50 (March 1951): 40. See also Seitz,
Hans Hofmann, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963), 8.
“started hitting people”: Peter Busa, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biog-
raphy of Jackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 50.
The Spirit of Western Civilization: Steven Nafieh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock:
An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 274-75.
34 “a very hard thing to pin down”: Holger Cahill, in Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal
for Artists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 114.
“It didn’t matter”: Harold Rosenberg, in Rose, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, 34.
Pollock’s classmate: Musa Meyer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 13.
INI@NEERS Sikes}

35 Diller agreed to visit Pollock in his studio: Burgoyne Diller, interview with Ruth Gurin,
March 21, 1964: 5. Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

CHAPTER 6
39 “lost its dynamic quality”: Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 238, 239, 241.
40 Jungian interpretations: Claude Ceruschi, Jackson Pollock: “Psychoanalytic” Drawings, ex-
hibition catalog (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1962), 7-8, 18-20.
40 the artist’s helpless drinking: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock:
An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 335-36, 359-60.
40 “finds it difficult to form”: Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, 363.
40 “twelve, fourteen hours . . .”: Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, “Who Was Jackson
Pollock?,” interview with Lee Krasner, Art in America 55 (May-June 1967): 50-51.

CHAPTER 7
43 Born Ivan Dombrowsky: John Graham, System & Dhialectics of Art (1937), ed. Marcia
Epstein Allentuck (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 4-11.
43 a place in the avant-garde: Irving Sandler, “John D. Graham: The Painter as Esthetician
and Connoisseur,” Artforum 7 (October 1968): 50.
43 “It was said”: Thomas B. Hess, “John Graham, 1881-1961,” Artnews 50 (September
1961): 51.
43 automatic writing: Graham, System & Dialectics of Art, 103, 135, 166.
43 talk of spontaneity: See André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), Manifestoes of
Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1972), 26.
44 long .. . conversations with Pollock: Graham, System & Dialectics of Art, 135, 160, 174.
44 Bentonoid sneers: Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987), 101—2.
44 Pollock’s first critical notice:J[ames| Llane], “Melange,” Artnews 40 (January 12-31,
1942): 29.
44 later described as “horror”: Barnett Newman, “Surrealism and the War” (1945), Barnett
Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1990), 96.
44 the roster of émigrés: Rona Roob, “Refugee Artists,’ MoMA: The Members Quarterly of
the Museum of Modern Art 6 (Winter 1991): 18-19.
44 refused to speak English: Francine du Plessix, “The Artist Speaks: My Father, Max Ernst,”
interview with Jimmy Ernst, Art in America 56 (November-December 1968):
Neh
45 “subject to the principle of pleasure alone”: André Breton, “Surrealism and Painting”
(1927), in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1965), 84.
46 his friend William Baziotes: Sidney Simon, interview with Robert Motherwell (1967),
Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 35-38.
46 “To my astonishment”: Paul Schimmel et al., The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism
into Abstract Expressionism, exhibition catalog (Newport Beach, Calif.: Newport Harbor
Art Museum, 1986), 18, 22, 39, 100, 106.
49 “Jackson yelling”: B. H. Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock,” Jackson
314 IN'OM Ex

Pollock: Black and White, exhibition catalog (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery,
1969), 7.

CuapTer 8
51 a “very poor” Guggenheim: Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), 31, 38.
51 “with pictures”: Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1983), 209-10.
52 “pictures were easier to obtain”: John Richardson, “Go Go Guggenheim,” The New York
Review of Books 39 (July 16, 1992): 20.
52 Art of This Century opened late in 1942. See Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim,
287.
52 “break down the physical”: Frederick Kiesler, “Design Correlation,” VVV 2—3 (March
1943): 76.
52 “was uterine architecture”: Rudi Blesh, Modern Art USA: Men, Rebellion, Conquest 1900—
1956 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 219.
53 “Pretty awful, isn’t it?”: See Jimmy Ernst’s two versions of this story, in A Not-So-Still
Life: A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984), 241-42; and in Jeffrey Potter, To
a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1985), 71-72.
53 “the greatest painter since Picasso”: Guggenheim, Out of This Century, 315.
53 Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Jean Arp: Leland Bell, in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 72.
53 “until I left America”: Guggenheim, Out of This Century, 315.
56 “looks pretty big”: Jackson Pollock, letter to Charles Pollock, July 29, 1943, in Francis V.
O’Connor, Jackson Pollock, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1967), 28.
56 This stunt is a matter of public record: Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim, 325-26.
57 “it was the only way”: Guggenheim, Our of This Century, 316.

CHAPTER 9
59 “during a northeaster”: Barbara Rose, “An American Great: Lee Krasner” (1972), in Hans
Namuth, 25 Artists (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1982), n. pag.
59 The run-down house: Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson
Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 85-86.
62 “that we would want to support”: Peter Blake, in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 96.
62 “Sometimes,” said Barr: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock,’ XXV Biennale
di Venezia Catalogo (Venice: Alfieri, 1950), 385. Reprinted in Artnews 49, no. 4 (Summer
1950): 60.
62 as Greenberg had been arguing: Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean
Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock” (1947), The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John
O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 2, 125; and “The Present Pros-
pects of American Painting and Sculpture” (1947), vol. 2, 166.
63 excreted the major paintings: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock:
An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 540-41.
63 “the reason he put his canvas”: Patsy Southgate, in Potter, To A Violent Grave, 88.
64 “What nonsense!”: Grace Glueck, “New Biography, New Debates on Jackson Pollock,”
The New York Times (January 25, 1990): C17.
64 “control the flow of paint”: William Wright, “An Interview with Jackson Pollock” (1950),
NOTES SD)

in Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Mod-
ern Art, 1967), 80.
64 “aerial sphincter”: Max Kozloff, “Jackson Pollock” (1964), Renderings: Critical Essays on a
Century of Modern Art (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 146.
65 “did not know yet”: Robert Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Artnews 50, no. 3
(May 1951): 40—41.

Cuapter 10
67 “Jackson and I were standing”: Lee Krasner, in Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective,
exhibition catalog (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1983), 98. .
67 “I’m sort of way out there”: Jackson Pollock, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An
Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 203.
67 “a betrayal”: Grace Hartigan, interview with the author, January 28, 1992.
67 “he was half-loaded”: James T. Valliere, “De Kooning on Pollock: An Interview” (1967),
reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 373, 374.
6 co tattered Bentonisms: Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1989), 24, 84.
68 “You could kill a man”: Ibid., 259 n. 2.
68 “spiritual projection”: Hans Hofmann, in William C. Seitz, Hans Hofmann (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1963), 14.
68 “the problem of civilizing”: Hans Hofmann, “Painting and Culture” (1931), Search for the
Real and Other Essays, ed. Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1967), 56.
68 “put up or shut up”: Carter Ratcliff, interview with Lee Krasner, Art in America 65
(September/October 1977): 82.
69 “IT am nature”: Landau, Jackson Pollock, 159. See also Steven Naifeh and Gregory White
Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 869.
69 “ritualistically attended”: Harold Rosenberg, “Joan Mitchell: Artist Against Background,”
Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 84.
6 \o essential being: Hofmann, Search for the Real, 55, 63, 70. See p. 72 for Hofmann’s warning
that “spirituality in an artistic sense should not be confused with religious meaning.”
However, modernist painters, like their Romantic predecessors, often made art a vehicle
—and a disguise—for religious impulses.
69 “But if you work from inside”: Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, 486.
70 ungraspably large in scale: See Carter Ratcliff, “Big for the Eye,” Jackson Pollock: Drip
Paintings on Paper, 1945—1949, exhibition catalog (New York: C&M Arts, 1993), n. pag.
70 “Tt all ties together”: Jackson Pollock, in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 135.
70 a clam without a shell: Grace Hartigan, interview with the author, January 28, 1992.
71 his friend Clyfford Still: Jackson Pollock, in Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists
(New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), 84.

Cuapter 11 :
74 “I paint only myself, not nature”: Clyfford Sull, interview with Benjamin J. Townsend
(1961), Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1990), 196.
74 “total psychic unity”: Clyfford Stull, interview with Ti-Grace Sharpless (1963), Clyfford Still
316 NOTES

1904-1980: The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections, exhibition catalog, ed. Thomas Kel-
lein (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 162.
74 “To be stopped by a frame’s edge”: Ibid.
74 “hopelessly trapped in the grids”: Clyfford Still, letter to Mark Rothko, November 10,
1951, reprinted in Clyfford Still, exhibition catalog, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), 57.
74 “a melancholy, almost a tragic sense”: Peggy Guggenheim, letter to Herbert Read, Feb-
ruary 2, 1946, in Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1988), 338.
75 “form a theogony”: Mark Rothko, introduction, Clyfford Still, exhibition catalog (New
York: Art of This Century, 1946). Reprinted in Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 203.
75 “A strange man,” she decided: Peggy Guggenheim, in Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Gug-
genheim, 338.
75 “the high and limitless plain”: Clyfford Still, letter to Gordon Smith, January 1, 1959, in
O'Neill, Clyfford Still, 196.
76 “the people who are looking”: Mark Rothko, statement (1954), in Ross, Abstract Expres-
sionism, 171.
76 “the states of mind”: Mark Rothko, statement (undated), in Ross, Abstract Expressionism,
173.
76 “lives by companionship”: Mark Rothko, statement (1947), in Ross, Abstract Expressionism,
170.
76 “made it clear”: Clyfford Still, “An Open Letter to an Art Critic” (1963), in O'Neill,
Clyfford Still, 47.
76 “To memorialize in the instruments”: Clyfford Still, statement (1974) on 1950-A No. 2
(PH-336) (1950), reprinted in O’Neill, Clyfford Still, 190-91.
76 “sterile conclusions of Western European decadence”: Clyfford Still, letter to Gordon
Smith, January 1, 1959, in O'Neill, Clyfford Szill, 195.
76 “For the price”: Clyfford Still, “An Open Letter to an Art Critic” (1963), in ONeill,
Clyfford Still, 47, 54.
77 “When I expose a painting”: Clyfford Still, letter to an anonymous friend, May 1951, in
Kellein, Clyfford Still 1904-1980, 156.
77 “Demands for communication”: Clyfford Still, statement, Fifteen Americans, exhibition
catalog, ed. Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 22.
77 embodied for his time: Clyfford Still, letter to Felicia Geffen, September 12, 1972, in
O'Neill, Clyfford Still, 203-4.

CuHapter 12
79 “stand all alone”: Willem de Kooning, interview with Irving Sandler (1959), in Irving
Sandler, The New York School: The Painters & Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper
& Row, 1978), 9.
79 “out of John Brown’s body”: Willem de Kooning, in Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning,
exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 16. See also Thomas B.
Hess, Willem de Kooning (New York: Braziller, 1959), 12.
79 “the most American of us all”: Henry D. Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
(1859), Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1973), 125.
79 “basic human emotions”: Mark Rothko, in Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New
York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 94.
80 “in society signify what is just”: Piet Mondrian, “A Dialogue on Neoplasticism” (1919),
NOTES S17,

reprinted in Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Styl (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), 121, 123.
80 the architecture of utopia: The progress from painting to utopia is a persistent theme in
all the writings of Mondrian. For a particularly clear description of this hoped-for devel-
opment, see Piet Mondrian, “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art” (1936), in The New Art—
The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. Harry Holtzman
and Martin S. James (Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1986), 299-300.
80 “And man?” asked Mondrian: Piet Mondrian, “Home—Street—City” (1926), in Holtz-
man and James, The New Art—The New Life, 209, 211-12.
80 “an empty world of geometric formalisms”: Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now”
(1948), Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 173.
8 —_ “it is precisely this death image”: Barnett Newman, statement for the catalog of The New
American Painting (1959), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews,
179.
8 — “busted geometry”: Barnett Newman, in Selden Rodman, The Insiders: Rejection and Re-
discovery of Man in the Arts of Our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press >

1960), 34.
8 pars “T’ve licked Mondrian”: Barnett Newman, in Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New
York: Walker and Company, 1969), 68.
81 most ingenious explicator: See Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, exhibition catalog (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971).
81 “He came over”: Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Company,
1969), 43.
8 _— Locke’s tabula rasa: In fact, the term tabula rasa does not appear in John Locke’s writings,
though the image of the mind as a blank slate at birth is the starting point of An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, which he published in 1690. First used by Aristotle in
De Anima, tabula rasa reappeared in an early French translation of Locke’s image of the
newborn mind as a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.” The mind
generates ideas by reflecting on perceptions, an activity which Locke conceived as a kind
of labor. Through reflection and other mental operations, the mind turns “simple sensa-
tions” into “complex ideas.” Eventually, the mind possesses “a mass of knowledge” (Essay,
bk. 2, ch. 1). Knowledge is thus a kind of property that individuals develop, through their
own effort, from the interplay between the world and the original blankness of their
minds. Property in the ordinary sense is gained by an analogous process, according to
the second of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690). The primordial state of na-
ture grants everything to everyone in common. By labor, one transforms things;
one removes them from the state of nature, and thus they become one’s property (second
Treatise, ch. 27). Locke’s Essay and his second Treatise have in common the image of the
individual emerging, by his or her own labor, from a state of uncivilized blankness. Thus
Locke’s writing was of great importance to James Madison and others who assigned
themselves the task of inventing a government in the New World, and Lockean ideas
about the tabula rasa and the self-created individual echo through the comments of Amer-
ican artists who feel acutely the isolation of the United States from the traditions of the
Old World. See Carter Ratcliff, “Dramatis Personae, Part IV: Proprietary Selves,” Art in
America 74 (February 1986): 9, 11, 13.
8 —_ “sivilize” him: Mark Twain, Mississippi Writings: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Guy
Cardwell (New York: Library of America, 1982), 912.
8 ho “almost fifteen years ago”: Dorothy Gees Seckler, “Frontiers of Space,” interview with
Barnett Newman (1962), in O'Neill, Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 251.
318 NOTES

82 “all the members”: Barnett Newman, “On the Need for Political Action by Men of Cul-
ture” (1933) and “Our Cultural Program” (1933), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman: Selected
Writings and Interviews, 5, 6, 7.
82 “The aesthetic act”: Barnett Newman, “The First Man Was an Artist” (1947), in O'Neill,
Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 158.
82 “outside society”: Barnett Newman, “A Conversation: Barnett Newman and Thomas B.
Hess” (1966), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 275; and “In-
terview with Emile de Antonio” (1970), ibid., 304.
84 “An artist paints”: Barnett Newman, statement in Tiger’s Eye (1947), in O'Neill, Barnett
Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 160.
84 “the terror of the Self”: Barnett Newman, note in the catalog of the 8th Sdo Paulo Biennial
(1965), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 187.
84 Newman’s and Pollock’s birthdays: Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker
and Company, 1969), 57.
84 admiration for Pollock’s art: Annalee Newman, interview with the author, March 3, 1992.
84 “had meaning only in relation”: Barnett Newman, in Yves-Alain Bois, Painting as Model
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 254.

