Two critics, one fight

Before the critics crowned anyone, the painters announced themselves. In May 1950 eighteen of them signed an open letter protesting the Metropolitan Museum’s conservative jury for a big exhibition of American art, and the magazine LIFE photographed the group, a glowering huddle of painters in suits that ran in January 1951 under the nickname the Irascibles. It was the movement’s first public collective act, the moment it cohered into a recognizable group. The next year they did it with art. In the spring of 1951 the painters themselves, with help from the dealer Leo Castelli, rented an empty storefront at 60 East 9th Street and hung the 9th Street Show (the “9th Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture”), a sprawling self-organized group show of Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko, Newman, Krasner, Frankenthaler and some sixty others. It was the public declaration that a New York School now existed, mounted not by a museum but by the artists in a rented room.

The legend leaves out something: the painters did not make their own reputations alone. Two New York critics did much of it for them, and they could not stand each other. The first was Harold Rosenberg, the poet-critic of the pair, who drank with the painters at the Cedar and wrote about painting as if he were flinging the paint himself, all heat and motion. In December 1952 he published “The American Action Painters” in ARTnews, the single most influential piece of writing the movement produced, and its core idea is that a painting is no longer a picture but an event. The canvas had become “an arena in which to act”; what ends up on the wall is the trace of a man facing a blank surface and doing something on it, an existential act more than an image. (Existential here points to the philosophy of the day, that a person’s choices and acts, made in the face of a meaningless universe, are what define them.) For Rosenberg the drama was the doing; the painting was the leftover proof. “Action painting” was his coinage, and it fit the gesture wing like a glove and Rothko’s still fields not at all, which is why it belongs to one wing only.

The rival was Clement Greenberg, the opposite kind of man and critic: a cold-eyed ex-Trotskyist (once a follower of the revolutionary Leon Trotsky) turned the most exacting formalist of his generation, who believed, simply and without much doubt, that he was right, and had the power to match it, since a Greenberg review could make or break a career. He was a formalist, meaning he held that the meaning of a painting lives in its physical form, its color, shape and surface, not in any story, emotion or “act” behind it. His big idea was flatness: painting had spent five centuries pretending a flat canvas was a deep space, and the whole march of modern art was painting slowly admitting the one thing that made it itself, that it is flat, a stretched cloth covered in color. Abstract Expressionism, in his reading, was the next step in that purification. He championed Pollock early (from the early 1940s, writing the “Art” column in The Nation, he was praising Pollock by 1943, before the drip paintings and the fame) and, years later, turned on him, backing instead the staining color painters who came after. He laid out the theory in “American-Type Painting” (1955).

So two clean opposites fought over the same pictures. Rosenberg: the painting is an event, the record of a self in action. Greenberg: the painting is an object, pure flat optical form, the next move in modernism’s logic. They backed different artists, wrote in different magazines, and their dislike was personal and vicious, not merely a clash of theories, and that quarrel is not a footnote. It is part of how the canon got built. And the dealers were the other half of the machine. The single most important early platform was the Betty Parsons Gallery, which opened in 1946 and gave the movement its first real commercial home: Pollock (from 1947), Rothko, Newman and Still all showed there between 1947 and 1952, before Sidney Janis lured several away to a more established gallery. A movement that distrusted the market still ran on it. A painting did not become a masterpiece by hanging on a wall; someone with a typewriter and a magazine, and someone with a gallery and a price list, had to say so first.