Agulha Revista de Cultura: GARRETT CAPLES | Surrealism and the Abstract Truth

I: A Glimpse of Surrealism: New Worlds

A museum-quality show in terms of ambition and achievement, Surrealism: New Worlds (2011-2012) fleshed out a forgotten, if not effaced, chapter in American art history, even as it incidentally told the story of the gallery showing it. For the éminence grise of San Francisco’s Weinstein Gallery is Gordon Onslow Ford (1912-2003), who, in addition to his role in the evolution of abstract art, was also one of the great collectors of modernism. Along with his friends Roberto Matta and Esteban Frances, the British-born Onslow Ford joined André Breton’s Surrealist Movement in Paris in 1938, and would subsequently pursue an increasingly visionary, Zen-influenced abstraction in New York City, Mexico, and finally Northern California, where he lived from 1947 until his death. Onslow Ford’s influence helped transform Weinstein –his exclusive dealer– into a serious place for historically connected surrealist art; through him, the gallery would forge links with other, then-living surrealists like Enrico Donati (1909-2008), and even now, after his death, it continues to gather his fellow travelers, as when it began representing the estate of Gerome Kamrowski in 2005, or the estate of Jimmy Ernst (Max’s son) in 2010.

Befitting its plural title, New Worlds didn’t present anything like a unified aesthetic, because surrealism alone among the modernist movements isn’t an aesthetic but rather a critical assault on the conventions of reality. Thus abstraction mingled freely with figurative art, assemblages with bronzes, an automatic work like Óscar Domínguez’s decalcomania Three Figures (1947) with a meticulous imitation readymade like Marcel Duchamp’s Eau et gaz à tous les étages (1958). Drawn from a roughly 30-year time span, the 1930s to the ’60s, the show listed some 22 artists –an unlisted Dorothea Tanning (then alive at 101, [1] though more active as a writer than a painter) brought the number up to 23– all of whom were connected to some degree to Breton’s group. The theme, broadly speaking, was the encounter between the European-formulated surrealism and the “new world” of America.

Being a gallery, Weinstein naturally leaned most heavily on painters it represents; Onslow Ford, Donati, Kamrowski, and Leonor Fini were the pillars of the show, along with substantial contributions from Matta and Jimmy Ernst. What was remarkable, therefore, was how deftly the gallery filled out the show with works from big-name artists from the surrealist pantheon. A pair of Max Ernsts –Convolvulus! Convolvulus! (1941) and Head of a Man (1947) – gave as good an impression of his mercurial range as possible from merely two paintings, the former an Henri Rousseau–like jungle of hidden creatures emerging from weird plumes of color, the latter an austere though colorful neo-cubist mask. A single André Masson had to suffice for that artist’s equally varied output, but the massive Le Centaure porte-clé (1947) (or “centaur key-ring”) was a real stunner whose mutating image suggested something of his graphic work. Large canvases by seldom-seen surrealists like Domínguez and Kurt Seligmann lent the show considerable depth.

The most crucial of the surrealist old masters represented, however, was Yves Tanguy, who staked out his own wall with three oils and one of his delicately rendered gouaches. All were what you’d call prime works of the artist, with significant pedigrees: one belonged to the early surrealist poet Paul Éluard, another to Hans Bellmer, and even the gouache has appeared in books and museums. But to identify Tanguy as more “crucial” here than, say, Masson or Max Ernst isn’t to remark on the greater significance and number of the works in question; rather, the influence of Tanguy on painters like Onslow Ford, Donati, Matta, Kamrowski, and William Baziotes felt more pronounced, and in fact constituted the heart of the show. For while New Worlds showcased surrealism’s variety over a 30-year span, the main thrust of the show inevitably became the development of abstract surrealism, particularly as affected by the arrival of Breton, Tanguy, and other members of the surrealist group in NYC in the early ’40s, fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris.

