The abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner, Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, and others revolutionized the art world in the 1940s and 1950s and continue to inspire passionate arguments to this day. What were these artists trying to achieve? Who were the critical voices of the time that rallied public interest in Abstract Expressionism and sparked rancorous debate?
Drawing on recent critical, historical, and biographical work, this lavishly illustrated book offers a sharp new focus on a pivotal art movement. It also presents an extensive commentary on the two most influential critics of postwar American art—Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg—whose powerful views shaped perceptions of Abstract Expressionism and other contemporary art movements. In one essay, Norman L. Kleeblatt traces the influence of Abstract Expressionism into the mid-1970s and examines its connection to subsequent art styles. Other essays range from the literary and intellectual culture of New York during that period and an analysis of sculpture and representation to a discussion of Jewish issues in relation to postwar American Art. In addition, the book features a magisterial essay by eminent critic Irving Sandler and a copiously illustrated cultural timeline by Maurice Berger.
"Thorough and scholarly. . . . Presents a balanced account of the art, the artists, the critics and the issues."—Richard Kalina, Art in America
(Richard Kalina Art in America 20081001)
"Of particular interest is Balken''s essay on Rosenberg, which relies on new archival research to give a more robust understanding of this powerful yet often misunderstood critic. . . . Recommended."—Choice
(Choice )
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
About the Author
Norman L. Kleeblatt is Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator at The Jewish Museum. Debra Bricker Balken is an art scholar and independent curator. Maurice Berger is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Douglas Dreishpoon is Senior Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Charlotte Eyerman is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Mark Godfrey is curator at the Tate Modern in London. Caroline A. Jones, Professor of Art History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Irving Sandler is Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Purchase and a Visiting Professor at Hunter College.
Maurice Berger is a cultural historian, art critic, and curator. He is Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A student of the pioneering theoretical art historian, Rosalind E. Krauss, he completed a B.A. at Hunter College and Ph.D. in art history and critical theory at the City University of New York. He then turned his attention to race. One of the few white kids in his low-income housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Berger grew up hyper-sensitized to race. Due to his experiences, he looked beyond the world of "critical theory" to address the relevance of visual culture, and especially images of race, to everyday life.
Berger engages the issues of racism, whiteness, and contemporary race relations and their connection to visual culture in the United States. His study on institutional racism--"Are Art Museums Racist?"--appeared in Art in America. Berger has also curated a number of race-related exhibitions, including For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights--a joint venture of the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This exhibition examines the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the modern struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States. It opened at International Center of Photography in New York in May 2010 and travels to the DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago), Smithsonian National Museum of American History (DC), Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (Baltimore), Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, MA) and other venues. For All the World to See was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the tenth NEH on the Road exhibition, an initiative that will adapt the exhibition in a smaller, lower security version and travel it to up to 35 more venues, mostly smaller and mid-size institutions across the country over a five year period from 2012 to 2017.
Berger is the author of eleven books on the subject of American art, culture, and the politics of race. His memoir, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) was one of the earliest books to introduce the idea of "whiteness" as a racial concept to a more general audience. The book was a finalist for the Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award of Boston University School of Social Work. Other books include: Masterworks of the Jewish Museum (Yale, 2004); The Crisis of Criticism (The New Press, 1998); Constructing Masculinity (Routledge, 1995); Modern Art and Society (HarperCollins, 1994); How Art Becomes History (HarperCollins, 1992); Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (Harper & Row, 1989). Berger's writing on art, film, television, theater, law, and the politics of race have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including Artforum, Art in America, New York Times, Village Voice, October, Wired, and Los Angeles Times. He has also contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies.
Berger is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts; book awards from the American Library Association, W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Harvard University, Boston University School of Social Work, and Benjamin L. Hooks Institute of the University of Memphis; curatorial honors from the International Association of Art Critics, American Section and the Association of Art Museum Curators; and a 2011 Emmy Award nomination for his work on the "For All the World to See" segment of WNET's Sunday Arts.
Berger has also been involved in a number of national and local initiatives around American race relations, visual culture, and education in the arts. From June 2002 to March 2005, he was Chairman of the External Advisory Committee of The Digital Library of The New York Public Library. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion, Columbia University (New York), Education Committee of Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Artistic Advisory Committee of National Foundation for Jewish Culture. He is the author of "The Crisis in Art Education," a white paper requested by President William Jefferson Clinton for his Committee on the Arts and The Humanities (1995) and a Position Report, The Future of the National Endowment for the Arts, requested by the Democratic National Committee for the transition team of President-elect Bill Clinton (1992).
This is a magnificent artbook enriched by breakthrough studies on the most important movement in post-war American art, namely Abstract Expressionism (and its offshoots like color-field painting). Based on the intellectual rivalry between the two most famous critics of the period, Clement Greenberg (the advocate of abstraction, who insisted on the importance of the work of art versus the creative process, abstract art being the only valid modern form of art) and Harold Rosenberg (who coined the expression "action painting" in a 1952 article in Artnews and to whom what counted was the act of creating, more than the end product) it enables the reader to discover some of the most canonical works of the movement, by De Kooning, Pollock, Newman and many others, lavishly illustrated.
The book accompanies an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in NYC (which will later go to St Louis) and is a trove of information and documents on the roots, the influences, the governing ideas, the artists' personalities and their reactions to the various opinions stated by Greenberg and Rosenberg on their art but also on the state of contemporary culture.
The reproductions of facsimile of letters are especially interesting, such as the ones Clyfford Still sent to Harold Rosenberg, first urging him to get into art criticism and then condemning him for doing so ("I am deeply disappointed" he ends up writing).
A landmark exhibition enlightened by this rich catalogue (a highlight is Irving Sandler's article on the convergences and divergences between Greenberg and Rosenberg)which I strongly recommend.
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This review is from: Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 (Jewish Museum) (Paperback)
Catalog for a 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, this monograph contains a good deal of interesting writing and illustration along with a couple of deflating examples of verbal pretentiousness which is tedious but not a spoiler. To avoid the repetitiveness inherent in yet another show of the same old guys (and a few gals), the focus was placed on the role of the two major creators of the myths of abstraction which impelled people to buying despite the opaqueness of the product. It can fairly be said, that without this myth-making, the rationales which made the abstraction seem meaningful, there could have been no surge of the excitement and buying which made New York City the Queen City of Art in the post-war period and most of the time since. Such writers as Keeblatt and Sandler, deeply involved with the movements in art of the period, and others with solid backgrounds, help us see what Greenberg and Rosenberg did to persuade the art community that Newman, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Kline, Motherwell, Guston and their confrères, had something that should be supported and cherished. On the whole, it is well done, with a few exceptions, accessible to the involved lay reader, and vital to understanding just what can get an art movement started.
With a major exhibition about to open at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the art of the City from 1940 to 1970, will be given a thorough viewing by a relatively few who were there in the beginning and the many who have been educated to its virtues since.
This book is a commendable source of information to complement the exhibitions publication which I have not yet seen.
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Action/Abstraction was an incredible exhibit. It covered a familiar time period and well-known artists, but from a wonderfully new perspective. If you are interested in the history of art history, I highly suggest spending some time reviewing this catalog.
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