For the first time an American movement led the world, or so the standard account goes, and Paris handed the avant-garde to New York. A loose group later called the New York School made the canvas, in one critic’s phrase, “an arena in which to act,” big enough to swallow the viewer and built to record the body, the gesture and the unconscious directly. The single idea split into two wings that look nothing alike: the gesture painters who put the act of painting on the wall, and the color-field painters who built vast glowing fields aimed at the sublime. Almost none of the actual paintings can be shown here, because the whole movement is still under copyright, so the words have to carry the pictures.
Surrealism got a manifesto and a pope. Abstract Expressionism got neither. It was never a club with a rulebook; it was a loose set of New York painters who mostly distrusted programs, plus two critics who fought over what they were doing. There is no founding document that names the movement and lays down its rules. The nearest thing is a letter two of them sent the New York Times in 1943, and after that the key texts arrive one at a time, by individual hands, often years apart.
Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko wrote that letter (with Barnett Newman a co-editor), published on 13 June 1943 in reply to a critic, Edward Alden Jewell, who had dismissed their work. Its most-quoted line draws the whole future of the movement in one sentence: “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.” The subject, they insisted, is everything, and only the tragic and timeless will do. Note the attribution: it is Gottlieb and Rothko’s, with Newman, and it is a letter, not a manifesto.
After that, four voices and no chorus. Pollock published a short statement, “My Painting” (in the journal Possibilities, which Robert Motherwell co-edited, winter 1947–48), describing how he worked on the floor so he could “literally be in the painting.” Newman published “The Sublime Is Now” (1948), the color-field wing’s credo. And the critic Harold Rosenberg published “The American Action Painters” (1952), the essay that coined “action painting” and called the canvas “an arena in which to act.” Two painters’ statements, two critics’ framings, and no manifesto.
