Mark Rothko and the Development of American Modernism 1998–1948

Expressionism became the style most heavily dispensed by our [the U.S.] government, for reasons that were in part explained by Thomas W. Braden in a 1967 article' that appeared under the title 'I'm Glad The C.I.A. is Immoral' in the Saturday Evening Post . .. Braden, executive secretary of the Museum Of Modern Art for a short period in the late 1940s, joined the Central Intelligence Agency as supervisor f cultural activities in 1951, and remained as director of this branch until 1954. Recognising that congressional approval of many of their projects was as likely 'as the John Birch society's approv42 THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL11:1 1988 This content downloaded from 192.215.101.254 on Fri, 2 Aug 2013 13:54:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ing Medicare', he became involved with such organisations as the Institute of Labour Research and the National Council of Churches as fronts in the American Cold War against communism here and abroad ... Braden, possibly taking his aesthetic cue from his Museum of Modem Art years, supported the export of Abstract Expressionism in the propaganda war ... Backed by money available to the C.I.A. and supportive of Abstract Expressionism, Braden's branch became a means of circumventing Congress and sending abroad art-as-propaganda without federal intervention.20 In this respect the paintings and individualistic statements of the Abstract Expressionists were made to form part of the U.S. 'cultural Marshall plan', an ideological offensive designed to complement the industrial and financial intervention which the U.S. orchestrated to prop up and eventually dynamise the capitalist nations of Western Europe against the threats (and promises) of Soviet communism.21 Represented as the 'universal Free Style of the West', the large agitated canvasses of Jackson Pollock or Rothko's floating fields of colour became emblems of the freedom of liberal American society: beacons of individualism, unfettered activity and creative risk, proposed as possible only in a true democracy. That the U.S. Government involved itself in various open or tacit ways with the rise to institutional and critical dominance of Abstract Expressionism is now relatively well-known this revisionist period in the historiography of Abstract Expressionism was largely confined to the mid1 970s. The New rork Times art critic Hilton Kramer, also predictably, launched an attack on the writers who addressed the relationship between the U. S. State and Abstract Expressionist artists and on the editorial board of Artforum agazine, where Max Kozloff and Eve Cockcroft's articles appeared. Kramer's riposte, entitled 'Muddled Marxism replaces Art Criticism at Artforum', though predictable, was too vociferous a polemic.22 A handful of articles in an arts magazine, and even the publication of Serge Guilbaut's lengthy book in 1983, was unlikely to destabilize critical and institutional orthodoxy as the Tate Gallery's recent exhibition and catalogue demonstrates. And in any case, the revisionist argument left intact the leitmotif of Abstract Expressionist and Modernist critical orthodoxy in general: the belief that the value of these works of art can be established absolutely independently of the circumstances within which they were produced and gained critical support and acclaim. If value (or 'quality') is, within Modernist terms, logically unrelated to social or historical explanation -save with a formalist genealogy which links a Rothko painting with a Mondrian or a Matisse from earlier generations of artists who are seen as constituting the Modernist pantheon -then adding a few (perhaps) surprising determinations involving the C.I.A. or the State Department unsettled not one iota the certainty of the recognition of quality and in Rothko's case in particular, the 'mystery' of his paintings.23 Rothko's paintings seem to exlude polysemy, their ontological and epistemological significance ineffable: where have they come from? What does their dense opacity represent? Rothko's post-war paintings, read through the prisms of either Harold Rosenberg's existentialist aesthetic or Clement Greenberg's rigorous formalism still remain to most mysterious and unyielding: meaningful and meaningless; profound and vacuous; active and immobile; an opening and a closure. Rothko's well-known reluctance to show his paintings, partly because he thought critics, through their writings, tried to 'fix' and close their significance, can be explained more adequately by examining the political and historical context wherein Rothko (and other Abstract Expressionists) opted for, were propelled toward and came to 'accept' the type of abstract painting with which he and they are now identified. In the context of New York between 1938 and 1948 can be identified the circumstances which led Rothko to say, in his statement entitled 'The Romantics Were Prompted': The familiar identity of things has to be pulverised