“Americans in Paris” was the first show to take place at the new New York University art space called the Grey Art Museum. Located on Cooper Square, a few blocks away from the old gallery, the new site is larger than the previous space. “Americans in Paris” offered works by many American artists who lived and worked in Paris, finding congenial conditions there after the war. The exhibition’s subtitle, “Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962,” indicates the duration of time, nearly a generation, during which painters and sculptors from the States took advantage of the inexpensive living circumstances available then in Paris. Former GIs received monthly support from the American government–enough money to get by and concentrate on art.
At the time, France still maintained its position as the major art culture of the West. Although the show doesn’t present work before 1946, Paris at that time still held sway in the international art milieu–this despite the fact that New York’s abstract expressionism was immensely popular in the middle 1940s. Indeed, New York had been rising for some time as an art center, and had begun to challenge Paris as the place to be. But, even so, art made in Paris was usually considered more than meaningful, even if only by virtue of its location.
Sometimes, though, artists made their way in both cities. Painters belonging to the abstract expressionist school were rampant both in New York and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in Paris–for example, abstract painter Joan Mitchell spent a year in 1947 in Paris on a fellowship, and beginning in 1955 began dividing her time between New York and Paris. She moved to Paris permanently in 1959. Eventually, many of the American artists who spent time in Paris made their way home to New York, but not without first experiencing the City of Lights.
Other artists in the show included the second-generation abstract painter Norman Bluhm, the black artist Ed Clark, and Cuban-born Carmen Herrera. These artists were not necessarily closely allied in regard to painting styles, but they shared in the excitement of rendering the various styles of the New York School–across the Atlantic!
A good number of American artists developed ways of working they would take back with them when they returned to America. In 1946, the first year of works in the show, we do see abstraction maintain its dominance–most of the works in “Americans in Paris” are non-objective in nature.
Moreover, by 1962, the year the exhibition ended, artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were changing abstraction–by relying on conceptual advances in painting, in the case of Johns, or turning toward a highly innovatory outlook with regard to materials and forms, in the case of Rauschenberg. And Pop art was at its very beginning in the start of the 196os, But even if the Grey Art Museum show addresses a fairly narrow window of time, the works in the exhibition are notable for their achievement, their diversity, and their command of an internationalism that made their art viable in two very different sites.
A point can be made about the artists’ strong preference for abstraction. Non-objective art had been of high quality for some two generations, having been established in the first decades of the 20th century. By the 1940s, this outlook was still approached with the sense that very exciting abstract work could be made, in keeping with very recent art history. The excitement of abstraction had not yet waned; exploratory work was possible.
Perhaps it is fair to say that the intellectual rigor resulting from cubism and its immediate aftermath was giving way to a more emotionally driven sense of art. Certainly, the proponents of an ab-ex orientation, who contribute a good deal to “Americans in Paris,” were relying on a painting method incorporating large gestures of feeling. The insight no longer had to do with structure, but with the explosive suggestion of pure feeling. This made abstract-expressionism immensely popular, to the point of being nearly populist, The style of lyric abstraction was somewhat limited by a heavy reliance on emotion alone. Emotion and a very free painterly hand replaced the intellectualism of cubist art or, for that matter, hard-edge abstraction. While it is important to remember just how forceful expressionist abstraction was at the time, we can remain doubtful concerning its methodology of excess, which may not have been as accomplished as many believed at the time.
Yet the twenty years “Americans in Paris” covers demonstrate remarkable achievements. Ed Clark’s beautiful abstraction, titled The City, was made in 1952. The work filled with roughly edged gray and blue rectangles and squares, suggests the colors of stone used to construct buildings in Paris. Clark, a black American artist of unusual vision and remarkable skill was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago. Clark lived in Paris for five years before moving to New York, where he consorted with other downtown artists. Known for the strength of his brushstroke, as well as his brilliant use of color, Clark is a true representative of the kind of abstraction that began in New York but was carried over to Paris. The City is an outstanding instance of a non-objective work that connects with the external reality of Paris, a city whose urban beauty has been extolled for a long time.
Claire Falkenstein was raised in California, receiving her degree from Berkeley. She moved to Paris in 1950, where she worked on open-air sculptures, which are notable for their combination of positive and negative volume. In one of the show’s better pieces, Falkenstein contributes an open-wire abstraction, whose overall shape suggests that of a reclining person. The work begins with a larger, bulbous end and slowly lowers a bit as the work moves away from the suggested head. Near the larger part are several open holes, causing an interpenetration of space in memorable fashion. The body of the work comes close to being woven, with wire ties connecting to each other. This is a modernist work of high order, and shows conclusively that fine art thrived on internationalism, especially the works made in Paris and New York, the first cities of modernism.