The encounter between the European surrealists and American artists like Kamrowski and Baziotes is the chapter of art history largely effaced through the application of the term “abstract expressionism” to NY artists of the late ’40s and the ’50s. The term was already in use, coined in 1919 in German by Oswald Herzog for his manifesto, “Der abstrakte Expressionismus”, in the second issue of the Berlin avant-garde magazine Der Sturm. Though it was brought into English by MoMA’s first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., as early as 1929 to describe Kandinsky, and appeared on the cover of the catalogue to Barr’s groundbreaking 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, the term was anachronistically applied by American art critics like Clement Greenberg as a way to avoid the label “abstract surrealism” (which also appears on the catalogue cover). With its communist and anarchist associations, “surrealism” carried too much revolutionary baggage for the postwar political climate in the U.S. The move also helped elide the stubborn political reality that abstract art was first achieved in Germany by a Russian artist, as if to suggest that historical “expressionism” hadn’t really been “abstract” and only here in America had become so. Thus Greenberg in “‘American-Type’ Painting” (1955, 1958) elaborates an account of art as a series of laws, problems, solutions in order to write: “The early Kandinsky may have had a glimpse of this solution, but if he did it was hardly more than a glimpse. Pollock had had more than that.”

Though no one believes in laws of painting anymore, the eclipse of abstract surrealism from American art history has proved curiously durable. But New Worlds illustrated the pivotal role of surrealism with a collaborative poured painting by Kamrowski, Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock, uncertainly dated “Winter 1940–1941.” Given that Onslow Ford began pouring paint in 1939, and gave a series of lectures on surrealism in New York City attended by at least two if not all three of these young American artists beginning in January 1941, it’s hard not to conclude that Pollock’s initial inspiration for his drip paintings was Onslow Ford’s account of surrealist automatism. This is the type of connection the label “abstract expressionism” obscures.

Yet this historical neglect has paved the way for Weinstein’s success, as the gallery has become an effective advocate for abstract surrealism.

II: The Fall Guy: Alfred H. Barr Jr.

When I say “abstract surrealism” has largely been effaced from American art history, this is no mere rhetorical posture. No sooner does André Breton leave New York City for Paris in 1945 than U.S. art critics begin the erasure of abstract surrealism in favor of the manufacture of American abstract expressionism. The reasons for this, as I suggest above, are plain: surrealism is too compromised by revolutionary ideology and, as has since become apparent, the U.S. covert intelligence community had uses for abstract art. As art critic Philip Dodd comments in Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999), “There may be a really perverse argument that says the CIA were the best art critics in America in the fifties because they saw work that actually should have been antipathetic to them –made by old lefties, coming out of European surrealism– and they saw the potential power in that kind of art and ran with it.” As Dodd rightly suggests, there’s a certain genius at work here, for this move was by no means obvious. Alienating the bourgeoisie had been a tenet of the modernist avant-garde from its very origins, and there were always contemporary conservatives willing to play the McCarthyite version of the shocked bourgeois, like Michigan Republican Congressman George Dondero, who railed against the Soviet influence he found lurking behind all abstract art. But as we’ve seen with Arthur Jerome Eddy, the ease with which conservative receptivity can defang the avant-garde is disconcerting, and with abstract art in particular, as Saunders writes, its very refusal to yield definitive imagery or imply a narrative makes itself ripe for co-optation:

Where Dondero saw in Abstract Expressionism evidence of a Communist conspiracy, America’s cultural mandarins detected a contrary virtue: for them, it spoke to a specifically anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent, it was the very antithesis to socialist realism. It was precisely the kind of art the Soviets loved to hate. But it was more than this. It was, claimed its apologists, an explicitly American intervention in the modernist canon. As early as 1946, critics were applauding the new art as “independent, self-reliant, a true expression of the national will, spirit and character. It seems that, in aesthetic character, US art is no longer a repository of European influences, that it is not a mere amalgamate of foreign ‘isms,’ assembled, compiled and assimilated with lesser or greater intelligence.”

As Saunders documents meticulously throughout The Cultural Cold War, elements within the CIA –for it was by no means an organization-wide policy– wished to use American abstract painting, among other arts, to assert the cultural superiority of the United States, seeing this as a battle for hearts and minds that would be crucial to defeating Soviet-sponsored communism. This perception was symptomatic of the organization’s expansion of intelligence activity beyond information gathering and analysis into psychological operations and propaganda. To fight this battle, the CIA set up various front groups, most notoriously the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which “at its peak… had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of the American Way.” But the CIA wasn’t merely limited to its indirect subsidiaries, also making use of existing institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, which in this case was easy to do because the president of MoMA starting in 1939 was Standard Oil scion, future National Security Council member, and future Republican Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s mother, Abby, was one of the principal founders of MoMA –he called it “Mommy’s Museum,” reports Saunders– and his involvement in intelligence predated the CIA’s existence, beginning in 1940 as FDR’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. (He was never actually a CIA man because he had his own spies, it seems.) He would also later enthusiastically endorse the “free enterprise” reading of abstract expressionism.

