DISSENTING VOICES

The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection:
American Abstraction 1930-1945

The Great Depression was in full swing. Contemplating going into the arts as a lifetime profession was the ultimate in an irrational hope and a guarantee of economic and social suicide. Then, of all things, to choose an area of interest . . . that was so coldly received as was abstract painting was yet another step into the twilight zone.
Ed Garman [1]

One of the few organizations established for artistic rather than political purposes during the 1930s, the American Abstract Artists was formed in January 1937 to promote abstraction within a generally hostile New York art world. [2] Its members, many of whom were still grappling with conflicting ideas in their own art, represented a variety of artistic approaches. In varying degrees, however, all looked to European modernism---Cubism, Constructivism, Neo-plasticism---for stylistic and intellectual roots. This was one of their strengths. American abstract artists drew ideas from many quarters, combining, refining, and reshaping stylistic and theoretical issues developed abroad over the course of twenty years, giving them new life in a distinctly different atmosphere.

Formation of the American Abstract Artists stemmed from initial conversations at Ibram Lassaw's studio in the spring of 1936. Lassaw, along with Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Byron Browne, Burgoyne Diller, Balcomb Greene, Albert Swinden, and George McNeil met to consider a group exhibition. [3] In the months that followed, others joined the discussions, and while acknowledging the need for some sort of organization, they recognized the difficulty of drafting a group manifesto that would achieve consensus on either stylistic or programmatic grounds. [4]

Sporadic informal meetings culminated in November 1936, when George McNeil, Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Vaclav Vytlacil, and others arrived, friends in tow, at Harry Holtzman's newly rented loft. The group met this time at the invitation of Holtzman, who was seeking broad-based support for an abstract artists' cooperative and workshop school. Holtzman's proposal was soon quashed in favor of a more pragmatic program, and within eight weeks the fledgling group had adopted a name and a statement of purpose. [5]

The "General Prospectus" established the American Abstract Artists as a group devoted to advancing abstract art in the United States through the exhibition of work by its members. "We believe," the founders declared in the organizational statement, "a new art form has been established which is definite enough in character to demand this united effort. This art is to be distinguished from those efforts characterized by expressionism, realistic representation, surrealism, etc." [6] Many of the early members of the American Abstract Artists were identified with pure abstraction---either the structural geometries of Piet Mondrian and the Russian Constructivists, or the organic forms of Joan Miró and Paul Klee. Yet, as George McNeil later pointed out, over half the founding members were or had been students of Hans Hofmann, a Cubist turned Expressionist who had long taught the importance of some aspect of nature as the starting point for art. [7]

Despite heated discussions over the nature of abstraction at the group's weekly meetings, the common purpose of exhibiting in the face of overwhelming opposition from critics and museums was an exciting prospect. In April 1937 the group opened its first annual exhibition.

What prompted this bold step at a time of little interest and critical opposition? The scarce opportunities to exhibit in commercial galleries certainly contributed. [8] But the most direct catalysts were the two New York museums most likely to show progressive art by young Americans: the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1935, the Whitney's large exhibition Abstract Painting in America ignored the fertile new experiments of young New Yorkers in favor of work by Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and others associated with Alfred Stieglitz's pioneering efforts. Although Stuart Davis was included, Davis's catalogue statement declared that the significant phase of abstraction in the United States had ended around 1927. In 1936 the Museum of Modern Art opened Cubism and Abstract Art, which showcased European art next to the work of a few American expatriates (Lyonel Feininger, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder). [9] While no one questioned the exhibition's importance in exposing European modernism to New York, its historical framework coupled with the exclusion of recent New York artists, added to the sense of neglect felt by American abstractionists. [10] It was clear that little sympathy for the younger Americans' cause would be forthcoming from New York art institutions.

Ignored by the museums to whom they looked for support, American abstract artists found few advocates. The art press provided little support, and more often than not, turned its back on the abstractionists. The debate over abstraction versus figuration was not a new argument. Many of the issues that were raised by the Armory Show in 1913 were being rehashed with little change. Yet the very nature of art was at question. Is a painting first a pictorial arrangement whose meaning derives from formal considerations, or is its formal framework merely a vehicle for communicating narrative imagery?

