Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976 (review)

The substantial and lavishly illustrated catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Jewish Museum and traveling to the Saint Louis Art Museum and Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, this book's title names the two most prominent mid-twentieth-century American Abstract Expressionist painters: Jackson Pollock, the author of dynamic non-objective compositions of poured and flung paint, and Willem de Kooning, famous for his powerful series of gesturally brushed, expressionistically abstracted images of women. While the catalogue reproduces, and the exhibition included, several works by these painters, a more accurate title would have replaced their names with those of the New York art critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, who are the real subjects of the publication. The most powerful and influential critics of their generation, Greenberg and Rosenberg both came from Jewish immigrant families and emerged from the Marxist intellectual crucible of the 1930s to develop rival critical viewpoints that they applied to the understanding of Abstract Expressionism and subsequent artistic developments. The formalist Greenberg favored non-representational art emphasizing the purity of its medium (which in the case of painting consisted of flat color spread across a rectangular canvas). Rosenberg, influenced by existentialism, coined the term "action painting," which valorized the physical and psychological processes of art-making over the finished aesthetic product. Greenberg championed Pollock in the 1940s while Rosenberg was personally close to de Kooning and published extensively on his work in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus the titular pairing of Pollock and de Kooning in Action/Abstraction implies the rivalry between Greenberg and Rosenberg.

The book also highlights the work of several other major Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors; the Color Field painters Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski; and a motley group of artists prominent in the 1960s including Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, and Anne Truitt. Curator Norman Kleeblatt's essay, "Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Postwar American Art," makes clear that the artists were selected based on the attention that Greenberg or Rosenberg paid to their work, with the exception of three included Abstract Expressionists: the white women Lee Krasner and Grace Hartigan and the African-American man Norman Lewis, who suffered critical neglect due to the period's sexual and racial biases. In addition to Kleeblatt's essay and introduction, the book features Maurice Berger's cultural timeline of New York art world developments from 1940-1976, a selected bibliography by Stephen Brown, and informative essays on various aspects of Greenberg's and Rosenberg's careers and writing by Debra Bricker Balken, Morris Dickstein, Douglas Dreishpoon, Charlotte Eyerman, Mark Godfrey, Caroline A. Jones, and Irving Sandler. Among the best of these are Jones's penetrating analysis of the sources and meanings of Greenberg's reductive formalist "modern sensibility," Godfrey's nuanced investigation of Greenberg's and Rosenberg's contributions to Jewish cultural debates but general avoidance of discussing of Jewish identity in modern art, and Dickstein's eloquent summary of these critics' indelible contributions to Modernist criticism, which the volume as a whole impressively documents and interprets.