On the one hand, this is all old news. As Saunders points out, accusations against MoMA’s promotion of abstract expressionism for the purposes of cold war propaganda date at least as far back as 1974, when Eva Cockcroft published her essay “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” in Artforum. On the other hand, art history, particularly as it relates to surrealism and abstraction, still hasn’t recovered from the distortions of this time. The CIA has essentially won the day, for the mission has been exposed but the false intelligence about the development of abstract expressionism hasn’t been corrected. And at least one reason for the persistent misinformation about abstract surrealism is the contemporary critical reputation of Alfred Barr. As the first director of MoMA, from 1929 to 1943, then later director of museum collections from 1947 to 1968, Barr is tagged as “the authoritative tastemaker of his day” (Saunders) and even “the single most important man in shaping the Museum’s artistic character and determining the success or failure of individual American artists and art movements” (Cockcroft). Both writers see Barr as having participated in an anticommunist plot to promote American abstract expressionism as a manifestation of the United States’ postwar cultural supremacy.

Yet there’s something squishy about the lines of evidence they marshal to support this conjecture. Cockcroft on her part infers Barr’s “‘credentials’ as a cold warrior” from his December 14, 1952, New York Times Magazine article, “Is Modern Art Communistic?” “In his battle against the ignorant right-wing McCarthyists at home, Barr reflected the attitudes of enlightened cold warriors like CIA’s [Thomas W.] Braden and MoMA’s [director of international activities Porter A.] McCray,” broadly corresponding to the “free enterprise” vision of abstract art summarized by Saunders above. Yet there’s little in Barr’s article to support such a reading; his point is put plainly in the last paragraph: “Those who equate modern art with totalitarianism are ignorant of the facts… Those who assert or imply that modern art is a subversive instrument of the Kremlin are guilty of fantastic falsehood.” While arguing from the examples of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, Barr is careful not to equate communism with totalitarianism, even as he distinguishes between Leninism and Marxism, or details the early ferment of the Russian revolution, when the likes of Kandinsky and Chagall were given “important posts in universities and academies.” You will search this article in vain for anything like the suggestion that free markets are a necessary precondition for modernist art, or indeed that a communist government is necessarily totalitarian.

I think Cockcroft’s reading of Barr here is well-intentioned but misguided. She’s breaking the first ground on the topic and the New York Times Magazine has framed the article in such a way as to give the impression that it poses the question in its title and answers definitively no. But anyone who’s written for a newspaper will know Barr likely didn’t title his own piece, and is it so hard to imagine him putting forward such an argument at the height of McCarthyism, when there were serious consequences to being branded “communist,” in order to deflect the attacks of politicians like Dondero, whom he names by name, rather than for more nefarious motives? Nevertheless, if I expect Saunders to have a more substantial account of Barr’s role in these matters, it’s not simply because she’s had the benefit of publishing 25 years after Cockcroft’s original article. Rather, Saunders herself has created the expectation because the 500-page Cultural Cold War is so thorough in its tracings of the labyrinthine connections between the CIA and the organization’s numerous operatives and front groups. It has to be thorough, otherwise it’d be ridiculous; who’d believe such far-fetched tales, without a mountain of evidence supporting them? The book is a detailed page-turner, a cold war bureaucratic thriller, yet when it comes to Barr, all we get are two pages of vague innuendo about his “fine Italian hand” and nothing in the way of substance. The weak treatment of Barr is a singular and puzzling failure amid Saunders’s otherwise impeccable scholarship.