Among artists, critics, and in the press these ideas sparked vehement debate in the United States. The social and economic fallout of the Depression led social commentators as well as artists to reexamine art in the context of American life. Although the issues were complex, many debated the question of art's relevance to the broad American public on nationalistic grounds. It was argued that recognizable subject matter was the only vehicle whereby artists could communicate with the public. By presenting American scenes, manifesting "native" qualities, and rejecting European art forms, American artists could help repair the Depression's damage to the national psyche. [11] The ethical tenor of this argument suggested that abstract artists were abnegating a deep social responsibility. Not surprisingly, many budding abstractionists felt morally condemned for choosing an esoteric path. [12]

Yet the vitriolic diatribes of antagonists like Thomas Craven, who railed against "lady art students and students of philosophy mired in [the] aesthetics" of European art movements, were easier to counter than were the arguments of more moderate critics. [13] For example, Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney said that excluding the subject matter ran

counter to a universal and powerful human instinct. . . . Abstractionism, by excluding the associative values of images, has denied itself the most profound plastic values. It has created striking and intriguing decoration, but not art which approaches the depth and power of the great masters of the Western Tradition. [14]

Abstract artists found it difficult to refute the inevitability of human psychological response. After all, it was an argument they themselves frequently used in order to promote abstraction as a means of direct communication between the artist and the viewer.

But how could abstract artists---particularly those with leftist social leanings---respond to these charges? They, too, were suffering the Depression's effects and somehow had to survive despite rampant unemployment. An organization of diverse individuals, which in Rosalind Bengelsdorf's words represented "every avant-garde school of the time," the American Abstract Artists was not in a position to present cohesive theoretical arguments in support of the cause.

Bengelsdorf said there were two primary groups that made up the American Abstract Artists: "Those stemming from Hofmann meant they liked Mondrian, Picasso, Braque, Matisse (for color). Opposed were those reflecting the impact of the Bauhaus (Kandinsky was Bauhaus too) and Gris, who was really more allied to Feininger than Picasso. Byron [Browne] and I and our ilk valued the experiments of Malevich, Pevsner, and Gabo, and we valued Gonzalez more and Miró." [16]

Many original members of the American Abstract Artists had been to Paris or Germany. Many had at least visited, and in some cases became friendly, with leading European painters and sculptors. Albert E. Gallatin, Charles Shaw, George L. K. Morris, Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Vaclav Vytlacil, Carl Holty, Ilya Bolotowsky, John Ferren, Jean Xceron, and others had spent greater or lesser amounts of time in Paris during the early 1930s. Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy both had taught at the Bauhaus, and Werner Drewes had been a student there.

Even those who remained in New York were moderately well versed in European modernism. The publications of various European groups---de Stijl, Abstraction-Création, the Constructivists, along with the periodical Cahiers d'Art---were certainly familiar. Friends not affiliated with the group, for instance Arshile Gorky and John Graham, helped acquaint their less well traveled colleagues with the mysteries of Cubism and other vanguard styles. But, by the late 1920s it was also possible to see examples firsthand. Katherine Dreier's remarkable Société Anonyme collection was shown at the Brooklyn Museum during the winter of 1926--27. In December 1927, Albert E. Gallatin opened the Gallery of Living Art (later called the Museum of Living Art) at New York University and the opportunity to study European vanguard art at length, and at leisure, was finally available. [17] Commercial galleries also showed recent vanguard European art. No fewer than forty-five gallery exhibitions featured Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, and Feininger between 1930 and 1940.

Almost half the original members of the American Abstract Artists, including Vaclav Vytlacil, George McNeil, Giorgio Cavallon, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Carl Holty, and Wilfrid Zogbaum, had converted to modernism through the insights of Hans Hofmann, himself an eclectic advocate of modern movements. Others were drawn to the purified utopian ideas of Piet Mondrian, the Russian Constructivists, and the Abstraction-Création, Art Nonfiguratif group in Paris. Understandably, the group could not agree on a single theoretical statement.

Yet, in the 1938 Yearbook, published in conjunction with the annual exhibition that year, various members defined, explained, and justified abstraction in terms they considered meaningful to the times. Isolationism was not the answer. Rather the creation of a universal language in art that reached beyond narrow chauvinism, drawing from European art and ideas as well as native concerns, might better address man's future well being.