Looking at the art in “Americans in Paris,” viewers might well be startled by the closeness of styles encountered between the work made in Paris and that seen, approximately at the same time, in New York City. The route between the two cities was more heavily traveled than viewers might imagine.. A good number of the foreign-based Americans went back to New York, where they practiced an abstraction already vividly present in their Parisian work. Abstract expressionism, fully covered by the show, was still in high mode, having been brought over from south of 14th Street. Seeing such work outside its American context, viewers remain impressed by the movement’s energetic popularity. Because of its romantic stance and its anti-intellectual bias, its reliance on feeling, the artwork in this style stays magnetically attractive, even now.
Leon Golub’s powerful head is created using deep blue and black strokes. The face is fully visible, but if we look at the strokes with our eyes half closed, the image can appear to be highly abstract. No matter whether the painting is representational or non-objective, its rough account amounts to a style that is raw, filled with suggestions of violence. Many seeing the painting would be aware of Golub’s later, well-known mercenary series; some of his tough-mindedness in this painting looks ahead to the representation of mindless torture–a consequence of cruelty perpetrated by soldiers committed only to those who paid them. Given the political suggestiveness of Golub’s forceful head, it can be said he was ahead of his time.
Painter Norman Bluhm, a well-regarded second generation artist working with abstract expressionism, contributed Calm and Crepescule, both made in 1956. Calm, a billowing mass of rounded cloud-like yellow pillows composing the larger weight of the painting, is treated,with splotches of blue. These shapeless blue forms highlight the edges of the composition. Calm is an extremely achieved abstraction, with the tight, small spheres made less volatile by the yellow color. Crepescule, understood in English as a word for near darkness or twilight, is mostly white, with the single color built up by forms similar to what we find in Calm. Here, too, the dense overall mass of white is emphasized and embellished by bits of blue, which underlie the white densities, which are dotted with small, open windows through which the blue color is exposed.
As good as these paintings are, one can legitimately criticize the ubiquity of abstract expressionism, which has become a touchstone, a visual ubiquity, for the American imperial stance in art. One needn’t tie expansive American egotism always to the force of its art, but it is true that the sometimes grandiose style held sway from the late 1930s to the late 1940s and even into 1950s. This was a time when the American world presence was held in high esteem. Yet is also true that, during this time, the American government was devoted to political and military maneuvers that oft were both secret and violent. Without making too much of the connection between the egotism of abstract lyricism and concurrent American political aggression, it can be said both adhered to the spirit of the time, a period of drive assertion for Americans. The triumph over fascism in the Second World War hid American manipulations for a while, and may have contributed to a slight overvaluation of the art.
Strangely, we continue our commitment to the abstract-expressionist style even now. Good painters currently work in this fashion.
The late Louise Fishman was a lyric abstractionist of the first order; Sean Scully, still working, merges the style with minimalist intensities. But one feels compelled to ask, Is the core of the movement still vital, or is it moribund? The twenty years of art covered by “Americans in Paris” can be seen as genuinely distinguished, and as this is the stated time frame of the show, it accomplishes its task. I am only asking whether one can sense a decline in the later work in the exhibition. It doesn’t seem so, although those of us who are older may be exhausted by the formal repetitiveness of gestures that were inspired when the abstract-expressionist first took off. I am not trying to deny the school’s imaginative force, only to say that the window of its achievement may be shorter than we think.
Harold Cousins produced two remarkable steel and brass sculptures: Plaiton Long-Standing (1959) and Le foret (1960). According to Cousins, the title word Plaiton is a combination term made up of the word “plate” in English and “laiton,” the word for brass in French. In this sculpture, thin rods of steel support flat, squarish and rectangular plates that stand three deep, the front individual pieces making it hard to fully see the ones behind. In Le foret (The Forest in English), thin rods of steel rise from a low pedestal of wood. As they move upward they fork into two prongs. By situating the rods so that they stand behind each other, much in the same way the flat planes in Plaiton Long-Standing are placed in successive rows, a certain density is reached. The resulting gestalt is both abstract–the rods are steel and indicate neither branch nor foliage, only a most basic structure–and figurative–the forms do in fact suggest, in inchoate fashion, a stand of trees.
It can be argued that these sculptures very successfully activate perceptions that move toward abstraction and toward representation, in the same moment. It might even be understood that such a double stance plays out even since abstraction was addressed in modernism. Of course, pure abstraction does exist, as in the paintings of Kandinsky or the late work of David Smith. But often one allegiance is (ever so slightly) beholden to the other. And it is also true the other way around: if one isolated, say, a bit of foliage in the Provence paintings of Cezanne, non-denominational forms quickly come to the eye. The assertion that one way of seeing always informs the other can be seen as too simple a statement, but Cousins comes up with Le foret to describe a work that is as abstract as it is figurative. Indeed, part of this sculpture’s charm is its place between sites of vision, which are thought to differ but may not truly do so.