CuHapter 13
87 “a flat, war-shattered city”: Henry McBride, “Jackson Pollock” (1949), The Flow of Art:
Essays and Criticisms of Henry McBride, ed. Daniel Catton Rich (New York: Atheneum,
1975), 425.
87 “painting is self-discovery”: Jackson Pollock, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists
(New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 85.
87 “the modern artist is working”: William Wright, interview with Jackson Pollock, summer
1950, in Francis V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1967), 80. This interview was never broadcast.
87 “Painting is no problem”: Jackson Pollock, in Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, “Who
Was Jackson Pollock?,” interview with Lee Krasner, Art in America 55 (May-June
1967): 51.
88 Cubism, in particular: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An Amer-
ican Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 591.
88 lessons learned from Hans Hofmann: For Greenberg’s acknowledgement of his debt to
Hofmann’s theories, see Clement Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Hans Hofmann
and a Reconsideration of Mondrian’s Theories” (1945), Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays
and Writings, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), vol. 2, 18-19.
88 “modern art didn’t drop out”: Wright, interview with Pollock, in O’Connor, Jackson
Pollock, 80.
88-89 ‘a god-damned European”: Grace Hartigan, interview with the author, January 28,
1992.
89 “Paul, this is exotic music”: Paul Falkenberg, “Notes on the Genesis ofan Art Film,” in
Hans Namuth, Pollock Painting (New York: Agrinde Publications, 1980), n. pag.
89 the last day of filming: Namuth, “Photographing Pollock,” Pollock Painting. See also Jef-
frey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 130-33; Lee Krasner, in John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now:
Reminiscences of the Fifties—New York's Artists, Writers, Musicians, and Their Friends (1967;
Wainscott, N.Y.: Pushcart Press, 1989), 231; du Plessix and Gray, “Who Was Jackson
Pollock?,” 49; and Lee Krasner, in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 165.
NI@ TES BY

90 “something a little odd”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992,
and March 1, 1992.
9 pat taffeta, silk, and ostrich feathers: “American Fashion: The New Soft Look,” Vogue 17
(March 1, 1951): 156-59.
9 A “There was a feeling”: Rudy Burckhardt, interviews with the author, January 15, 1992,
and March 1, 1992. Later, Krasner said that Pollock, too, felt that he had made enough
drip paintings. “He couldn’t have gone further doing the same thing,” she said, in B. H.
Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner,” Jackson Pollock: Black and White, exhibition
catalog (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969), 7.
94 “I’m not working much anymore”: Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, xvi.
94 “In the forties”: Elaine de Kooning, in Gruen, The Party’s Over Now, 213, 218.
94 Pollock’s appearances at the Cedar: Franz Kline, in Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock:
An American Saga, 758.
96 “What?” said Pollock: Gruen, The Party’s Over Now, 228-29.
96 an “ugh artist”: John Ferren, in Harry F. Gaugh, Willem de Kooning (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1983), 8.

CuHapTer 14
97 “That’s what fascinates me”: Harold Rosenberg, “Interview with Willem de Kooning”
(1972), Willem de Kooning, exhibition catalog (Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie In-
stitute, 1979), 148.
100 “The vegetation here”: Willem de Kooning, letter to Joseph and Olga Hirshhorn,
May 13, 1965, in Judith Zilczer, Willem de Kooning (Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Mu-
seum and Sculpture Garden, 1993), 159.
100 “were not interested in painting per se”: Willem de Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse... ,”
interview with David Sylvester (1960), ed. Thomas B. Hess, Location 1 (Spring 1963).
Reprinted in Willem de Kooning: Pittsburgh International Series, exhibition catalog (Pitts-
burgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, 1979), 24.
10 — “What the hell”: Willem de Kooning, interview with Bert Schierbeek (1969), Willem de
Kooning: Collected Writings, ed. George Scrivani (Madras and New York: Hanuman Books,
1988), 160—61.
101 “and his pointing out to me”: Edwin Denby, “On Painting: The Thirties,” Dancers, Build-
ings and People in the Streets (New York: Curtis Books, 1965), 202.
104 “I never made a Cubistic painting”: Rosenberg, “Interview with Willem de Kooning,”
151.

Cuapter 15
107 he denounced communist dogma: Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: New York Intellectuals
in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 134.
107 one must wear a mask: Harold Rosenberg, “From Play Acting to Self,” Act and the Actor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 126-32.
107-8 vulgarity of Western society: Harold Rosenberg, “Action Painting: Crisis and Distor-
tion,” The Anxious Object (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 39.
108 “a grand crisis”: Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” The Tradition of
the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 25.
108 “it was decided to paint”: Ibid., 30.
108 “gesticulated upon the canvas”: Ibid., 31.
108 “He is not a young painter”: Ibid., 29-30.
108 “the act-painting is of the same”: Ibid., 28.
320 IN‘Owiies

109 de Kooning’s willingness to doubt: Harold Rosenberg, “De Kooning: ‘Painting Is a

Way, ” The Anxious Object, 109, 111, 113.
109 Sartre on Giacometti: Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Quest for the Absolute” (1948), trans. Wade
Baskin, in Essays in Existentialism, ed. Baskin (New York: Citadel Press, 1990), 392, 395,
399.
109 “reading Harold’s action-painting piece”: Michael Goldberg, interview with the author,
May 16, 1993.
109 “we weren’t influenced directly”: Willem de Kooning, interview with Irving Sandler
(1959), in Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expres-
stonism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 98.
109-11 “It was a mood, all right”: Alex Katz, interview with the author, June 15, 1994.
111 billowing clouds of pretense: Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 32-35.
111 Pollock at Rosenberg’s house: Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 140.
111 “Don’t tell me”: Harold Rosenberg, in Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave:An Oral Biography
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 181.
111 the best interests of pure painting: Clement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting”
(1955), The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. 3, 233-34.
112 “Rosenberg’s piece on me”: Jackson Pollock, in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy
Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 197.
112 “Painting for de Kooning”: Rosenberg, “De Kooning: On the Borders of the Act,” The
Anxious Object, 124.

CHaptTeER 16
113 “lyrical and calm”: T[homas] B. Hless], “Is Today’s Artist with or Against the Past?,”
interview with Willem de Kooning, Artnews 57 (Summer 1958): 27, 56.
113 “I took the attitude”: Willem de Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse . . . ,” interview with
David Sylvester (1960), ed. Thomas B. Hess, Location 1 (Spring 1963), in Willem de Koo-
ning: Pittsburgh International Series, exhibition catalog (Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Car-
negie Institute, 1979), 27-28.
113 “always in the picture somewhere”: Willem de Kooning, in Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35
(1950), in Ann Eden Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), 321—22.
114 To paint like Soutine and Ingres: Rudy Burckhardt, in Burckhardt and Simon Pettet,
Talking Pictures: The Photography of Rudy Burckhardt (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Books,
1984), 150; Burckhardt, “Long Ago with Willem de Kooning,” Art Journal 48 (Fall 1989):
DDS.
114 “never seems to make me peaceful or pure”: Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art
Means to Me” (1951), in Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, exhibition catalog (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 145.
’
114 “painter and painting are one”: Harold Rosenberg, “De Kooning: ‘Painting Is a Way,’’
The Anxious Object (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 112, 109-20, passim. See
also Harold Rosenberg, “De Kooning: On the Borders of the Act,” ibid., 123-29, passim.
114 painters become themselves: Rosenberg, “De Kooning: On the Borders of the Act,” The
Anxious Object, 124.
114 more purely “optical”: Clement Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Willem de Koo-
ning” (1948), The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. 2, 229.
116 “It is impossible today”: Hess, Willem de Kooning, 74.
NOTES
B2F

116 “The landscape is in the Woman”: Ibid., 100. In 1955 de Kooning painted a picture
called
Woman as Landscape.
116 “could sustain this thing”: Willem de Kooning, in Harold Rosenberg, “Willem de
Koo-
ning” (1973), Art & Other Serious Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
164.
The ellipsis is in the original.
116 “You can’t always tell”: Willem de Kooning, in David L. Shirey, “Don Quixote in
Springs,” Newsweek 70 (November 20, 1967): 80.
116 “are always original”: “Art: Willem the Walloper,” Time 57 (April 30, 1951): 63.
116 sales were negligible: Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning (New York: George Braziller,
1959), 116.
116 “Janis wants me”: See Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, exhibition catalog (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 74. See also Rosenberg, “De Kooning: ‘Painting Is
a Way,” The Anxious Object, 119. Rosenberg remembered de Kooning saying, while he
was still entangled with the Women, “If I had character, I would paint abstractions.”
117 “park way landscapes”: Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, exhibition catalog (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 26.
117 $2,600 in 1950: Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, “Who Was Jackson Pollock?,” in-
terview with Tony Smith, Art in America 55, no. 3 (May-June 1967): 54.
117 “luxury lofts’: Thomas B. Hess, De Kooning: Recent Paintings (New York: Walker and
Company, 1967), 10. Even at the end of the fifties, a de Kooning canvas offered for sale
in New York fetched less than a work of comparable size by contemporary Parisian
abstractionists now considered avant-garde hacks. See Thomas B. Hess, “A Tale of Two
Cities” (1964), The New Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966),
L62enee le
117 a studio built—and endlessly rebuilt: Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, exhibition
catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 101-2, 122.
WY “Enormously!” said de Kooning: Harold Rosenberg, “Interview with Willem de Kooning”
(1972). Reprinted in Willem de Kooning: Pittsburgh International Series, 157.
“the center of things”: Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, exhibition catalog (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 101.

CuHaptTeER 17
121 According to a memoir: Ruth Kligman, Love Affair (New York: Morrow, 1974), 30—45.
121 Other accounts: B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1972), 232.
121 As summer started: Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 230.
122 a dozen roses: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American
Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 783-84.
124 “a strange sensation”: Mercedes Molleda, review of The New American Painting (1958),
in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1990), 281. My translation.
124 “Why do they think they are painters?”: Claude Roger Marx, review of The New Amer-
ican Painting (1959), in Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, 287.
124 “the roots of this art”: André Chastel, review of The New American Painting (1959), in
Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, 288.
125 “an extraordinary occasion”: Irving Blum, interview with the author, May 9, 1994.
126 They had formed a new academy: Irving Sandler, “Introduction,” Defining Modern Art:
B22 INOWES

Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed. Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 41.
126 “I don’t know how I responded”: Grace Hartigan, interview with the author, Novem-
ber 11, 1994.
127 “an eloquent guy”: Michael Goldberg, interview with the author, April 27, 1994.
127 “We liked our father figures”: Alex Katz, interview with the author, January 21, 1992.
127 “Of course”: Elaine de Kooning, “Is There a New Academy?” Artnews 56 (June 1959):
36.
127 “unless they are singing”: Elaine de Kooning, “Subject: What, How, or Who?” (1955),
The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings (New York: George Braziller, 1994),
145.

CHaPTER 18
129 “Beware the body”: Jasper Johns, “Sketchbook Notes,” Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965),
in Pop Art Redefined, ed. John Russell and Suzi Gablik (New York: Praeger, 1969), 84.
132 the painting appeared on the magazine’s cover: Artnews 56 (January 1958).
132 “I thought Alfred Barr was God”: Susan Cheever, “Johns & Castelli, Inc.,” Harper’s Bazaar
3373 (January 1993): 78.
132 “a strange and very interesting city”: Leo Castelli, interview with the author, May 5, 1992.
132 Trieste, where he was born: Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, “Leo Castelli,” The Art
Dealers: The Powers Behind the Scene Talk about the Business of Art (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1984), 81-83.
134 Mighty Mouse: Willem de Kooning quoted by Ruth Kligman, interview with the author,
December 22, 1993; Calvin Tomkins, “Leo Castelli: A Good Eye and a Good Ear,” The
New Yorker 56 (May 26, 1980): 52, 59.
134 Dora and Ernest Rauschenberg: Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 47-48.
134 Pinkie and Blue Boy: Barbara Rose, Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage Books,
1987), 7.
136 veteran of the Bauhaus: Josef Albers: Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 60—61.
136 The Stable Gallery: Rose, Robert Rauschenberg, 32, 36-37.
137 “I always paid”: Ibid., 28.