Few members of the American Abstract Artists were real theorists of the new art. Indeed, by the 1930s it was often difficult to disentangle the ideas of various European movements. For example, the utopian vision of the Bauhaus artists and the Russian Constructivists did not conflict, at least in the minds of Americans, with the formal concerns espoused by Cubists or by Hans Hofmann. Americans instead blended sources, drawing formal devices from one group, theoretical concerns from others.

Hans Hofmann, perhaps the single most influential proponent of the new art in New York City, had spent the early years of his career in Paris and was intimately acquainted with the analytical and synthetic phases of Cubism and their offshoots as well as with Matisse's early experiments with color and space. He was thoroughly familiar with Wassily Kandinsky's work, according to Carl Holty, who reported that Kandinsky had left his early work in Munich and had been unable to return at the beginning of World War I. [18] Hofmann was visiting his family in Munich when war broke out. Unable to return to Paris, he opened a school for modern art.

Hofmann's concerns as a teacher went far beyond instruction in modernist principles. As in more academic institutions, Hofmann's students first learned to draw, working from life and from still-life arrangements, before beginning to paint or use color. [19] At his school in Munich and later in New York, he illustrated lectures with diagrams of composition and movement in Old Master and modern works. Some of his favorite examples were Michelangelo's God and Adam panel from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Rembrandt's drawings, works by Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Cézanne, and the Cubists.

The core of Hofmann's teaching was his treatment of the painting as an independent object, itself not a new concept. As early as 1890 Maurice Denis had written that a picture, "before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote---is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." [20] Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger had taken this idea one step farther: a true painting, they wrote, "carries within itself its raison d'ètre. . . Essentially independent, necessarily complete . . . it does not harmonize with this or that ensemble, it harmonizes with the totality of things, with the universe; it is an organism." [21]

The creation and balancing of space---both forward and back---via manipulation of color and form on the two-dimensional canvas lay at the heart of Hofmann's theories. As important as form in painting were the voids---the space "between and around portions of visible matter" throughout the picture plane. Hofmann advocated separating planes and colors from the outlines of objects and distributing them over the entire surface of the canvas. Through his analyses of the picture plane, the relationship of forms and colors to each other, and especially his emphasis on rhythm, which he called "the highest quality" in a work of art, Hofmann opened many eyes, already well trained by academy standards, to new possibilities in paint.

Hofmann's emphasis on formalism was based on a deep-seated belief in the psychological impact of art. He stressed empathy, a concept developed by Wilhelm Worringer, which Hofmann defined as "the intuitive faculty to sense qualities of formal and spatial relations or tensions, and to discover the plastic and psychological qualities of form and color." [22] An intuitive painter himself, Hofmann wrote that "color stimulates certain moods in us. It awakens joy or fear in accordance with configuration." [23]

Bengelsdorf called Hofmann the "catalyst who helped me see 'holes' in pictures, who attempted to maneuver me so I could produce paintings that 'held the surface' while they indicated innumerable depths." [24] As a result of his teaching, Hofmann's students came to believe that a work of art began in the rhythms, forms, and colors of nature. He did not argue against nonobjectivity---many of his own works have no identifiable objects---but taught fundamental principles. Through his schools in New York and Provincetown, he reached a large number of forward-looking artists, and a public lecture series he gave during the winter of 1937--38 attracted widespread attention in New York.

Hofmann's influence went far beyond the students who attended his New York and Provincetown schools. During the 1920s, Vaclav Vytlacil, Worth Ryder, Ernest Thurn, Carl Holty, and other young Americans attended Hofmann's classes in Munich or in the various towns in Germany, Italy, and France where his summer sessions were held. Many of these younger artists became Hofmann's apostles. Through Ryder, who began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, Vytlacil, who became an instructor at the Art Students League in New York, and Thurn, who opened a school in Boston, Hofmann's teachings found an American audience several years before Hofmann himself took up residence in the United States. [25]

Although Hofmann never joined the American Abstract Artists, he gave his blessing when the group was formed, and his protégés represented a significant faction within the group.

