The capital moves
For three centuries, if you wanted the newest thing in painting, you went to Europe, usually to Paris. The Impressionists, the Cubists, the Surrealists were all Paris stories. Then the war broke Europe, and the capital of art moved across an ocean. By the late 1940s the new thing in painting came out of New York, and for the first time the rest of the world looked to America to see what came next. That, at least, is the standard account, and it is the one large fact behind the story (it is a widely held judgment more than a measured fact, but by the early 1950s the art world was unmistakably watching New York). How it happened is a story of refugees, a New Deal jobs program, a teacher with a German accent, and a bomb. It is also, fair warning, a movement whose painters held a frankly enormous opinion of what they were doing; a little of that self-belief is the price of admission.
Start with the refugees. As the Nazis overran Europe its artists ran, many of them to New York: the Surrealists almost as a group (André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, the young Matta), plus the abstract painters Mondrian and Léger. The Surrealism read tells that exile in full. What matters is what the émigrés (people forced into exile) carried in their luggage: a method. Automatism, the Surrealist practice of making marks straight from the unconscious with the editing, reasoning mind switched off, so chance and buried impulse do the composing. The goal was abstraction (painting with no recognizable objects or scenes), and the refugees handed the Americans the tool to get there.
The human hinge
If you want one person who is the bridge from Surrealism into this new American painting, it is Arshile Gorky, and he deserves more than the word “bridge.” He was born Vostanik Manoug Adoian around 1904 in Ottoman Armenia, survived the Armenian Genocide (the mass killing and deportation of Armenians during the First World War), reached America as a young man, and reinvented himself wholesale, taking the name Arshile Gorky and a half-invented past to go with it. He spent the 1930s working through Cézanne and Picasso almost like a syllabus, and in the 1940s found his own voice by fusing automatism with abstraction. Then his luck collapsed: a 1946 studio fire destroyed much of his work, cancer followed, and in 1948 he died by suicide, just as the movement he had done so much to seed was taking off. He opened the door and did not live to walk through it.
The ground it grew from
The Americans changed automatism on the way. The Surrealists used it to dredge up dream-images; the Americans (Pollock, Gorky, the young Robert Motherwell) kept the part where the hand runs unsupervised but dropped the dream-pictures. What was left was pure gesture (the physical mark of the artist’s moving hand and body, the brushstroke or poured line as a direct trace of motion). There was a second European who stayed: Hans Hofmann, who ran an art school in New York and Provincetown that nearly every American modernist passed through. He preached “push and pull,” that flat patches of color, arranged right, can make a flat canvas seem to advance and recede without ever pretending to be a window. He taught the Americans to treat a painting as an object in its own right rather than a picture of something. (Lee Krasner studied with him.)
None of these painters could have kept working through the 1930s without help, and it came from the government. The WPA Federal Art Project (part of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal program that put millions of unemployed Americans to work in the Depression) paid artists a modest salary to make art. Pollock, de Kooning, Gorky, Krasner and Rothko all drew WPA paychecks, and it kept them alive and, just as important, in the same city, broke and ambitious together. Then came the war’s end and the bomb. Painters who had lived through a global slaughter and a weapon that could erase a city wanted a painting equal to that weight, and many turned to myth, ritual and the unconscious. Their ambition got a public statement in 1943, when Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman, wrote to the New York Times in reply to a critic, Edward Alden Jewell, who had dismissed their work. The line they all stood on: there is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
The room where it got argued
A movement is not only paintings; it is the room where the painters argue, and for this one there were two, a block apart in Greenwich Village. The first was a bar. The Cedar Tavern (the Cedar Street Tavern, 24 University Place) was the social engine from about 1950: a plain, smoky place where Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Joan Mitchell, Krasner and Frankenthaler drank, argued theory and money, threw punches, slept with each other, and made and broke reputations over a night. Pollock once tore the men’s-room door off its hinges. The second room was the brain. The Artists’ Club, known as “the Club” (founded 1949, 39 East 8th Street), held Friday-night panels and debates: artists and critics hashing out what abstraction was for and what “the sublime” meant in a Manhattan loft. The Cedar supplied the heat and the Club the talk, and between them they were the movement’s Montmartre.
That is the ground: refugees with a method, a hinge-figure who fused it with abstraction, a teacher with a theory, a jobs program that kept everyone together, a war that demanded a heavy painting, and a bar and a club where it got argued into shape. Out of it grew one idea, that a painting need not be of anything, which is what people meant by Abstract Expressionism: abstract, with no recognizable subject, and expressionist, made to deliver raw feeling. That one idea promptly split into two wings that look like opposites. The next two chapters take them one at a time.