Not just a guy's club anymore

Writing in the New Yorker in 1944, art critic Robert Coates observed:

There’s a style of painting gaining ground in this country which is neither Abstract nor Surrealist, though it has suggestions of both, while the way the paint is applied—usually in a pretty free-swinging, spattery fashion, with only vague hints of subject matter—is suggestive of the methods of Expressionism. I feel that some new name will have to be coined for it, but at the moment I can’t think of any. Jackson Pollock, Lee Hersch, and William Baziotes are of this school . . . in addition to some forty other contemporaries. ¹

More than fifty years later, Abstract Expressionism—as this emergent style of painting came to be called—remains the most discussed and debated movement in twentieth-century American art. It certainly continues to inspire more and more scholarship and speculation—art history surveys, artist biographies, museum exhibitions, doctoral dissertations. And it continues to command some of the highest prices in the art market: a painting by Willem de Kooning recently sold at auction for $15.6 million at Christies. Abstract Expressionism, in other words, remains the measure of success against which modern and contemporary American art is judged—as art, as art history, as blue-chip goods. It is no surprise that in the late 1970s, when a younger generation of artists including Julian Schnabel tried to figure out how to “become” art historical, they imagined themselves as the new Pollocks, fashioned an audacious style similarly full of drips and splashes (although Schnabel’s “drips” were broken plates), and called their grand scale art “Neo” Expressionism.

In Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, art historian Ann Eden Gibson joins the slew of critics and scholars asking how and why Abstract Expressionism acquired and continues to hold this dominant cultural position. Her important and insightful book, however, veers into new directions, most notably attention to the “others” who have hitherto never been included in the Abstract Expressionist story.

That story has tended to go something like this: that in post-World War II America there emerged a heroic band of avant-garde artists, rebels whose cause was to overthrow various representational styles of art and the political agenda they embodied, in order to create a culture more in keeping with the “American Century” that Henry Luce prophesized in LIFE magazine in 1941. By 1952, in an equally influential Art News essay titled “The American Action Painters,” Harold Rosenberg had lionized the typical Abstract Expressionist artist as an American loner, “heir of the pioneer and the immigrant,” a “vanguard painter [who] took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville’s Ishmael took to the sea.” He had also constructed the standard historical account of the entire movement:

Many of the painters were “Marxists” (WPA unions, artists’ congresses)—they had been trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism)—it amounts to the same thing. The big moment came when it was decided to paint. . . . Just TO PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral. ²

The look of those postwar painterly gestures ranged from Pollock’s drips to de Kooning’s slashes and included the free-wheeling splotches, luminous colors, decentralized spaces, loose brushstrokes, spontaneous lines, enigmatic totems, and so-called “primitive” and universalist forms and shapes of the other guys—the “essential eight” (xx)—who also made up the membership in the Abstract Expressionist “club”: Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. The look of their generally monumental canvases was “allover” and overly energetic: a physically beefy aesthetic whose insistence on being big and strong and heroic belied the real anxieties that the Abstract Expressionists manifested about being male and being artists in cold war America.

The subjects of their abstract art—mainly themselves—belied those anxieties, too. Abstract Expressionism embodied profound disaffection with both earlier modes of American art...