If Hofmann taught the psychological impact of pictorial arrangements, the ideas generated at the Bauhaus and by the Russian Constructivists provided meaningful models for arguing the social relevance of abstraction. In the aftermath of World War I, it was clear to Constructivists Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Vladimir Tatlin, and others that the structures on which modern civilization was built had failed. For them history provided flawed models, so they designed a new art, a constructive art. Built around the ideas and materials of the age of science, for a time this new art was considered the true style of the Russian proletariat. Their utopian vision inspired Constructivists to believe that their new art could induce order in an otherwise chaotic society. For left-wing American artists struggling against charges of social meaninglessness, Constructivism had strong appeal.

Among the American Abstract Artists, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, John Ferren, and Josef Albers were especially conscious of living in a new age---an age of science and the machine. Bengelsdorf described the modern artist as "a researcher in his medium, parallel to the scientist experimenting in a laboratory, seeking to discover "those infinite phenomena that actually make life experiences, thereby giving to humanity a better means of dealing with his only defense against natural enemies. And this defense is knowledge." [26] Although couched in more personal terms, Josef Albers reflected similar sentiments: "Through works of art we are permanently reminded to be balanced, within ourselves and within others; to have respect for proportion, that is, to keep relationships. It teaches us to be disciplined, and selective between quantity and quality." [27] Like the Constructivists, these artists believed abstraction addressed a larger human concern---the possibility for order within the universe.

Many Americans became familiar with Constructivist ideas through the members and publications of Abstraction-Création, Art Nonfiguratif, a Paris-based international association established to promote "the cultivation of pure plastic art, to the exclusion of all explanatory, anecdotal, literary and naturalistic elements." [28] Leading members included Piet Mondrian, the Russians Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Kasimir Malevich, and El Lissitzky, as well as Wassily Kandinsky and other teachers from the Bauhaus. Among those who later belonged to the American Abstract Artists, Carl Holty, Jean Hélion, John Ferren, and Jean Xceron were members of the French group. Hélion's fluent command of English made him an especially important member. It was Hélion who introduced Albert Gallatin, George L. K. Morris, Charles Shaw, and other Americans to various members of the international group. Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, both active in leftist organizations in New York, were attracted by the art and social ideas when they encountered Abstraction-Création shortly after its formation in 1931. But the Americans did not adopt Constructivism wholesale.

Several members of Abstraction-Création, notably Mondrian and Kandinsky also proposed a spiritual foundation for art. Most members of the American Abstract Artists had read Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art and were conversant with the spiritual underpinnings of Neo-plasticism. Based on Theosophy, the ideas of Kandinsky and Mondrian had a direct impact on the Transcendental Painting Group in New Mexico---notably Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram. In New York, the spiritual explanations for art were most staunchly advocated by Hilla Rebay, Solomon R. Guggenheim's art advisor, whom most members of the American Abstract Artists regarded as an adversary.

A difficult and opinionated woman, Rebay advocated pure nonobjectivity as the key to "a world of unmaterialistic elevation." [29] She spoke of cosmic order, universal understanding, and intuitive genius, and had little patience for those who disagreed with her narrow stylistic preferences. Even those members of the American Abstract Artists who enjoyed her support---Dwinell Grant, Gerome Kamrowski, and John Sennhauser---generally remained disenchanted with her cosmic ideas. (Kamrowski exhibited his Surrealist canvases anonymously for several years to prevent Rebay's discovering that he had strayed from her stylistic fold.) When the Guggenheim collection opened for public viewing in 1937, Rebay's articulate explanations of nonobjectivity were opposed by those members of the American Abstract Artists who advocated the social relevance of abstraction.