Cuapter 19
139 a drawing to erase: Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1990), 82.
139 “he wasn’t going to make it easy”: Barbara Rose, Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage
Books, 1987), 36.
139 “just fooling around”: Willem de Kooning, statement (1962), in Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art
and Life, 79.
140 “think of Bed”: Robert Rauschenberg, in Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rausch-
enberg and the Art World of Our Times (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 137.
140 In some tellings of the story: These versions of Leo Castelli’s first meeting with Jasper
Johns are from the author’s conversation with Castelli, May 5, 1992; Louis A. Zona, “Johns/
Castelli: Some Thoughts on a Friendship,” Jasper Johns: Drawings and Prints from the
Collection of Leo Castelli, exhibition catalog (Youngstown, Ohio: Butler Institute of Amer-
ican Art, 1989), 4; Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, “Leo Castelli,’ The Art Dealers: The
Powers Behind the Scene Talk about the Business of Art (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1984), 88; “Leo Castelli,” an interview,
Art & Auction 5, no. 6 (February 1983), 63; Tomkins,
 NOTES
323

Off the Wall, 140; Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, exhibition catalog, rev.
ed. (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 36; Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting:
A
Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940—1970 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984),
95—
96.
140 “I'd never made a print”: Vivien Raynor, “Jasper Johns: ‘I Haven’t Attempted to Develop
My Thinking in Such a Way That the Work I’ve Done Is Not Me,’” Artnews 72 (March
1975) sae
142 “separate and equal”: Ruth Fine and Nan Rosenthal, “Interview with Jasper Johns” (1989),
The Drawings of Jasper Johns, exhibition catalog (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of
Art, 1990), 71.
142 “I knew him so well”: Tatyana Grosman, in Crichton, Jasper Johns, 19.
142 “Jasper, you must be”: John Cage, “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas” (1964), The New Art,
ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 212.
142 Allendale, South Carolina: Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, which was the city nearest
to Allendale that had a hospital. Jasper Johns, letter to the author, December 9, 1994.
142 He remembers drawing: D. R. Rickborn, “Art’s Fair-Haired Boy: Allendale’s Jasper Johns
Wins Fame with Flags,” The State, Columbia, South Carolina (January 15, 1961), in 35
Years: Jasper Johns, Leo Castelli, exhibition catalog, ed. Susan Brundage (New York: Leo
Castelli Gallery, 1993), n. pag.
142 At the age of five: Grace Glueck, “ ‘Once Established,’ Says Jasper Johns, ‘Ideas Can Be
Discarded,” The New York Times (October 16, 1977): sec. 2, 31.
142 “swans on a stream”: Jasper Johns, letter to the author, December 9, 1994.
144 “Tt didn’t occur to me”: Fine and Rosenthal, “Interview with Jasper Johns” (1989), 71.
144 “It wasn’t especially cheerful”: Peter Fuller, “Jasper Johns Interviewed Part II,” Art
Monthly 19 (September 1978): 7.
144 Silas Green’s dance troupe: Richard Francis, Jasper Johns (New York: Abbeville Press,
1984), 16. Jasper Johns, letter to the author, December 9, 1994.
144 “were not highly accomplished”: Jasper Johns, interview with the author, March 11, 1991.
144 refuses to give the school’s name: Jasper Johns, letter to the author, December 9, 1994.
144 “made posters that advertised movies”: David Bourdon, “Jasper Johns: ‘I Never Sensed
Myself as Being Static,’” The Village Voice (October 31, 1977): 75.
145 “It seemed to me”: Glueck, “ ‘Once Established,’ Says Jasper Johns, ‘Ideas Can Be Dis-
GandedseasseG. ells
145 liebfraumilch: Rose, Robert Rauschenberg, 33.
145 Johns and Suzi Gablik: Jasper Johns, letter to the author, December 9, 1994.

Cuarter 20)
147 “I have photos of him”: Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art
World of Our Times (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 109-10.
147 “the first person”: Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, exhibition catalog, rev. ed. (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 34.
147 turned to each other: Tomkins, Off the Wall, 112-13, 118.
147 “It was sort of new”: Paul Taylor, interview with Robert Rauschenberg, Interview 20
(December 1990): 147.
148 “there wasn’t any resistance”: Barbara Rose, Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage
Books, 1987), 36.
324 NOTES

148 “Basically,” Johns remembered: Tomkins, Off the Wall, 134.

148 Rauschenberg meeting Cage: Rose, Robert Rauschenberg, 23; Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschen-
berg/Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 71.
148 “had a really incredible view”: Rose, Robert Rauschenberg, 33.
149 “an affirmation of life”: John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961), in Tomkins, Off
the Wall, 69.
149 Seeking freedom: “In the Form of a Thistle: A Conversation Between John Cage and
Thomas McEvilley,” Artforum 31 (October 1992): 100.
149 “IfI puta frame”: Robin White, “John Cage,” View 1 (April 1978), in Richard Kostelanetz,
Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1991), 211.
149 to impose fixity on flux: “In the Form of a Thistle,” 99.
149 “I would want art”: Robin White, “John Cage,” View 1 (April 1978), in Kostelanetz,
Conversing with Cage, 2\\—12.
149 “Painting relates”: Robert Rauschenberg, statement, Sixteen Americans, exhibition catalog,
ed. Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 58.
149 “I have a peculiar kind”: Tomkins, Off the Wall, 8.
149 Rauschenberg painted a stripe: Ibid., 118-19.
150 “I don’t see the necessity”: James Klosty, interview with Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham
(New York: Limelight Editions, 1986), 85.
150 Johns corrected Rauschenberg’s grammar: Tomkins, Off the Wall, 119.

CuapteEr 21
151 “a social attitude”: Gene Swenson, “What Is Pop Art,” interview with Jasper Johns (1964),
in Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, ed. Carol Anne Mahsun (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1989), 135.
151 “I liked the attention”: Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, exhibition catalog, rev. ed. (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 38.
WS iS) “sympathy” for the Dada spirit: Marcel Duchamp, interview with Dorothy Norman (1953),
Art in America 57 (July-August 1969): 38.
152 They liked each other: Crichton, Jasper Johns, 39-40.
152 recently published book on Duchamp: Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (1959), with chapters
by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and H.-P. Roche (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
152 “when my work was first compared”: Roberta J. M. Olson, “Jasper Johns: Getting Rid of
Ideas” (1977), in Riva Castleman, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective, exhibition catalog
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 11.
152 “My interest in his work”: Peter Fuller, “Jasper Johns Interviewed I,” Art Monthly 19
(July-August 1978): 10.
152 “it may be a great work”: Jasper Johns, “Thoughts on Duchamp,” Art in America 57
(July/August 1969): 31.
153 “the shadows change”: John Coplans, “Fragments According to Johns: An Interview with
Jasper Johns,” Print Collector's Newsletter 3 (May-June 1971): 31.
153 “I don’t think”: April Bernard and Mimi Thompson, interview with Jasper Johns, Vanity
Fair 47 (February 1984): 65.
156 a champagne picnic: Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns’ Paintings and Sculptures 1954-1974:
The Changing Focus of the Eye (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1975), 122-23.
158 Leonardo: Ibid., 60. In an early statement, Johns extracts from Leonardo’s comments on
drawing a thoroughly Johnsian ambiguity—the notion that, in Johns’s words, “the bound-
ary of a body is neither part of the body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere.” See
NOTES S25)

Jasper Johns, statement, Sixteen Americans, exhibition catalog, ed. Dorothy C. Miller (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 22.
158 Moby Dick: Mark Rosenthal, Jasper Johns: Work since 1974, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990), 75.
158 faucets and laundry hamper: Ibid., 65, 70.

CuapTErR 22
161 “Any fool can see that it’s a broom!”: Alan R. Solomon, “Jasper Johns,” Jasper Johns,
exhibition catalog (New York: Jewish Museum, 1964), 16.
16 — its use, which is to make art: For Johns’s discovery, in the writings of Ludwig Wittgen-
stein, of the theory that meaning follows from use, see Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns’
Paintings and Sculptures 1954-1974: The Changing Focus of the Eye (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1985), 92-94.
162 “was something that I could do”: Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, exhibition catalog, rev.
ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 30.
162 the sale of Three Flags: Arnold Glimcher, in Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, The Art
Dealers: The Powers Behind the Scene Talk about the Business of Art (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, 1984), 168-69.
162 “Whatever I do seems artificial”: Crichton, Jasper Johns, 53.
163 “I think art criticizes art”: Vivien Raynor, “Jasper Johns: ‘I Haven't Attempted to Develop
My Thinking in Such a Way That the Work I’ve Done Is Not Me,” Artnews 72 (March
1978) see
163 “They just looked”: Grace Glueck, “Art Notes: Art’s Artist,” The New York Times
(January 16, 1966), in 35 Years: Jasper Johns, Leo Castelli, exhibition catalog, ed. Susan
Brundage (New York: Leo Castelli Gallery, 1993), n. pag.
164 “No. The title Scent”: David Bourdon, “Jasper Johns: ‘I Never Sensed Myself as Being
Static, ” The Village Voice 22 (October 31, 1977): 75.
164 “I don’t put any value”: Gene Swenson, “What Is Pop Art,” interview with Jasper Johns
(1964), in Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, ed. Carol Anne Mahsun (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1989), 135.
165 “If you have one thing”: Ibid., 136.

CuapTEr 23
167 “One thing is not another thing”: Walter Hopps, “An Interview with Jasper Johns” (1965),
Looking Critically: 21 Years of Artforum Magazine, ed. Amy Baker Sandback (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1984), 27.
167 “it’s not too important”: John Coplans, “Fragments According to Johns: An Interview
with Jasper Johns,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 3 (May-June 1972): 32.
167 the focus of your eye: Jasper Johns, statement, Sixteen Americans, exhibition catalog, ed.
Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 22; Gene Swenson, “What
Is Pop Art,” interview with Jasper Johns (1964), in Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, ed.
Carol Anne Mahsun (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 132-33.
168 “My immediate impression”: Jasper Johns, interview with the author, March 11, 1991.
168 “acknowledging the common continent”: Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Mod-
ern Library, 1950), 119.
169 “Even the simplest thing”: Robert Rosenblum, interview with the author, March 17, 1991.
170 proceeded with deliberation: Brice Marden, statement, in Carl Andre, “New in New York:
Line Work,” Arts Magazine 41 (May 1967): 50.
326 NOTES

CuHaptTer 24
175 “confronted, assaulted, sucked in”: Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”
(1958), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 1—7.
175 “Art should not be different”: John Cage, quoted by Francine du Plessix Gray, in Martin
Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972),
349,
176 “wanted his canvas”: Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” (1952), The
Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 25, 30.
176 “not to more paintings”: Allan Kaprow, in Michael Benedikt, Three Experiments (New
York: Doubleday & Company, 1967), 355.
176 “events that, put simply, happen”: Allan Kaprow, “Happening in the New York Scene”
(1961), in Kelley, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 16-17.
176 “is to be intimate”: Allan Kaprow, in Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters
and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 201-2.
177 “It was becoming so chic”: Jim Dine, statement, in American Artists on Art, from 1940 to
1980, ed. Ellen H. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 68.
177 John Cage objected: John Cage, in Sandler, The New York School, 213 n. 37.
177 Kaprow had acknowledged the obvious: Ibid., 203.
177 “Pop Art, Minimalism”: Elizabeth Baker, interview with the author, September 25, 1994.
178 the Supremes themselves performed: Ibid.
179 Henry Geldzahler took Rauschenberg to Warhol’s studio: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett,
POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 22; Roni Fein-
stein, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings 1962—64, exhibition catalog (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), 45.
180 “not so likely to get hung up”: Robert Rauschenberg, interview with Calvin Tomkins,
June 25, 1963, in Feinstein, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings 1962—64, 42.
18 iS) “seemingly can’t be dealt with”: G. R. Swenson, “What Is the F-111?,” interview with
James Rosenquist (1965), in John Russell and Suzi Gablik, Pop Art Redefined (New York:
Praeger, 1969), 109.
183 “the great scale”: Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), in Kelley, Essays
on the Blurring of Art and Life, 2.

CHAPTER 25
185 “We all loved him”: Diana Vreeland, statement (1989), in Kynaston McShine, Andy War-
hol: A Retrospective, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 424.
187 Warhol’s birth date: Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York:
Bantam Books, 1990), 10; David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989),
14, 25 n. 2.
187 “My father was away”: Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and
Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 21-22.
188 “started on the first day”: Ibid., 21.
188 comic books and coloring books: John Warhola, in Bennard B. Perlman, ““The Education
of Andy Warhol,” The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum, 1994),
148.
189 “TI got something”: Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 22.
189 “Andy’s first idea”: Philip Pearlstein, in Jean Stein, Edie: An American Biography (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 187.
IN‘\OMUERS SAY

189 “Success Is a Career at Home” and so on: “What Is Success?” with illustrations by Andy
Warhol, Glamour 22 (September 1949): 147-53.
189 the last a@was dropped from Warhola: Perlman, “The Education of Andy Warhol,” 149.
189 They were “electrifying”: Tina S. Fredericks, “Remembering Andy,” in Jesse Kornbluth
7,

Pre-Pop Warhol (New York: Panache Press at Random House, 1988), 11.
189 When Andy fell ill as a child: Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New
York: HarperCollins, 1990), 16-17.
19] Warhol’s imagery “made an enormous difference”: Geraldine Stutz, in Patrick S$. Smith,
Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 101,
103-6.
192 “almost nonexistent”: Tina S. Fredericks, interview (1978), in Smith, Warhol: Conversations
about the Artist, 101.
192 a cockroach crawls out: Colacello, Holy Terror, 21.
192 1000 Names and Where to Drop Them: Bourdon, Warhol, 61.
193 “a piece of shit”: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 6.
193 “I’m doing work just like that myself”: The source of this version of the story is Ivan
Karp, in Stein, Edie: An American Biography, 195. For other versions, see Ivan Karp, in
Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, 211; Ted Carey, in Smith, Warhol: Conver-
sations about the Artist, 88-89; and Warhol and Hackett, POPism: The Warhol
60s, 7.