in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society enshrouds every aspect of our environment.24 What were the finite associations and the familiar identity of things which Rothko wished to see pulverised? Are they to be understood as comfortably unspecific, an abstract rejection of an abstract social and historical world, or as minutely tangible and related to be situation artists had found themselves in from the mid-1930s onwards? The existentialist 'freedom' and 'risk', celebrated by Harold Rosenberg, had been grasped more accurately by Clement Greenberg as a situation of alienation. Writing in 1948, Greenberg argued that 'isolation, alienation, naked and revealed to itself, is the condition under which the true reality of our age is experienced ... Isolation is, so to speak, the natural condition of high art in America.'25 This was a position close to the one Rothko also adopted in 1948: The unfriendliness of ociety to his activity isdifficult for the artist o accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation. Freed from afalse sense of security and community, the artist can abandon his plastic bank book, just as he has abandoned other forms of security.26 'Society' meant for Rothko two specific things. The two senses indicate what could be called the double alienation which he felt in the period 1938 to 1948 (and after). In the late 1930s, Rothko, employed on the New Deal Federal Art project, an active member of the Artists' Union and the American Artists' Congress against Racism and Fascism, holding socialist-anarchist beliefs, was involved in a prolonged argument with and against the organised THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 11:1 1988 43 This content downloaded from 192.215.101.254 on Fri, 2 Aug 2013 13:54:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Left's advocacy of socialist realism as the proper stylistic vehicle for revolutionary painting, as dictated by the Comintem and represented in America by the editorial position of Art Front, the newspaper of the Artists' Union. Within this radical political and artistic 'society' of left-wing groups and affiliations, Rothko found himself, along with other artists, profoundly at odds with Stalinist political and cultural orthodoxy.27 Ten years later, in 1948, along with Pollock, Newman and Gottlieb, Rothko was apparently transfixed by the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation and by the gathering momentum of anti-subversive hysteria in America.28 The very possibility of speech, of painting of adequate referential communication at all, in this context was felt to be jeopardized. Pollock's drawing War (1946 or 1947) was one of the last works before his celebrated 'drip' period, which contained any recognisable imagery or conventional spatial composition. Between about June 1947 and April 1948 Rothko painted Number 18, de Kooning Painting and Pollock Number 26A, 1948, paintings in which the referential or iconic content of representation was expunged. In 1947 the U.S. State Department's Office of Education had announced its 'Zeal For American Democracy' programme; in August the American Federation of Teachers produced pamphlets showing how to understand and counter 'the strategy and tactics of world communism'.29 At about the same time J. Edgar Hoover and Tom Clark, the U.S. Attorney-General, organised the socalled 'Freedom Train', a patriotic museum-onwheels touring the nation, to coincide with the coming election in 1948. The day that Congress debated the implementation of the Truman Marshall Plan, the National Guard conducted a practice bombing raid on Washington, a 'lobbying' technique designed to make the military's viewpoint on the matter of U.S. security obvious. Guilbaut argues that although Rothko's and Pollock's work was non-figurative, it was intended to be expressive of a subjective state: anxiety about the state of the world in the nuclear age.30 Loathing the groups of artists who had moved towards a totally uncritical support for the U.S. Government during the Second World War and the national chauvinism mounting after the war in America, Rothko's resort o the use of titles referring to ancient myths for his paintings from Antigone (Fig. 3), in 1941, was part of a strategy for attempting to transcend the oppressive contemporary political and ideological context.31 Rothko's sense of personal oppression was expressed in what amounts to a plea in 'The Romantics Were Prompted': 'It really is a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.' At about the same time as Rothko wrote this, Rene d'Harnoncourt, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, announced that he regarded modern art as the foremost symbol of American Democracy -a symbol of 'infinite variety' and 'ceaseless > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~iO Fig. 3. Mark Rothko: Antigone. Private collection. exploration'. 32 The sense of immobility, constriction and muteness which Rothko and others felt was being presented by d'Harnoncourt and later by many other cr