The Brooklyn Rail

About twenty years ago, for a panel at the College Art Association, I gave a talk about the interviews I conducted for Artforum, Art in America, and Art News during the early 1970s. Back then, few were focused on diversity. If I failed to recognize that Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Larry Poons, Jack Tworkov, John Chamberlain, Herbert Ferber, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, John McCracken, and Michael Heizer were all white guys, I also failed to notice they were all abstractionists. In fact, until the other day, that didn’t seem obvious to me.

After Neo-Expressionism appeared in the eighties, each of these artists continued to work with non-representational imagery. That’s the way things were. Back then, differences seemed more pronounced. That no longer seems to be the case.

For more than a century, generations of abstract artists have developed their own unique history. By 1970, an air of self-congratulation permeated exhibitions and books devoted to this subject. Critic and educator Irving Sandler published his much lauded—and copiously illustrated—The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. And four years later, The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960 to 1970 curated by E.A. Carmean, Jr. opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. These days, a more temperate approach holds sway. At the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, the astute Leah Dickerman traced the initial years of Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925. And during the pandemic, Pepe Karmel, a professor at NYU, pointed out in Abstract Art: A Global History, his instant reference book, the astonishingly varied themes and places where this manner of working has been practiced.

One of the oddest qualities of growing older has been the discovery that what was once defined as contemporary art has been transformed into historical period styles. And what once seemed entrenched has instead become enduring. Artists such as Frank Stella have become modern masters. We are, to be sure, as distant from this Princeton graduate’s “Black Paintings” of 1958–60 as his patterned, monochromatic works were from the Cubist masterpieces executed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 1910s. That’s how time passes!

Researchers today can draw upon all sorts of primary references at the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC as well as Malibu’s Getty Archives. In the case of Helen Frankenthaler, whose paintings and works on paper I know well, much still needs to be done. To write Ninth Street Women; Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, author Mary Gabriel unearthed a lot of information. In Hartigan’s archives, filed in the libraries of Syracuse University, she found some gems about the artist’s life. Regarding the paintings, we still have much to consider. For instance, Frankenthaler never saw her abstractions as diaphanous veils of color. Instead, she felt she was using her palette to create deep space. And she felt, in her words, that she was getting people where “they lived.”

We need to know considerably more about the ambitions and aims of first and second-generation American abstractionists, not just Frankenthaler. What made them tick? Why did they work with puddles of color, slash marks, patterned designs, and such? Why weren’t they impelled to tell stories?

Then, too, a new generation is yet again reinventing abstraction. Figurative imagery has entered the mix, as have objects and other sorts of collaged elements. We are in dire need of new books and more detailed histories. Bring it on.