CuHapTER 26
195 Lexington Avenue Studio: Ivan Karp, in Jean Stein, Edie: An American Biography (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 195; Walter Hopps, in Stein, Edie, 192.
196 “to be the eyes of the Met”: Ingrid Sischy, “An Interview with Henry Geldzahler,” in
Henry Geldzahler, Making It New (New York: Turtle Point Press, 1994), 2.
196 “T think they’re really wonderful”: Ted Carey, in Patrick S. Smith, Warhol: Conversations
about the Artist (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 90.
196 “They were stacked away”: Eleanor Ward, in Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the
Artist, 202.
196 too much like Lichtenstein’s: David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1989), 109.
197 a show at the Ferus Gallery: Irving Blum, in Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the
Artist, 195.
197 “Look what the cat dragged in”: Eleanor Ward, in Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the
Artist, 200-1, 204.
197 Philip Johnson: Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam
Books, 1990), 116.
197 his first Pop images: Bourdon, Warhol, 106-8. During the fifties, Warhol had used balsa
wood and eraser stamps to produce commercial images. See Jesse Kornbluth, Pre-Pop
Warhol (New York: Panache Press at Random House, 1988), 122.
197 rows of Coca-Cola bottles: Marjorie Frankel Nathenson, “Chronology,” in Kynaston
McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1989), 407.
198 “assembly-line effect”: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 22.
198 an empty fire station: Bourdon, Warhol, 142.
328 NOTES

198 a building on East Forty-seventh Street: Warhol and Hackett, POPism: The Warhol
60s, 61.
200 “They were always discreet”: Ibid., 54-55, 61—65.
200 a Park Avenue housewife: Ibid., 59.
200 “too faggy and sick and druggy”: Jane Holzer, in Stein, Edie: An American Biography, 228.
200 “Sugar Shack”: Warhol and Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, 64, 83-84.
201 his trademark outfit: Ibid., 172.

CHAPTER 27
203 a dealer named Michael Sonnabend: Calvin Tomkins, “Profile: Leo Castelli,’ The New
Yorker 56 (May 26, 1980): 62.
203 a skyscraper on West Fiftieth Street: This is the Time-Life Building, at West Fiftieth
Street and Sixth Avenue. See Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 15.
203 “The Empire State Building is a star!”: Andy Warhol, statement, Andy Warhol, exhibition
catalog (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968), n. pag.
203 a “retired” painter devoted to film: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol
60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 113, 115.
203 Flowers: David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 191, 193.
204 to get rid of plot: Ronald Tavel, in Jean Stein, Edie: An American Biography (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 232, 234.
205 “I wanted to do everything”: Warhol and Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, 263.
206 “the point was to be fabulous”: Danny Fields, in Patrick S. Smith, Warhol: Conversations
about the Artist (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 290.
206 “They’re better talked about than seen”: Paul Taylor, “Andy Warhol: The Last Inter-
view, Flash Art 133 (April 1987): 41-44.
206 to concentrate on painting: See Bob Colacello, Holy Terror; Andy Warhol Close Up (New
York: HarperCollins, 1990), 90ff.
206 Debbie Dropout: Warhol and Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, 255-57, 259.
206 “It was so dirty”: Ibid., 271.
207 “a sort of glamorous clubhouse”: Henry Geldzahler, in Stein, Edie: An American Biography,
201.
208 “he had too much control over my life”: Bourdon, Warhol, 284; Stein, Edie: An American
Biography, 288-94; Warhol and Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, 271-74, 277; Paul
Alexander, Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy’s
Millions (New York: Villard Books, 1994), 64-71.
208 “without the crazy, druggy people”: Warhol and Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, 285.
208 “If this is art”: Colacello, Holy Terror, 4—5.

CHAPTER 28
211 portraits on commission: Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York:
HarperCollins, 1990), 89, 94-95, 446. The price of copies had risen to $20,212 by the end
of Warhol’s life.
212 “when you’re working with silk screen”: Gerard Malanga, in Patrick S. Smith, Warhol:
Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 170.
214 “The Monroe picture”: Gretchen Berg, “Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy War-
hol” (1967), Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: BFI Publishing,
1989), 54, 56.
214 “If you want to know”: Ibid., 56.
 INF@TEERS
S29

214 “I think it’s horrible to live”: Andy Warhol, unpublished interview with Scott Cohen,
October 1980, in Colacello, Holy Terror, 438.
214 religious feelings recalled by eulogists: See, for example, John Richardson, “Eulogy for
Andy Warhol” (1987), in Kynaston McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exhibition
catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 454.
215 “Why don’t you start”: Colacello, Holy Terror, 373.
215 “get it all down”: Colacello, Holy Terror, 373-74.
215 “people at the top, or around the top”: Andy Warhol, with Bob Colacello, Andy Warhol’s
Exposures (New York: Andy Warhol Books/Grosset & Dunlap, 1979), 19.
215 he wanted Clint Eastwood: Ibid., 188.
215 The sum of these preferences: Carter Ratcliff, “Starlust: Andy’s Photos,” Art in America
68 (May 1980): 120-22.
216 “Everybody has their own America”: Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper & Row,
1985), 8.

Cuapter 29
220 “You could become a de Kooning disciple”: John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1989); 39.
221 “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible”: John Elderfield, Morris Louis, exhi-
bition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 13.
221 had joined him in his quandary: Helen Frankenthaler, interview with the author, March
3, 1989.
222 “becomes paint in itself”: Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland” (1960), The Collected
Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),
vol. 4, 95-97. See also Greenberg, “Introduction to Jules Olitski at the Venice Biennale”
(1966), The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 228-30.
222 disparities between theory and practice: Carter Ratcliff, “Art Criticism: Other Eyes, Other
Minds (Part V), On Clement Greenberg,” Art International 18 (December 1974): 53-57.
222 “constantly taking a risk”: Simone Swan, “A Conversation with Peter Bradley,” The De-
luxe Show, exhibition catalog (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1971), 67.
223 “the irreducible essence of pictorial art”: Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism”
(1962), The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 131-34. For evidence that Frankenthaler
did not entirely accept the Greenbergian theory of flatness and pure “opticality,” see Cindy
Nemser, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler” (1971), American Artists on Art from 1940
to 1980, ed. Ellen H. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 55.
223 true progress in art: Michael Fried, “Three American Painters,” Three American Painters:
Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, exhibition catalog (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University, Fogg Art Museum, 1965), 8.
223 a tone of millennial fervor: See, for example, Walter Darby Bannard, “Color, Paint, and
Present-Day Painting,” Artforum 4 (April 1966): 35-37; Michael Fried, “The Achievement
of Morris Louis,” Artforum 6 (February 1967): 34-30; Jane Harrison Cone, “Kenneth No-
land’s New Paintings,” Artforum 6 (November 1967): 36-41; and Kermit S. Champa,
“Olitski: Nothing but Color,” Artnews 66 (May 1967): 36-38, 74-76.

CuapTErR 30
225 an array of uncompromised facts: Donald Judd, “Jackson Pollock” (1967), Complete Writ-
ings 1959-1975 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press, 1975),
151.
225 “spatially illusionistic”: Donald Judd, interview (1971), in Jeanne Siegel, Artwords: Discourse
330 NOTES

on the 60s and 70s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 48. See also Bruce Glaser,
“Questions to Stella and Judd,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 155.
226 “shape, image, color”: Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” (1965), in Art and Theory, 1900—
1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), 813.
226 the traits of a good “gestalt”: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1” (1966), Contin-
uous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1993), 6-8.
227 “duality of thing and allusion”: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and
Non Sequiturs” (1967), Continuous Project Altered Daily, 26.
227 no “divisiveness of experience”: Ibid., 25.
227 “scale, proportion, shape”: Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” 4.
227 “My arrangements”: Carl Andre, statement (1978), in Minimalism, exhibition catalog (Liv-
erpool, Eng.: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1989), 12.
227 “As people walk on them”: Carl Andre, statement (1969), Arz in Process IV, exhibition
catalog, ed. Elaine H. Varian (New York: Finch College Museum of Art/Contemporary
Wing, 1969), n. pag.
227 idea must be followed “blindly”: Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1968), Con-
ceptual Art, ed. Ursula Meyer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 174-75.
228 Metaphorical play is not encouraged: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2” (1966),
Continuous Project Altered Daily, 11-16.
228 the periodic table of the elements: Advertisement for an exhibition of Carl Andre’s work
at the Dwan Gallery, New York, May 1969. See Arts Magazine 43 (May 1969): 22.
228 “pure opticality”: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Battcock, Minimal Art,
116-47.

CuHapTER 31
231 “a kind of palpable reality”: Frank Stella, in William S. Rubin, Frank Stella, exhibition
catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 12.
231 to find “a way”: Ibid., 13.
232 Miller declared her intention: Leo Castelli, interview, in Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones,
The Art Dealers: The Powers Behind the Scene Talk about the Business of Art (New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1984), 92-93.
233 “symbols are counters”: Carl Andre, “Frank Stella,” Sixteen Americans, exhibition catalog,
ed. Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 76.
234 the “soul” of Frank Stella: Michael Fried, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop:
Discussion,” Discussion in Contemporary Culture, Number 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1987), 79.
234 Stella’s paintings as “slabs”: Donald Judd, in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd”
(1966), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1968), 162.
234 “what you see is what you see”: Frank Stella, in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and
Judd,” 158.
234 The question, Fried argued: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Battcock,
Minimal Art, 120.
235 He is one of us: Donald Judd, in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” 162.
235 “space accessible to eyesight alone”: Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New
 IN@UES
S55}

Paintings,” Frank Stella: An Exhibition of Recent Paintings, exhibition catalog (Pasadena:

Pasadena Art Museum, 1966), 7.
235 “deeply impressed”: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., letter to Fulbright grant committee, October 28,
1960, Stella file, Museum of Modern Art library, New York. See Rubin, Frank Stella,
I) io, SY.
235 Barr proposed to the trustees: Leo Castelli, interview, in de Coppet and Jones, The Art
Dealers, 92-93.

CHapTeER 32
239 “duality of thing and allusion”: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and
Non Sequiturs” (1967), Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 25.
239 “has no inherent relation”: Robert Morris, “Anti Form” (1968), Continuous Project Altered
Daily, 41.
ies i simply shaped, a strong gestalt: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1” (1966), Con-
tinuous Project Altered Daily, 6-8.
241 “I am almost not an ‘I’”: Vito Acconci, in Kate Linker, Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli,
1994), 20.
24, os “I think in terms”: Jeanne Siegel, “Carl Andre: Artworker,” interview (1970), Artwords:
Discourse on the 60s and 70s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 135.
242 he found himself in “a field”: Vito Acconci, “Notes on My Photographs, 1969-1970”
(1988), Vito Acconci: Photographic Works 1969-1970, exhibition catalog (Chicago: Rhona
Hoffman Gallery, 1988), n. pag.
242 At the Museum of Modern Art’s Information show: Haacke provided ballots. Of the
37,129 visitors who voted, slightly more than two-thirds said that Rockefeller’s silence on
Vietnam had turned them against him. See Francis Frascina, “The Politics of Represen-
tation,” Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993) 5120218
242 “juxtapose a microorganism”: Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art
Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), 95, 145.
243 “from measured volume”: Ibid., 95. See also Robert Barry, statement (1969), in Conceptual
Art, ed. Ursula Meyer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 38-39.
243 “investigation of means”: Morris, “Anti Form,” 44-45.
243 art as an “investigative activity”: Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere, “Bruce Nauman In-
terviewed,” Vanguard 8 (February 1979): 16.

CuHapter 33
246 “work its salutary effect”: Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the
1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 107-12.
246 Observatory: Observatory was destroyed later in 1971. A larger version, 298 feet in diameter,
was built in 1977, in Oostelijk, Flevoland, the Netherlands. See Robert Morris: The Mind/
Body Problem, exhibition catalog (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994),
238-39,
246 a kind of “automation”: Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making:
The Search for the Motivated”
(1970), Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of
Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 77-78, 87.
247 a color photograph: Arthur Gordon, Artforum 13 (November 1974): 7.
247 “extreme vulgarity”: Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck,
Annette Michelson, letter to the editor, Artforum 13 (December 1974): 9.
SPS NOTES

248 “Let's give three dildos”: Robert Rosenblum, letter to the editor, Artforum 13 (March 1975):
8-9.
249 “all about territory”: Lynda Benglis, in Robert Pincus-Witten, “Lynda Benglis” (1974),
The New Sculpture 1965-1975: Between Geometry and Gesture, ed. Richard Armstrong and
Richard Marshall (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), 312.
250 “They were supposed to refer”: Lynda Benglis, interview with the author, September 27,
1994.
250 “heroic, macho, sexist game”: Lynda Benglis, in Pincus-Witten, “Lynda Benglis,” 312.
251 “they were looking back at me”: Lynda Benglis, interview with the author, Septem-
ber 27, 1994.
251 “find a new form”: Lynda Benglis, interview with the author, June 24, 1987.