Given the lack of sympathy for abstraction in the press, disputes within the ranks could only harm the cause. So in 1937, Hananiah Harari composed a letter to the editor of Art Front, the publication of the Artists' Union, signed by Byron Browne, Herzl Emanuel, George McNeil, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Jan Matulka, and Leo Lances. The letter refuted Rebay's view of nonobjective art and reaffirmed the connection between abstraction and the real world:

It is our very definite belief that abstract art forms are not separated from life, but on the contrary are great realities, manifestations of a search into the world about one's self, having basis in living actuality, made by artists who walk the earth, who see colors (which are realities), squares (which are realities, not some spiritual mystery), tactile surfaces, resistant materials, movement. . . . Abstract art does not end in a private chapel. Its positive identification with life has brought a profound change in our environment and in our lives. . . .[30]

Apart from aesthetic questions, for pragmatic reasons it was important to connect abstract art with contemporary life. As director of the mural project for the New York City WPA, Burgoyne Diller hired Byron Browne, George McNeil, Hananiah Harari, and others to design murals for public walls around New York City. Argument that abstract art was elitist, particularly from such a well-placed figure as Rebay, jeopardized the precarious relationship between abstract artists and the WPA. [32]

An early devotee of the ideas and art forms promoted by Abstraction-Création, Diller was a former Hofmann student who had begun incorporating the Constructivist principles of El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malevich into his own work as early as 1930. By late 1933 he had discovered Mondrian, and from that time on Neo-plasticism became a primary concern. [33]

As director of the WPA mural program, Diller was in a unique position to act on the idea that abstract art could serve larger social ends. The murals completed under his supervision---for radio station WNYC in New York's municipal building, the Chronic Disease Hospital, the Central Nurses Home on Welfare Island, the 1939 World's Fair, and other prominent locations---represented a significant milestone for abstract art.

One of the largest mural sites was the Williamsburg Housing Project, a modern complex of twenty apartment buildings designed as workers' housing under the progressive eye of architect William Lescaze. The project provided a unique opportunity to test the Constructivist-based idea of abstraction as a proletarian style. With Lescaze's support, Diller arranged for Stuart Davis, Balcomb Greene, Harry Bowden, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Albert Swinden, among others, to paint geometric abstractions on walls in communal rooms throughout the complex that were in keeping with the clean design of the architecture.[34]

In arguing for the placement of abstract murals on public walls, Diller blended the Constructivist-styled language of social usefulness with Hans Hofmann's psychological understandings. He explained the motivation behind the Williamsburg Housing Project:

The decision to place abstract murals in these rooms was made because these areas were intended to provide a place of relaxation and entertainment for the tenants. The more arbitrary color, possible when not determined by the description of objects, enables the artist to place an emphasis on its psychological potential to stimulate relaxation.[35]

The most significant attempt to integrate technology with art had begun during the early 1920s at the Bauhaus, the famous experimental school for industrial design in Germany, where both Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had taught. When the Bauhaus closed in 1933, Albers accepted a teaching position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and in 1937, Moholy-Nagy settled in Chicago, establishing a new industrial design school.[38] Utopian in philosophy, the Bauhaus curriculum had a strong pragmatic basis that served as a model for an experimental school established under WPA auspices in New York. Its name, the Design Laboratory, underscored its experimental nature, and the innovative curriculum required courses in sociology and psychology as well as art, industrial design, and the science of industrial materials.[39]

Both the Design Laboratory and Moholy-Nagy's Institute of Design in Chicago emphasized the connection between art and American industry. Advertising and marketing had become sophisticated fields, and many felt it was time product design caught up. By educating a new breed of artist-designers who would develop useful objects that could be easily mass produced, the Design Laboratory and the Institute of Design aimed to raise the American public's standard of living, broaden its aesthetic appreciation, and create a demand for well-designed, useful objects. (During World War II, the Institute of Design developed creative ways for manufacturers to cope with shortages: wooden bed springs to replace metal springs, an infrared oven made of an oil drum, and other objects were proposed, although only prototypes were ever built.)[40]

The philosophy of the Design Laboratory and the Institute of Design infiltrated the American Abstract Artists through Irene Rice Pereira, Robert Jay Wolffe, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The programs of these schools provided tangible evidence that Bauhaus and Constructivist ideas played a significant part in reorienting contemporary notions of the role of art within American society. They reflected a social optimism that marked the improving economic situation during the last years of the 1930s.

Given the remarkable variety in art and ideas within the membership of the American Abstract Artists, it was probably inevitable that serious internal dissension would occur, despite the success of its exhibition program. From the outset the group divided on stylistic issues, but became increasingly associated with geometric abstraction, due partly to the leadership of Balcomb Greene and Carl Holty. Yet many members found this emphasis increasingly confining.

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