Sam Francis, a Fifties artist known for his exuberantly free hand, and equally exuberant colors, produced Blue Out of White in 1958. His style borders on extravagance, but then the genre he is working within is extreme to begin with. In this painting, Francis has rough-edged black passages that expand from the lower edge and middle right, and a bit downward from the top edge as well, into a center whose hue is bright yellow.There is a green protrusion, an amorphic form sitting between the black and the yellow on the middle right,
It might well happen that more than a few writers would see this kind of work, once described, as offering little more than the particulars of the accurate description characterizing them. One hesitates to criticize a deeply emotional genre of painting that, to start with, never wished to proceed according to intellectual exploration. Francis’s strength here, and generally, has to do with his ability to set colors against each other, in passages formed by intuition, not by rational structure. But then this is true of all expressionist art. Additionally, it may be that the evasion of cerebral intention can easily become a fault, in that feeling alone, given the abstruse advances in other 20th century arts, such as writing and music, cannot be expected to always emphasize an intuitive structure.
As a result, we gaze with a degree of relief at Golub’s Torso, III, December 3 (1960), which offers a blue, headless torso of a standing man against a mottled, dark charcoal background. Because it is a figure, there is something more than vague to discuss. The figure’s realism becomes a touchstone for its reading; we can comment on closeness to the actual, symbolic literary force, the relation of the forms within a historical lineage. In the painting Curves: Orange, Blue. and White ( 1949), Cuban-American painter presents a beautiful hard-edge oval taken up with black columns and cuts of circles, which are mimicked by forms in blue against a blue background. The forms are developed through linear edges rather than unformed, irrational, and even deliberate confusion. Herrera, who would live more than one hundred years old, created works that depended on a hard-edge geometry she had mastered by the middle of the 20th century.
The late Ellsworth Kelly, a master of the monochromatic painting, is represented in “Americans in Paris” by the 1952 seven-panel painting called Kite I. It is a series of squares and rectangles, with verticals of blue on either end of the work, next to which are verticals of equal width in black. In the middle is a set of three squares: yellow at the top, white in the middle, and light blue at the bottom. The set of colors, within a simple arrangement, stands out as a the triumph of a light hand. As with Carrera’s work, a hard edge defines the forms, which becomes something of a relief to look at as so many deliberately uncouth, improvised artworks are found in the show.
For anyone living in New York City who keeps up with historical shows, both lyric and hard edge abstraction are going to look slightly dated after a while. The drips and splatters and general lack of cohesion start to look a caricature of a poetic stance in painting, just as the linear abstraction we come across can seem rational and tight in the extreme. One senses that a lot of the artists repeat their formula, that the iterations and closely connected sequences are a way of repeating a basic paradigm–to the point where repetition becomes cliche. It can look like the artist is deliberately limiting his expression in favor of developing an easily recognized structure. There is nothing wrong in doing so; indeed, a sequence close in form, from one painting to the next, may signal a reliance on the innate accomplishment of a particular perception that has been severely limited.
Yet, at the same time, the art can read as dull in its pursuit of similarity. Sometimes, a strong artist can escape the trap of excessive reiteration by varying the gesture–Joan Mitchell, one of the few Americans who chose to stay in France, has an untitled painting done in 1960 that is unusual in its structure: a ring of dark blue, very dark gray, and black abstract forms rising nearly like architecture in a ring around the four edges of the work. In the center, standing out, is a circle with white edges, defined by jagged, edgy forms arrayed is a strong, nearly architectural correlation with each other.
Mitchell, who painted with such passion her art became a by-word for an uncompromising stance in lyric abstraction, looks inspired in the freedoms taken with a non-objective approach. But it is also a bit hard to separate the painting from the scores of abstract paintings found in the shows. “Americans in Paris” is a wonderful exhibition, scholarly in its outlook and affectionate in its regard the poetic gesture. In fact, the show is so good, the problems of lyric abstraction become transparent. The difficulty can best be addressed by a question: at what point does art fall flat from sameness? We are perhaps too willing to read a lot of work that appears to copy other works or itself, in favor of leaning on an already established style. While the artists in this excellent show all make valuable contributions to its coherence of function and historical coverage, It is possible to tire a bit from sameness. Surely, the artists seen here were making original works of art, but they also occupied a spectrum of form and visual effect. In doing so, perhaps they gave up, in some small way, the individualism they were so passionately looking for.
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