CHapter 34
253 “One could wander around”: Robert Morris, statement on his Los Angeles Project II (1969),
in Thomas Krens, The Drawings of Robert Morris, exhibition catalog (Williamstown, Mass.:
Williams College Museum of Art, 1982), n. pag.
253 “putting Brancusi’s Endless Column”: Carl Andre, in David Bourdon, “Carl Andre’s Razed
Sites” (1966), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968), 104.
253 “I found myself”: Lisa Bear and Willoughby Sharp, interview with Dennis Oppenheim
(1970), in Lucy R. Lippard, Srx Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), 183-84.
254 “The museums and collections”: Michael Heizer, “The Art of Michael Heizer,” Artforum
8 (December 1969): 34.
254 The drip paintings are “environmental”: Michael Heizer, interview with the author, Feb-
ruary 13, 1991.
254 That innocence made it seem real: Heizer, “The Art of Michael Heizer,” 34.
255 its trapezoidal shape: Elizabeth C. Baker, “Artworks on the Land,” Art in America 64
(January-February 1976): 94.
255 “You realize”: Michael Heizer, interview with the author, February 13, 1991.
255 Complex Two: Virginia Rutledge, “Monuments to Making,” Art in America 83 (July 1995):
70-71.
258 “the observed ratio”: Walter De Maria, “The Lightning Field,” Artforum 18 (April
1980): 58.
258 To walk into The Lightning Field: Baker, “Artworks on the Land,” 95.
258 the “peaceful, religious space” of the West: Michael Heizer, in Howard Junker, “The
New Sculpture: Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty,” Saturday Evening Post 241 (Novem-
ber 2, 1968): 43.
258 “sight was saturated”: Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty (1972), The Writings of Robert
Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 113.

CHAPTER 35
259 “rinky-dink . . . Mickey Mouse”: Robert Smithson, conversation with Dennis Wheeler
(1970), in Eugenie Tsai, Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 123.
259 “It made a big impression”: Paul Cummings, interview with Robert Smithson (1972), The
Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press,
1979), 142-43.
IN‘@ TERS
333)

260 He would leap from Ad Reinhardt’s satires: Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language
in the Vicinity of Art” (1968), The Writings of Robert Smithson, 73, 76.
260 “He had the look of a brooder”: Bill Berkson, interview with the author, January 26,
1995.
261 “The Eliminator is a clock”: Robert Smithson, “The Eliminator” (1964), The Writings of
Robert Smithson, 207.
261 “mistakes and dead-ends”: Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966),
The Writings of Robert Smithson, 10-13.
262 “Tours between the Nonsite and the site are possible”: Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson:
Sculpture, exhibition catalog (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 104.
263 “writing about mirrors”: Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan”
(1969), The Writings of Robert Smithson, 97.
264 “conscious of the actualities”: Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), The Writings of
Robert Smithson, 90.
265 ideal of “intellectual beauty’: See Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
(1816); Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Colosseum” (1818), Shelley’s Prose: The Trumpet of
Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954),
224-28.

CuHapTER 36
269 “a Happening is not a commodity”: Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene”
(1961), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 25-26.
269 “difficult, hostile, awkward and oversize”: Barbara Rose, “A BC Art” (1965), AutoCritique:
Essays on Art and Anti-Art, 1963-1987 (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 69—
IDs Ws
269 “Ideas alone can be works of art”: Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1968),
Conceptual Art, ed. Ursula Meyer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 174.
270 “1. The artist may construct the piece”: Lawrence Weiner, statement (1969), in Lucy R.
Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York:
Praeger, 1973), 73.
270 “The world is full of objects”: Douglas Huebler, statement (1970), in Lippard, Six
Years, 74.
270 “When art does not any longer depend”: Seth Siegelaub, interview with Ursula Meyer
(1969), in Lippard, Six Years, 125.
272 a quick response: Marcia Tucker, “Women Artists Today,” Making Their Mark: Women
Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-1985, ed. Randy Rosen and Catherine C. Brawer
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), 198-99.
272 “any woman artist who says”: Lee Krasner, in Cindy Nemser, “Forum: Women in Art,”
Arts Magazine 45 (February 1971): 18.
273 P&D, he said: john Perreault, “Issues in Pattern Painting,” Artforum 16 (September
1977): 32-36.

CuHapTeER 37
276 the “dismalness” of the scene: Peter Schjeldahl, David Salle (New York: Random House,
1987), 14.
276 “The art world seemed”: David Salle, interview with the author, September 7, 1994.
276 Hallwalls: Robert Longo, interview with the author, September 25, 1994.
277 “Artists Space and Hallwalls”: David Salle, interview with the author, September 7, 1994.
334 INIOWRES

277 “It wasn’t as though”: Ibid.

277 “more about living situations”: Schjeldahl, David Salle, 12.
277 Schnabel doesn’t recall the incident: Julian Weissman, interview with the author, Septem-
ber 25, 1994; Julian Schnabel, interview with the author, October 31, 1994.
277 “Everybody was simply trying”: Schjeldahl, David Salle, 9.
278 “There was no energy”: Robert Longo, interview with the author, September 25, 1994.

Cuapter 38
281 “are really quite horrible”: René Ricard, “Julian Schnabel’s Plate Painting at Mary Boone,”
Art in America 67 (November 1979): 125-26.
282 prices for Schnabel’s paintings: Anthony Haden-Guest, “The New Queen of the Art
Scene,” New York 15 (April 19, 1982): 28; Susan K. Reed, “The Meteoric Rise of Mary
Boone,” Saturday Review (May 1982): 38.
282 “I didn’t want to bother”: Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick, “Report from the
East Village: Slouching Toward Avenue D,” Art in America 72 (Summer 1984): 138.
283 “The Original and Still the Best”: Nicolas A. Moufarrage, “The Year After,” Flash Art
118 (Summer 1984): 51.
284 “had felt about Jasper”: Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, “Leo Castelli,’ The Art Dealers:
The Powers Behind the Scene Talk about the Business of Art (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1984), 107.
284 “in society, or culture”: Julian Schnabel, notebook (1978), in Julian Schnabel, C.V.J.: Nick-
names of Maitre d’s & Other Excerpts from Life (New York: Random House, 1987), 146.
285 the mechanisms of the image: Jack Goldstein, statement (1978), Jack Goldstein, exhibition
catalog (Erlangen, Germany: Stadtische Galerie Erlangen, 1985), n. pag.
285 “These are pictures of emotions”: Cindy Sherman, with an introduction by Peter Schjeldahl
and an afterword by I. Michael Danoff (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 198.

CHapTER 39
289 “the paintings are dead”: David Salle, “The Paintings Are Dead” (1979), Blasted Allegories:
An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallace (New York: New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), 325-27.
291 “I don’t subscribe to the idea”: Mary Boone, interview with the author, January 21, 1984.
291 $3.6 million for Out the Window: Peter Watson, From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the
Modern Art Market (New York: Random House, 1992), 416—18.
291 “works of art have become quasi-financial instruments”: Susan Lee, “Greed Is Not Just
for Profit,” Forbes 141 (April 18, 1988): 64-66.
291 “David is an absolutely splendid young artist”: Laura de Coppet, “Leo Castelli,” Interview
12 (February 1982): 60—62.
291 the hubbub of the boom: Carter Ratcliff, “Dramatis Personae, Part I: Dim Views, Dire
Warnings, Art-World Cassandras,” Art in America 73 (September 1985): 9, 11, 13, 15.
291 “the inflation of minor talents”: Robert Hughes, “Careerism and Hype Amidst the Image
Haze,” Time 125 (June 17, 1985): 83.
291 “the tyranny of novelty”: Walter Darby Bannard, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes,” Arts
Magazine 57 (September 1982): 83.
291 “what is at stake”: Hilton Kramer, “Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s,” The New
Criterion | (September 1982): 40.
291 “We can thank Andy Warhol”: Barbara Rose, “Art in Discoland,” AutoCritique: Essays on
Art and Anti-Art, 1963-1987 (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 291.
292 “Andy felt complete contempt”: Victor Bockris, interview with the author, May 25, 1993.
INOW ES S155)

292 Warhol’s art and attitudes: For indictments of Andy Warhol, see Robert Hughes, “On
Art and Money,” The New York Review of Books 31 (December 6, 1984): 27; Robert
Hughes, “The Rise of Andy Warhol,” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed.
Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 45-57; Kramer,
“Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s,” 40; and especially Suzi Gablik, Has Mod-
ernism Failed? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 56—62.
292 “looked as if they had been whipped up”: Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Up
Close (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 473.
292 bring in a quick $800,000: Ibid., 446.
294 a fashionable young architect, Christian Hubert: Martin Filler, “Tribeca Textures,” House
and Garden 157 (February 1985): 128-35.
294 Schnabel’s loft: Andre Leon Talley, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife: Jacqueline Schnabel,”
Vogue 175 (March 1985): 510-15, 560; Doris Saatchi, “Julian Schnabel: An Artist’s Life,”
House and Garden 157 (July 1985): 108-15, 182.
294 “there’s a contradiction”: Richard Serra and David Salle, in “Portraits,” Artforum 20 (May
1982): 59, 61-62.
DoD Schizophrenia Prism: See “Expressionism Today: An Artists’ Symposium,” Art in America
70 (December 1982): 58—59.

CuaptTeErR 40
O97) “looked pretty good”: Richard Prince, Why I Go to the Movies Alone (1983), in Lisa Phillips,
Richard Prince, exhibition catalog (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
1992) N48:
298 an eye for the art of the New York avant-garde: Grégoire Miiller, The New Avant-Garde,
with photographs by Gianfranco Gorgoni (New York: Praeger, 1972), 82-92, 96-97.
298 “Painting,” said the painter: Gianfranco Gorgoni, interview with the author, May 7, 1992.
298 compared himself to Picasso: Michael Stone, “Off the Canvas: The Art of Julian Schnabel
Survives the Wreckage of the Eighties,” New York 25 (May 18, 1992): 31.
298 “in Pollock’s work every element”: Julian Schnabel, C.V.J.: Nicknames of Maitre d’s & Other
Excerpts from Life (New York: Random House, 1987), 41.
300 “red and white and gold paint”: Robert Longo, statement in Paul Gardner, “When Is a
Painting Finished?” Artnews 84 (November 1985): 91.

EprLocuE
304 “kind of innocence and total conviction”: Pat Steir, “Brice Marden: An Interview,” Brice
Marden: Recent Drawings and Etchings, exhibition catalog (New York: Matthew Marks
Gallery, 1991), n. pag.
 ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

COLOR PLATES:

Ite Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950, 1950. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York. George A. Hearn Fund, 1957. Photograph © 1980 Metropolitan Museum of
Art. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950. Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Noah Goldowsky and Edgar Kaufman, Jr.; Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase
Prize, 1952. Photograph © 1996 Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved. © 1996
Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Ill. Jasper Johns, Flag, 195455. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson
in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Photograph © 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996
Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of
Philip Johnson. Photograph © 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996 The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Bil AC KAUN Di W A TE i OS TR ALT IcOuNES:.

I Jackson Pollock, Cathedral, 1947. Dallas Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard
J. Reis. Photograph © Dallas Museum of Art. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, 1950. © 1996 Rudy Burckhardt
Thomas Hart Benton, Self-Portrait with Rita, 1922. National Portrait Gallery, Smithson-
ion Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jack H. Mooney
Thomas Hart Benton, The Arts of Life in America: The Arts of the South, 1932. New
Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Harriet Russell Stanley
Fund. Photo credit: Arthur Evans
Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934—35. National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institu-
tion, Washington, D.C. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, c. 1934. New Britain Museum of Amer-
ican Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Gift of Thomas Hart Benton. Photo credit: E. Irving
Blomstrann. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
Jackson Pollock, Flame, c. 1934-38. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Enid A. Haupt
Fund. Photograph © 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foun-
dation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, Birth, c. 1938-41. Tate Gallery, London. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner
Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
André Masson, Meditation of the Painter, 1943. Courtesy Zabriskie Gallery, New York
338 HSS
TR AM CUI GR
EI Tine

Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure, 1942. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and
Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund. Photograph © 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996 The
Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph
© 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943. University of Iowa Museum of Art, lowa City. Gift of
Peggy Guggenheim, 1959. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
/ Artists Rights So-
ciety (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo credit: David Heald © 1996
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, One, Number 31 (1950), 1950. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund. Photograph © 1996 Museum of Modern Art.
© 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Clyfford Still, 1958. © 1996 Estate of Hans Namuth
Clyfford Still, 7954, 1954. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Sey-
mour H. Knox, 1957
Barnett Newman, 1951. © 1996 Estate of Hans Namuth
Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948. Courtesy PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York.
© 1996 Estate of Barnett Newman
Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm, 1950. © 1996 Estate of Hans Namuth
Jackson Pollock, The Water Bull, c. 1946. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 1996 The
Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, Number 14, 1951, 1951. Tate Gallery, London. © 1996 The Pollock-
Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, Easter and the Totem, 1953. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift
of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock. Photograph © 1996 Museum of Modern
Art. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock, Male and Female, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and
Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
/ Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York
DAs Jackson Pollock, The Deep, 1953. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pom-
pidou, Paris. © 1996 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
/ Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
wat Willem de Kooning, New York, 1950. © 1996 Rudy Burckhardt
th)
bo Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, c. 1940-41. © 1996 Willem de Kooning Revo-
cable Trust
/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Willem de Kooning, Queen of Hearts, c. 1943. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. © 1996 Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Willem de Kooning, Painting, 1948. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph ©
1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996 Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust
/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
29. Hans Hofmann, Fantasia, c. 1944. University Art Museum, University of California,
Berkeley. Gift of the artist
OSE
R AM OUN SGyRIE
DH iTES Bog,

30. Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo-
graph © 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996 Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Sit Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana, 1958. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Lee V. Eastman,
New York. © 1996 Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust
/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
32) Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
83: Grace Hartigan, New England, October, 1957. Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York.
Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1957
Shi Alfred Leslie, Soldier’s Medal, 1959. Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of
Seymour H. Knox, 1957
5> Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1958. © 1996 Estate of Joan Mitchell, courtesy Robert Miller
Gallery, New York
36. Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Collection Leo Castelli, New York. © 1996
Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
377: Jasper Johns in his New York studio with Flag, 1955. © 1996 Robert Rauschenberg /
Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
38. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Leo Castelli
in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. © 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996 Robert Rausch-
enberg
/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
39) Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © 1996 Robert
Rauschenberg
/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
40. Jasper Johns, False Start II, 1962. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Celeste
and Armand Bartos Foundation. Photograph © 1996 Museum of Modern Art. © 1996
Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
ae Jasper Johns, According to What,
1964. Collection Mr. and Mrs. S. I. Newhouse, New
York. © 1996 Jasper Johns
/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Se. Jasper Johns, Scent, 1973-74. Ludwig Collection, Aachen. © 1996 Jasper Johns / Licensed
by VAGA, New York, NY
43. Jasper Johns, Fool’s House, 1962. Collection Jean Cristophe Castelli. © 1996 Jasper Johns/
Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
44, Jasper Johns, Flag on Orange Field, 1957. Museum Ludwig, Cologne. © 1996 Jasper Johns/
Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
45. Susan Rothenberg, Cabin Fever, 1976. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
46. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1964. Collection Joseph Helman, New York. © 1996 Estate of
Donald Judd / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Ade Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (Soap Pads), 1964. © 1996 The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the VisualArts/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
48. Frank Stella, Conway I, 1966. Collection Marie Christophe Thurman, New York. © 1996
Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
as). George Segal, Man at Table, 1961. Stadtisches Museum, Monchengladbach, Germany.
© 1996 George Segal
/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
50. Robert Rauschenberg, Barge, 1963. Collection of the artist, on extended loan to the Na-
tional Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © 1996 Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY
Ske James Rosenquist, F-11/, 1965. Installation view. © 1996 James Rosenquist
/ Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY
340 HORS TRA COUN GRE Duiies

SY, Claes Oldenburg, Bedroom Ensemble, 1963, reconstructed in 1996. Collection Claes Ol-
denburg and Coosje van Bruggen, New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Wildenstein
8), Andy Warhol, Yarn, 1983. © 1996 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
DAs Andy Warhol at the Factory, 1966. © 1996 Billy Name/Photonica
3k Andy Warhol, Five Boys, c. 1954. Courtesy Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York. © 1996
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York
56. Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola, 1960. Dia Art Foundation, New York. © 1996 The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Die Andy Warhol, Large Coca-Cola, 1962. Collection Elizabeth and Michael Rea, New York.
© 1996 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
58. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. © 1996 The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Se), Andy Warhol, Large Triple Elvis, 1963. © 1996 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
60. Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964. Film still. © 1994 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
61. Andy Warhol at the Flowers show; Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris, 1965. © 1996 Harry
Shunk
62. Andy Warhol, Leo Castelli, 1975. Collection Leo Castelli, New York. © 1996 The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
63. Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster, 1963. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
© 1996 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
64. Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952. Collection of the artist, on extended loan
to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © 1996 Helen Frankenthaler
65. Morris Louis, Point of Tranquility, 1958. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Photo credit: Lee Stalsworth. Courtesy Em-
merich / Sotheby’s
66. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C. © 1996 Estate of Donald Judd / Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY
67. Frank Stella, Avicenna, 1960. Menil Foundation, Houston. © 1996 Frank Stella
/ Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
68. Frank Stella, Flin Flon IIT, 1969. Collection unknown. © 1996 Frank Stella
/ Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
69. Frank Stella, Nasielsk IT, 1972. Courtesy Knoedler & Company, New York. © 1996 Frank
Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
70. Frank Stella, Nogaro, 1981. Collection Sally Ganz. © 1996 Frank Stella/ Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
wile Frank Stella, Lo sciocco senza paura (#1, 4X), 1984. Collection Ann and Robert Freedman,
New York. © 1996 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
72. Richard Serra throwing molten lead, 1972. © 1996 Gianfranco Gorgoni
73: Robert Morris, Observatory, 1971-77. Oostelijk, Flevoland, The Netherlands. Photo cour-
tesy the artist and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 1996 Robert
Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
341

Tas Robert Morris, Untitled, 1974. Collection of the artist. Photo courtesy the artist
and the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 1996 Robert Morris/ Artists
Rights
Society (ARS), New York
TD. Lynda Benglis, advertisement in Artforum, November 1974, Photograph by Arthur
Gor-
don. © 1996 Lynda Bengl /Licensed
is by VAGA, New York, NY
76. Lynda Benglis, Totem, 1971. Installation at Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute
of
Technology, Cambridge. © 1996 Lynda Bengl / Licensed
is by VAGA, New York, NY
Woe Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979. Photo credit: John Cliett. © 1996
Dia
Center for the Arts, New York
78. Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Near Quemado, New Mexico. Photo
credit:
John Cliett. © 1996 Dia Center for the Arts, New York
7S). Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Photograph
© 1972 Gianfranco Gorgoni. Estate of Robert Smithson, courtesy John Weber Gallery,
New York
80. Miriam Schapiro, Black Bolero, 1981. Art Gallery of New South Wales, courtesy of Stein-
baum Krauss Gallery, New York
81. Robert Longo, Men Trapped in Ice, 1980. Courtesy Metro Pictures, New York
82. Julian Schnabel, Portrait of Mary Boone, 1983. Collection Mary Boone, New York
83. Julian Schnabel, Exile, 1980. Collection Barbara Schwartz, New York
84. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cour-
tesy Metro Pictures, New York
85. Robert Longo, Tongue to the Heart, 1984. Collection Eli Broad, Los Angeles. Courtesy
Metro Pictures, New York
86. David Salle, Cigarette Lady: Blue and Yellow, 1979. Collection Larry Gagosian, New York.
© 1996 David Salle / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
87. David Salle, Melancholy, 1983. © 1996 David Salle/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
88. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Alert, GE), c. 1984—85. © 1996 The
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
89. Mike Bidlo, Jack the Dripper at Peg’s Place, 1982. Installation and performance piece,
P.S. 1, New York. Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Bruno Bischofberger,
Zurich
90. Robert Longo, Heads Will Roll, 1984—85. Collection Eli Broad, Los Angeles. Courtesy
Metro Pictures, New York
OF Brice Marden painting, 1990. © 1990 Bill Jacobson, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery,
New York
922 Brice Marden, Presentation, 1990-92. Collection of the artist. © 1996 Brice Marden/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Os: Robert Rahway Zakanitch, Big Bungalow Suite IV, 1992—93. Collection of the artist
 INDEX

Abstract Expressionism, 148, 177, 195, 231, Astor, Patti, 282—83

294 automatism, 45—46, 48
Acconci, Vito, 241—42, 279 Autumn Rhythm (Pollock), 86, 90, 91, 113,
According to What (Johns), 152, 153, 154-55, 184, 220
163 avant-garde art, 25-29, 48, 51, 295, 303; see
Acker, Kathy, 294 also New York artists
action painters, 105, 108—9, 111-12, 113, 114, Avery, Milton, 229
176 Avicenna (Stella), 230
Africano, Nicholas, 170, 275.
Albers, Josef, 136 Baechler, Donald, 170-71
All You Zombies: Truth Before God (Longo), Baker, Elizabeth, 177, 178
299 Bannard, Walter Darby, 221, 222, 291
Alogon (Smithson), 262 Barge (Rauschenberg), 180—81
Amarillo Ramp (Smithson), 263, 269 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 31, 46, 52, 123, 132; on
Amaya, Mario, 207 New York painters, 125-27, 151; on Pol-
“American Action Painters, The” (Rosen- lock, 59, 62—63; on Stella, 235-36
berg), 108—9, 111, 112 Barrier (Morris), 226
American Artists Congress, 39 Barry, Robert, 243, 253
America Today (Benton), 15, 20, 22 Baselitz, Georg, 283
Andre, Carl, 226, 241, 245, 255, 261; on Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 292, 293, 298
Stella, 233, 234, 237; works, 182, 227, 228, Bauer, Rudolf, 51
240, 253 Baziotes, Ethel, 28
Anuskiewicz, Richard, 179 Baziotes, William, 25, 28, 46, 123
Arena Brains (Longo), 300 Beaton, Cecil, 90—91
Armstrong, Tom, 162 Bed (Rauschenberg), 138, 139—40
Arrive/Depart (Johns), 157 Bedroom Ensemble (Oldenburg), 183—84
“Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 228, 229 Beds of Spikes (De Maria), 256—57
Artforum, 247-50, 263, 294 Bellamy, Richard, 260
Art in America, 152, 281 Benglis, Lynda, 247-51, 252
Artists Space, 270, 277 Bent “Blue” (Johns), 167
Artists’ Union, 26-27, 29 Benton, Maecenas Eason, 21, 22
Artnews, 7—9, 10, 11, 44, 105, 108, 113, 127, Benton, Rita, 15, 33
175, 231, 260 Benton, Thomas Hart, 19-20, 21-23, 39—40;
Art of This Century, 52—53, 68, 74 political views, 22—23; relationship with
art-school Expressionism, 283 Pollock, 15-16, 21, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39—40;
Arts Magazine, 291 as teacher, 14, 15—16, 33; works, 3, 15, 18,
Arts of Life in America, The (Benton), 20 PAV), PAI, PAS GPS:
Art Students League, 14, 15-17, 33, 73, Benton, Thomas Hart (senator), 21—22
259-60 Berkson, Bill, 260
Asphalt Rundown (Smithson), 263 Bernstein, Roberta, 156
344 INDEX

Betty Parsons Gallery, see Parsons, Betty Stella and, 232, 233, 235-36; Warhol and,
Bianchini Gallery, 178 195, 203—4
Bidlo, Mike, 296, 297, 298 Castelli Warehouse, 239, 240—41
Bierstadt, Albert, 74 Cathedral (Pollock), 2
Big Bungalow Suite IV (Zakanitch), 306—7 Cedar Street Tavern, 94—96, 111, 121, 136-
Birth (Pollock), 42, 44 37, 260
Black Bolero (Schapiro), 268 Chamberlain, John, 176, 177
Black Bra (Salle), 300 Chastel, André, 124
Black Mountain College, 136, 145, 148, 175 Chelsea Girls, The (Warhol), 206, 208
Blesh, Rudi, 52 Chia, Sandro, 284
Blind Time Drawings (Morris), 246 Church, Frederick E., 74
Blue Poles (Pollock), 117 Cigarette Lady: Blue and Yellow (Salle), 290
Bluhm, Norman, 99, 109, 134 City (Heizer), 255
Blum, Irving, 125, 196, 197 Claim (Acconci), 242
Bockris, Victor, 292 Clemente, Francesco, 283, 292, 294
Bollinger, Bill, 241 Clocktower, 271
Boone, Mary, 281, 283, 284, 289, 291 Clough, Charles, 276
Borofsky, Jonathan, 276 Club Onyx (Stella), 232
Bourdon, David, 164, 197, 253 Coca-Cola (Warhol), 190
Brach, Paul, 134 Colacello, Bob, 208—9, 211, 215, 292
Bradley, Peter, 222 Collaborative Projects (Colab), 282
Braque, Georges, 104 color-field painting, 177, 178, 221-23, 228—
Brauntuch, Troy, 276, 284—85 BN PUN, BID
Breer, Robert, 177 Complex One (Heizer), 255, 269
Breton, André, 44, 45, 46 Complex Two (Heizer), 255
Brillo Box (Soap Pads) (Warhol), 174 conceptualism, 270, 271
Broken Circele/Spiral Hill (Smithson), 263—64 Condo, George, 284
Broken Kilometer, The (De Maria), 255—56 Convergence: Number 10, 1952 (Pollock), 93
Brown, James, 171 Conway I (Stella), 174
Brown, John, 79 Cotton Pickers (Pollock), 35, 37
Burckhardt, Rudy, 6, 7—9, 10, 11, 27-28, 29, Couch (Warhol), 203
90, 91, 98, 114 Cubism, 31, 88, 104-5
Burgy, Donald, 242 Cucchi, Enzo, 283
Busa, Peter, 34 Cunningham, Merce, 148, 150, 179, 206
Bykert Gallery, 170, 246 C.V.J.: Nicknames of Maitre d’s & Other Ex-
cerpts from Life (Schnabel), 298—99
Cabin Fever (Rothenberg), 171
Cage, John, 148-49, 175, 177 Dadanloleis2
Cahill, Holger, 34 Dancers on a Plane (Johns), 150
Calder, Alexander, 31 Davis, Stuart, 22, 101, 229
Cale, John, 204 de Antonio, Emile, 192, 193, 197, 203
Carey, Lede 1935 196 Death of Fashion, The (Schnabel), 281
Castelli, Ileana, see Sonnabend, Ileana Deep, The (Pollock), 94, 95
Castelli, Leo, 132—34, 203, 275; de Kooning de Kooning, Elaine, 7, 94, 117, 127, 133, 219
and, 133; gallery, 131-32, 134, 169, 193, de Kooning, Willem, 27-28, 79, 98, 100, 101,
246, 270, 276; Johns and, 140, 141, 151—52, 137, 219; on American painting, 79, 113;
153, 156, 158, 162; Pollock and, 133, 134; on art, 149; Castelli and, 133; economic
Rauschenberg and, 139, 140; Schnabel success, 117, 123; exhibitions, 62, 123, 134,
and, 284; SoHo gallery, 281, 286—87, 291; 229; on existentialism, 109, 113; influence,
INDEX 345

105, 139, 168, 220; paintings, 4, 53, 99— Ernst, Max, 52

100, 101-5, 112, 113-18, 303; Pollock and, European art: Cubism, 31, 88, 104—5; émi-
67—68, 79, 88—89, 96, 113; popular culture gré artists in New York, 44—46, 51; Ex-
and, 295; recognition, 118-19; Rosenberg pressionism, 283; in 1980s, 283-84:
on, 109, 112, 114; in Springs, 117; tech- Surrealism, 43—48
nique, 99-100; training, 100—1 Excavation (de Kooning), 99-100, 105
de Laszlo, Violet, 40, 44 Exile (Schnabel), 284, 285
De Maria, Walter, 254-58, 257, 269 existentialism, 109-11, 113
Denby, Edwin, 28, 101-2 Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), 204—5
Denes, Agnes, 242 Expressionism, 283
Depression, 25-29, 33—35 Eyes in the Heat (Pollock), 58, 59, 258
Dia Center for the Arts, 255
Dialectic Triangulation (Denes), 242 F-111] (Rosenquist), 181—82, 183
Diller, Burgoyne, 26-27, 35, 40 Factory, 198-201, 204-9, 215
Dinew jimall; Falkenberg, Paul, 89
di Suvero, Mark, 176, 178 False Start (Johns), 141—42, 291
Diver (Johns), 291 False Start IT (Johns), 143
Door to the River (de Kooning), 117 Fantasia (Hofmann), 110
Double Negative (Heizer), 254 fashion industry, 90—91, 179, 190-91
drip paintings: analogies to bodily fluids, Federal Arts Project (FAP), 27, 29, 34-35,
63—64, 70; critics on, 87, 90, 222; frames 40, 44, 101
of, 80, 175; infinite implied in, 70, 222, Feeley, Paul, 219
227-28; influence, 184, 222, 228, 239, 254, Feldman, Morton, 89
258, 271, 295, 297; Judd’s view of, 225, feminism, 247—49, 272
226; Morris’s view of, 239, 246; of No- Ferren, John, 96
land, 222; of Pollock, 7—9, 10, 59, 62, 65, Ferus Gallery, 197
69-71, 220, 222, 225; Pollock on, 87; Pol- Fiegan, Richard, 291
lock’s technique, 59, 64—65, 89, 91-93; Fields, Danny, 206
shapes in, 70; theories on, 63—64; tools, films: by Longo, 300-1; by Salle, 295; by
91—93; uniqueness in modern art, 88 Schnabel, 298; by Warhol, 203, 204, 206,
Dubuffet, Jean, 134 207; of Pollock, 89, 111
Duchamp, Marcel, 52, 56, 152—53, 158, Finn, Huckleberry, 81—82
226 Fishl, Eric, 276
Duration Piece #7 (Huebler), 270 Five Boys (Warhol), 188
Dwan Gallery, 228, 256, 262 Flag (Johns), 131, 132, 141, 151, 162
Dzubas, Friedel, 134, 220, 221 Flag on an Orange Field (Johns), 166, 170
Flame (Pollock), 40, 41
earthworks, 254—55, 257—58, 263—64, Flavin, Dan, 177, 229, 261
269 Flin Flon III (Stella), 232
Easter and the Totem (Pollock), 92, 93—94 Flowers (Warhol), 203—4
Echo: Number 25, 1951 (Pollock), 91 Following Piece (Acconci), 241
Eddingsville (Johns), 156 Fool’s House (Johns), 160, 161, 163
Egan, Charles, 116 Francis, Sam, 123
Elaine de Kooning (de Kooning), 102 Frankenthaler, Helen, 218, 219—22, 223, 229,
Eliminator, The (Smithson), 261 272
Empire (Warhol), 202, 203 Fredericks, Tina S., 189, 192
“Entropy and the New Monuments” Fried, Michael, 223, 228-29, 233—35, 237
(Smithson), 261—62 Friedman, B. H., 94
Ernst, Jimmy, 28 Fun Gallery, 282
346 INDEX

Gablik, Suzi, 145 Heizer, Michael, 254, 255, 258, 269

Geldzahler, Henry, 179, 196, 197, 207, 229 Held, Al, 99, 117
Giacometti, Alberto, 109, 134 Heller, Ben, 132
Gibson, William, 300 Henderson, Joseph L., 40
Gift (Man Ray), 151 Hess, Thomas B., 7, 25, 43, 81, 113, 117,
Girl with Ball (Lichtenstein), 193 7, N= 32
Glimcher, Arnold, 162 History of Water, The (Benton), 20
Gluck, Nathan, 197, 293 Hofmann, Hans, 7, 88, 110, 112, 114; paint-
Going West (Pollock), 36, 37 ings, 3; Pollock and, 68—69; School of
Goldberg, Michael, 109, 117, 126-27, 219-20 Fine Arts, 32—33
Gold Marilyn Monroe (Warhol), 197, 198, 212 Hopper, Edward, 229
Goldstein, Jack, 276, 284—85 House and Garden, 294
Goodman, Job, 34 Huberman, Leo, 22
Gorgoni, Gianfranco, 240, 298 Hubert, Christian, 294
Gorky, Arshile, 46, 62, 101, 112, 114, 123 Huebler, Douglas, 270
Goodnough, Robert, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 64 Hughes, Fred, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211
government, see Federal Arts Project Hughes, Robert, 291
Graham, Dan, 276 Huot, Robert, 241
Graham, John, 9, 26, 43—44, 101 Hutchinson, Peter, 242
Greenberg, Clement, 32, 62, 63, 64, 114, 116;
on color-field painting, 222; Frankenthaler I, a Man (Warhol), 207
and, 219, 220-21; Pollock and, 88, 105, I. Miller, 190—91
111-12, 222; on Stella, 234 “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan”
Green Box (Duchamp), 152 (Smithson), 263
Greene, Stephen, 231 Indiana, Robert, 123, 169, 197
Green Gallery, 196, 226 Interview, 208-9, 291
Green Target (Johns), 131, 132, 260 In the Studio (Johns), 157—58
Grosman, Tatyana, 140, 142 Ireland, Patrick, 182
Griinewald, Matthias, 158 Isenheim Altarpiece (Griinewald), 158
Guardians of the Secret, The (Pollock), 48
Guggenheim, Peggy, 51-53, 74, 75; Pollock Jackson, Harry, 99
and, 52—53, 56—57, 68 Jack the Dripper at Peg’s Place (Bidlo), 296,
Guggenheim, Solomon, 51, 53 297
Guggenheim Museum, 53, 246 Jacobson, Bill, 302
Guston, Philip, 35, 96, 111, 123, 229 Janis, Sidney, 116, 134
Jewish Museum, 131, 179, 246, 253
Haacke, Hans, 242 Johnny Mnemonic (Longo), 300-1
Hallwalls, 276—77 Johns, Jasper, 127, 135, 142—45, 147, 169,
Hansa Gallery, 176 275, 303; on de Kooning, 168; drawings,
Happenings, 176-77, 269 193; Duchamp’s influence on, 152—53,
Hare, David, 56 158; exhibitions, 131—32, 141, 151—52, 153,
Haring, Keith, 282, 292 156, 163, 164, 229; influence, 169-72, 226,
Harlem Light (Johns), 156 231; lithographs, 140-41, 142; paintings,
Harlot (Warhol), 204 130, 131-32, 141—42, 151, 152, 153, 154-—
Harper's Bazaar, 179, 192 55, 156—59, 160, 161-65, 167—69; on Pol-
Hartigan, Grace, 67, 99, 123-24, 126, lock, 168; prices of paintings, 291; prints,
2NO= 20272. 167; Rauschenberg and, 140, 141, 145,
Heads Will Roll (Longo), 299-300 147-48, 149, 150; theater work, 150
Heiss, Alanna, 270-71 Johnson, Jed, 207, 208
 INDEX
347

Johnson, Philip, 132, 197, 206 Lichtenstein, Roy, 4, 169, 178, 193, 195, 303
Johnson, Poppy, 245 Life, 10, 87
Judd, Donald, 223, 234, 237, 261; exhibitions, Light Bulb (Johns), 193
229; works, 174, 177, 224, 225-26, 227 Lightning Field, The (De Maria), 257-58,
Judson Church, 179 269
Jugglers, The (Frankenthaler), 220 Linich, Billy, see Name, Billy
Lippard, Lucy, 276
Kandinsky, Wassily, 32—33, 51 Locke, John, 81
Kansas City Art Institute, 39, 136 Long Island, see Springs
Kaprow, Allan, 175—76, 177, 183, 269, 277 Longo, Robert, 276—77, 278-79, 286-88,
Karp, Ivan, 193, 195—96, 197 289, 291, 299-301
Katz, Alex, 99, 111, 127 Lo sciocco senza paura (#1, 4X) (Stella), 235
Kelly, Ellsworth, 178, 182 Louis, Morris, 221, 222, 229
Kertess, Klauss, 246 Love (Warhol), 292
Kiefer, Anselm, 283 Byewleenely7/,
Kiesler, Frederick, 52 Lyrical Abstraction, 271, 275
Kiku (Warhol), 292
Kitchen, 270, 277, 279 MacConnell, Kim, 272
Kitchen (Warhol), 204 Macdonald-Wright, Stanton, 19
Klein, Ralph, 94 Magazine of Art, 43
Kligman, Ruth, 121-22 Mahoning (Kline), 119
Kline, Franz, 114, 137, 140, 219; exhibitions, Makos, Christopher, 214
123, 229; influence, 117; on Pollock, 94— Malanga, Gerard, 198, 203, 204, 208, 211-12
96; works, 119, 123 Male and Female (Pollock), 93—94
Kluver, Billy, 179 Man at Table (Segal), 174
Kord, Victor, 271 Mangold, Robert, 169—70
Kosuth, Joseph, 270 Mansion, Gracie, 282
Kozloff, Joyce, 272 Marden, Brice, 170, 302, 304, 305, 307
Kozloff, Max, 64 Marilyn Monroe’s Lips (Warhol), 194, 198
Kramer, Hilton, 291 Marisol, 197
Krasner, Lee, 6, 219; career, 9, 26, 32, 33, 44, Marot, Helen, 40
67; politics, 29; on Pollock, 11, 40, 56, 84, Marriage of Reason and Squalor, The (Stella),
87, 90; relationship with Pollock, 9-10, P= BE
33, 44, 48-49, 67, 68, 88, 121-22; Rosen- Martin, Agnes, 182, 219
berg and, 111-12; in Springs, 7, 8, 9, 10, Martin, David Stone, 190
56-57, 59; training, 32; on women artists, Marx, Claude Roger, 124
272 Masson, André, 44, 45, 46, 48
Krishnamurti, Jedda, 70 Matisse, Henri, 32, 93
Kushner, Robert, 272 Matta Echaurren, Roberto, 45, 46
Max Protetch Gallery, 279
Landscape with Rider (Pollock), 37 Max’s Kansas City, 206, 241, 260
Lane, Lois, 170 McBride, Henry, 87
Large Coca-Cola (Warhol), 191 McMillen Gallery, 44, 68
Large Triple Elvis (Warhol), 199 McNeil, George, 16
Lebel, Robert, 152 Meditation of the Painter (Masson), 45
Leo Castelli (Warhol), 210 Melancholy (Salle), 290
Leslie, Alfred, 117, 125, 126, 219-20 Melville, Herman, 168
Lew, Jeffery, 270 Men in the Cities (Longo), 286
LeWitt, Sol, 182, 226, 227, 261, 269 Men Trapped in Ice (Longo), 278, 279
348 INDEX

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 150, neo-Dada, 151—52

179, 206 neo-Expressionism, 283
Metro Pictures, 284—85, 286—87, 297 Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 90, 113, 196, Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (Nauman),
229, 246 169
Metzger, Edith, 122 New England, October (Hartigan), 124
Midgette, Allan, 214 New Image painters, 170-71, 275, 281
Miller, Dorothy, 31, 123, 132, 232-33 Newman, Barnett, 44, 78, 80—85, 137; exhi-
Minimalism, 177, 178, 226-29, 239—41, 243, bitions, 81, 84, 123, 229; influence, 260;
247, 269-—70; economic success, 269, 275; Pollock and, 84; works, 3, 46, 81, 82, 84—
influence of Pollock, 229; Smithson on, 85, 158
261-62 New School for Social Research, 15, 20, 175
Mir6, Joan, 46, 48 New York: alternative spaces, 270-71, 277,
Mitchell, Joan, 117, 125, 126, 127, 272 279; artists’ attraction to, 28-29; East Vil-
Mittendorf, Helmut, 283 lage, 282-83; SoHo, 275-76, 281, 284-85;
Mogenson, Paul, 169-70 Tribeca, 294
Molleda, Mercedes, 123-24 New York artists: attitude toward Europe-
Mondrian, Piet, 33, 52—53, 74, 80-81, 134 ans, 44—45, 51; at Cedar Street Tavern,
Monogram (Rauschenberg), 140, 141 94-96, 111, 121, 137, 260; in Depression,
Monroe, Marilyn, 197, 198, 212 25-29, 34; and existentialism, 109-11;
Montauk Highway (de Kooning), 117 Happenings, 176-77; incomes, 117; leftist
Morris, Robert, 226-27, 241, 261; exhibitions, politics, 25, 26-27, 29, 39, 245 —46; lofts,
229; “Notes on Sculpture,” 228; political 26, 294; in 1950s, 117, 123-27; in 1960s,
activities, 245; on Pollock, 239, 243, 246; 169-70, 177-79, 229; in 1970s, 275-77; in
set designs, 150; works, 240, 244, 245, 1980s, 282—83, 284-88, 291, 292, 293-95,
PAO=47,. 2485 251 —52..258 300
Morrissey, Paul, 207 New Yorker, The, 65
Moser, Barry, 158 Nico, 204
Moskowitz, Robert, 170 1954 (Still), 75
Motherwell, Robert, 44, 46, 123 Nogaro (X, 4.75X = Ist version) (Stella), 234
Mountains and Sea (Frankenthaler), 218, Noland, Kenneth, 221, 222, 229
220-21 Nolde, Emil, 283
Mullican, Matt, 276 Nonsites (Smithson), 262
Mural (Pollock), 54—55, 56 Nosei, Anina, 281, 283
Museum of Modern Art, 31—32, 246; Ameri- “Notes on Sculpture” (Morris), 228
Canwant oneal Gal 26 eals222 0233 S536. Novros, David, 169—70
242; focus on European art, 31-32; New Now Everybody (Longo), 287
American Painting show, 123-25; Op Art Number 1A (Pollock), 62
exhibit, 178; Pollock exhibition, 122-23; Number 4, 1950 (Pollock), 64—65
Pollock works purchased by, 46, 62 Number 14, 1951 (Pollock), 91
Museum of Non-Objective Painting, see Number 32, 1950 (Pollock), 9
Guggenheim Museum
Myers, John Bernard, 220 Observatory (Morris), 244, 246, 253
O’Hara, Frank, 109
Naifeh, Steven, 63—64 Ohr, George, 158
Name, Billy, 186, 198-201 Oldenburg, Claes, 123, 169, 177, 183—84, 197
Namuth, Hans, 72, 76, 78, 86, 89, 111, 149 Olitski, Jules, 178, 221, 222, 229, 235
Nasielsk II (Stella), 233 One, Number 31 (1950) (Pollock), 60—61, 62.
Nauman, Bruce, 169 90, 117, 184, 220
INDEX
349

Onement I (Newman), 83 influence, 3—4, 99, 219: influence on

Op Art, 178 earthworkers, 255, 258; influence on
Oppenheim, Dennis, 253—54, 255 Frankenthaler, 219, 220, 223; influence on
Orange Disaster (Warhol), 213 Minimalists, 229; influence in 1960s, 182—
Orestes (de Kooning), 102 84, 243; influence in 1980s, 294, 298-99;
Orozco, José Clemente, 39 influence in 1990s, 298—99, 303—4, 307;
Out the Window (Johns), 141, 291 influence on pattern and decoration
Oxidation paintings (Warhol), 184 painters, 272 —73; influence of surrealism,
Ozenfant, Amédée, 32 46—48; Kaprow on, 175; and Kligman,
121-22; Matta and, 46; Mondrian on, 53;
P&D, see pattern and decoration (P&D) music and, 295; mysticism, 70; on nature,
painting 265; Newman and, 84; painting gestures,
Pace Gallery, 284 7—9; Peggy Guggenheim and, 52—53, 56—
Painted on 21st Street (Frankenthaler), 220 57; personality, 16, 41, 96; physical
Painting (de Kooning), 102, 104 appearance, 16; psychiatrists, 40, 94; public
Parsons, Betty, 62, 76, 81, 84, 89, 90,-136, image, 88—90; Rauschenberg and, 137;
137, 140, 220 and recognition, 10-11, 87—88, 297-98:
pattern and decoration (P&D) painting, 272— relationship with Krasner, 9-10, 33, 44,
W352 Ds SOB 48—49, 67, 68, 88, 121-22; resentment
Paula Cooper Gallery, 241, 247 against Europe, 44, 89; resentment against
Pearlstein, Philip, 189, 192 other artists, 96; Schnabel on, 298—99; in
Pearman, Pat, 135 Springs, 7, 8, 10, 56—57, 59, 87-88, 89—
performance art, 270 90; training, 14-17, 33; working habits,
Perilous Night (Johns), 158, 161 40; works, 36, 38, 41, 42, 47, 54-55, 58,
Perreault, John, 273 60—61, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95; see also drip
Phenomena (Tchelitchew), 133 paintings
Picabia, Francis, 151 Pollock, Lee Krasner, see Krasner, Lee
Picasso, Pablo, 43, 48—49, 94, 101, 104, Pollock, Roy (father), 13-14, 63
158 Pollock, Sanford (brother), 33-34, 39, 40
Pincus-Witten, Robert, 247, 249 Pollock, Stella (mother), 13, 14, 16
Plunge (Smithson), 262 Poons, Larry, 182, 222, 229
Point of Tranquility (Louis), 221 Pop Art, 4, 169, 177, 178, 197, 229, 294
Polke, Sigmar, 289 Portrait of Cézanne (Picabia), 151
Pollock, Charles (brother), 14, 15, 39 Portrait of Mary Boone (Schnabel), 280
Pollock, Frank (brother), 16 Potter, Jeffrey, 16, 63, 67
Pollock, Jackson, 6; on action painting, 112; poured paintings: of color-field painters, 222,
aims in painting, 40—41, 69, 71, 87; alco- 228; see also drip paintings
holism, 10, 16-17, 34, 40, 56, 63, 67-68, Presentation (Marden), 305
84, 89-90, 94—96, 111; Artnews interview, Prince, Richard, 297—98
7—9, 11; and art world, 10, 33, 219; Ben- PS, i, Bak 27
ton and.) 1b =16s 21), 225 33534) 37,38) 39— Purgatory (Smithson), 260
40; Castelli and, 133, 134; childhood, 14;
death, 67, 122; in Depression, 33-35, 39— Queen of Hearts (de Kooning), 103
40; dreams, 67; during World War II, 40,
44; evolution as painter, 35, 37-38, 48; ex- Race Track, The (Ryder), 37-38
hibitions, 44, 53, 56, 62, 87, 90, 122-23, Racing Thoughts (Johns), 158
134, 220, 229; family, 13-14; in Federal Raft, The (Schnabel), 284
Arts Project, 34—35, 40; in films, 89, 111; Rauschenberg, Robert, 134-37, 147, 149; de
income, 117; independence, 88—89; Kooning and, 139; exhibitions, 123, 136—
350 INDEX

Rauschenberg, Robert (cont.) Sartre, Jean-Paul, 109, 111

37, 139, 179, 229; influence, 226; Johns Scent (Johns), 157, 164
and, 140, 141, 145, 147-48, 149, 150; thea- Schapiro, Miriam, 268, 272
ter work, 150, 179; works, 136—37, 138, Scharf, Kenny, 292
139—40, 141, 176, 179-81, 303 Schizophrenia Prism (Salle), 295
Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, Schmidt, Thomas Lanigan, 273
150 Schnabel, Julian, 277, 289, 291, 294; exhibi-
Ray, Man, 31, 151 tions, 284; films, 298; on Pollock, 298—99;
Realm of the Carceral, The (Morris), 252 works, 280, 281—82, 284, 285, 299
Reed, Lou, 204 Schwankovsky, Frederick John de St. Vrain,
Reinhardt, Ad, 123, 137, 260 14, 15
Reiring, Janelle, 286—87 Scully, Sean, 303—4
Reuben Gallery, 176 Seasons, The (Johns), 158
Ricard, René, 281 Seery, John, 271
Richardson, John, 52 Segal, George, 174, 178
Riley, Bridget, 178 Self Portrait in Profile (Duchamp), 152
Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 295 Self-Portrait with Rita (Benton), 18
Rivera, Diego, 39 Seligmann Gallery, 219
Rivers, Larry, 123, 140 “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (LeWitt),
Robert Kushner and Hts Friends Eat Their 227, 269
Clothes (Kushner), 272 Serra, Richard, 239, 240, 256, 294, 295, 298
Rockburne, Dorothea, 169—70 Shea, Diane, 286
Rodman, Selden, 87 Sherman, Cindy, 276, 285, 286
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 27 She-Wolf, The (Pollock), 46-48, 56, 59, 260
Rose, Barbara, 29, 67, 269, 291 Shimmering Substance (Pollock), 59
Rosenberg, Harold, 107—9; on action paint- Shunk, Harry, 205
ers, 105, 108—9, 111—12, 113, 114, 176; on Siegelaub, Seth, 270
artists in Depression, 26, 28, 29, 34; de Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 3, 39, 64
Kooning and, 116, 117; on Hofmann, 69; Smiling Workman, The (Dine), 177
Krasner and, 111-12 Smith, David, 25, 101, 134, 219, 229
Rosenblum, Robert, 123, 169, 248 Smith, Gregory White, 63—64
Rosenquist, James, 123, 177, 181-82, 183, 196 Smith, Tony, 117
Rosenthal, Rachel, 147, 148 Smithson, Robert, 258, 259—65, 269, 298
Rothenberg, Susan, 170-71 Snow, Carmel, 192
Rothko, Edith Sachar, 26 Social History of Indiana, A (Benton), 20, 21
Rothko, Mark, 26, 44, 137; exhibitions, 123, SoHo (New York), 275-76, 281, 284-85
229; paintings, 46, 79-80; Stull and, 74, Solanis, Valerie, 206—8
D716 Soldier’s Medal (Leslie), 125
Royal Academy (London), 162 Solman, Joseph, 27
Rubin, William, 63 Solomon, Holly, 270, 275
Rupp, Christy, 282 Sonnabend, Ileana, 133, 139, 203
Russell, Morgan, 19 Sonnabend, Michael, 203, 241
Ryder, Albert P., 37-38 Sonnier, Keith, 169
Ryman, Robert, 182, 219 Southgate, Patsy, 63, 94, 109
Space Completion Ideas (Burgy), 242
Salle, David, 276, 277-78, 289, 290, 291, 294, “Specific Objects” (Judd), 226
295, 300 Spectrums (Kelly), 182
Sandler, Irving, 109 Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 258, 263, 264, 298
Saret, Alan, 241 Springs, Long Island: de Kooning in, 117;
 INDEX
S155]

Pollock and Krasner in, 7, 8, 10, 56—57, Tomlin, Bradley Walker, 123
59, 87-88, 89-90 Tomlinson Court Park (Stella), 232
Stable Gallery, 136, 197 Tongue to the Heart (Longo), 287—88
Stankiewicz, Richard, 176 Torreano, John, 271
Stanley, Bob, 178 Totem (Benglis), 250
Steir, Pat, 303 Totem Lesson II (Pollock), 91
Stella, Frank, 192, 229, 231-37; critical reac- T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond (Pollock), 38—
tion to, 233-35; exhibitions, 123; and 39
fashion, 179; set designs, 150; works, 174, Tremaine, Burton, 132, 162, 196
W732 3002377938 0284035237, Tribeca, 294
Stelling, Bill, 283 Twain, Mark, 81—82
Stenographic Figure (Pollock), 46, 47 Two Blue Walls (Huot), 241
Stevens, Wallace, 158 Twombly, Cy, 136
Stull, Clyfford, 72, 73-77, 80, 111; exhibi-
tions, 74—76, 77, 80, 123, 229; Pollock and, University of South Carolina, 144
TAaWworksyos/l = (2575070 Untitled (Johns; 1964—65), 153, 156
Stone, Allan, 196 Untitled (Johns; 1972), 156—57
Studio (Johns), 153 Untitled (Judd), 174, 224
Studio IT (Johns), 156 Untitled (Mitchell), 126
Stutz, Geraldine, 190 Untitled (Morris), 248
Suburb in Havana (de Kooning), 118 Untitled (Alert, GE) (Warhol and Basquiat),
Sultan, Donald, 170 293
Summertime: Number 9A, 1948 (Pollock), Untitled Film Stills (Sherman), 285, 286
10
Surrealism, 43—48 Velvet Underground, 204-5, 206
Swenson, Gene, 151, 197 Venice Biennale, 62
Swing (Longo), 279 Ventriloguist (Johns), 158
Synchromists, 19 Vietnam War protests, 245
Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Newman), 81, 84
Tabak, May, 111 Viva, 207
Takis, 177 Vogue, 90-91, 179, 294
Tanning, Dorothea, 52 Voice (Morris), 246—47
Tantric Detail (Johns), 157
Target with Four Faces (Johns), 131—32 Ward, Eleanor, 136, 196, 197
Target with Plaster Casts (Johns), 130, 131, Warhol, Andy, 4, 186, 205; Campbell’s soup
132 cans, 196—97, 198; celebrities and, 209,
Tavel, Ronald, 204 215-16; childhood, 187—88, 189; collec-
Taylor, Paul, 179 tions, 215; commercial art, 189, 190—92,
Tchelitchew, Pavel, 44, 133 211, 292—93; critics on, 291—92; death,
Thiebaud, Wayne, 196—97 187; exhibitions, 197, 203—4, 291—92; Fac-
Thoreau, Henry David, 79 tory, 198-201, 204—9, 215; family, 187,
Threadwaste (Morris), 240 189; films, 203, 204, 206, 207; image, 192,
Three Flags (Johns), 162 214-15, 216; influence, 294; influence of
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 220, 232 Johns, 169; influence of Pollock, 184; Op
Tiffany & Co., 148 Art, 178; paintings, 184, 192—93, 195-98,
Tiger’s Eye, 84 203, 212; portraits, 209, 211-14, 292, 293;
Time, 22, 116, 136 set designs, 150; shooting of, 207—8; silk
Tolegian, Michael, 21 screens, 179, 197—98, 203—4, 211, 212, 216;
Tomkins, Calvin, 147 studios, 195; supermarket logos, 177;
SD INDEX

Warhol, Andy (cont.) Winters, Terry, 171

training, 188—89; works, 174, 184, 188, Wofford, Philip, 271
190, 191, 194, 199, 202, 210, 213, 293 Woman Artists in Revolution (WAR),
Warhol Museum, 215 Dapp
Water Bull (Pollock), 90, 91 Woman on a Horse (Frankenthaler), 219
Weber, John, 177, 275 Woman I (de Kooning), 115, 116
Weil, Susan, 136 women’s liberation movement, 247—49, 272
Weiner, Lawrence, 270 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 27;
Weissman, Julian, 277 see also Federal Arts Project
Wesselman, Tom, 169 Wrestlers, The (Longo), 279
We, the People (Huberman), 22
White Flag (Johns), 131, 132, 291 Yarn (Warhol), 184
White Numbers (Johns), 132 yarn paintings (Warhol), 184
Whitman, Robert, 179
Whitney Museum of American Art, 20, 162, Zakanitch, Robert, 303, 306—7
180, 245, 246, 272, 291-92 Zwack, Michael, 276, 279
My
Pollock
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