There are at least two problems with the cold warrior reading of Barr. To begin with, historically, Barr was frequently criticized for his “seeming neglect” of American art and “the Museum’s perceived neglect not only of the abstract expressionists but also of American abstract art in general.” As Sybil Gordon Kantor writes in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (2002), “his interest in historical orthodoxy, the enfolding narrative that embraced innovation, precluded American art because it did not contribute to the creation of the international abstract art movement.” Barr included Americans in his narrative of the development of abstract art, but only when their work was in dialogue with the international movement—hence the synchromists MacDonald-Wright and Russell and the surrealists Calder and Man Ray—rather than expressive of some specifically “American-type” quality. This paints a rather different picture of Barr than the one suggested by Saunders and Cockcroft. The second problem with the image of the determinedly internationalist Barr as cold warrior is that he was, in fact, fired from his position as director of MoMA in 1943, eventually replaced in 1949 by Rockefeller’s handpicked man from the Office of Inter-American Affairs, René d’Harnoncourt. Though myriad bureaucratic reasons are cited, Barr’s dismissal was the culmination of a series of outrages committed against the conservative sensibilities of MoMA’s board of trustees. Kantor locates the beginning of the chain of events at the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism show, which opened on December 7, 1936, and is snarked at in full color in the December 14, 1936, issue of Life. Méret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, Object (1936), caused especial consternation among trustee and journalist alike, but what may have also irked various board members was the active participation of André Breton’s (internationalist) (communist) surrealist movement in the show, hot on the heels of the group’s collaboration with Barr on Cubism and Abstract Art. Essentially, Barr made “Mommy’s Museum” a cultural wing for the international Popular Front against fascism in that pivotal year of 1936, [2] and this can’t have escaped Nelson Rockefeller’s notice, though it’d be three years before he’d become president of the board of trustees. Nonetheless, Barr managed to endure until 1943, when he was fired in the wake of what we might call two surrealist sins against trustee orthodoxy: exhibiting Joe Milone’s baroquely decorated, protoassemblagist shoeshine stand in the lobby during the 1942 Christmas season and mounting a retrospective of primitive outsider artist Morris Hirshfield, known for his weird female nudes, in the summer of 1943. The actual firing is attributed to chairman of the board Stephen C. Clark, but I think we can take for granted Rockefeller’s knowledge and sanction of the removal of the first and only director thus far in the history of Mommy’s Museum.

Whenever you come across two diametrically opposed readings of a particular cultural figure, you should be given pause. In Barr’s case, the fact that he has been accused both of fostering American abstract expressionism in the name of a jingoistic, anticommunist crusade and of neglecting American abstract expressionism due to a Eurocentric disdain for the cultural achievements of the United States suggests that neither conception of him is accurate. If Barr lends himself to attack from opposite ends of an ideological spectrum, this is primarily because he can’t be easily appropriated by either side. Barr was trying to document the history of modernist art with as close an adherence to truth as humanly possible –successive visits to Nazi Germany in ’33 and ’35 had convinced him such recent history could already be erased– and this has left him with few friends because truth is ideologically messy. But the main problem with Barr’s reception history, when all is said and done, is that he’s never allowed to speak for himself. That is, Barr’s most important work, the over-200-page catalogue to his groundbreaking 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, has only rarely been reprinted, in 1966, 1974, and, most recently, 1986. Almost 30 years since its last appearance: I imagine you can whip through an art history Ph.D. on modernism without having to read it. But to me it’s still the best book on its subject –the development of abstract art from its origins to the then-present– and the fact that it’s not in print, not considered as crucial a text of American modernism in its own way as The Cantos, is one of the sad lingering effects of the CIA’s cold war art offensive.

III: Inventing Inventing Abstraction

For evidence of the pernicious effect of Barr’s lack of critical standing, and the unavailability of Cubism and Abstract Art, on contemporary art history, we need only turn to MoMA itself and its massive 2013 retrospective, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925. Visiting the exhibit –indeed, visiting MoMA at all– you’d never know Alfred Barr existed, despite this show’s obvious debt to his, its use of materials Barr acquired during his time as the museum director, and its wall-sized map of the “network” of artists and promoters of abstraction, this last an ineffectual travesty of Barr’s famous chart outlining the development of abstract art through various avant-garde movements and tendencies over time which served as the original cover of his 1936 catalogue. Barr fares somewhat better in Inventing Abstraction’s catalogue, which devotes a pair of essays to his chart and the Cubism and Abstract Art show, respectively. Yet even so, his work is seriously misrepresented. In the latter essay, “Abstraction in 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art,” Inventing Abstraction curator Leah Dickerman writes that “by 1936, Barr seems to have thought that as a form of contemporary practice, abstraction was already in abeyance. On the chart, the period between 1925 and 1935 remains unpopulated by the names of movements.” But the fact that this second sentence is perfectly accurate –the last new avant-garde movement named on the chart, “(Abstract) Surrealism,” is listed at 1924, the year of Breton’s first manifesto– in no way guarantees the truth of the first sentence. It is, in fact, false, as is clear from Barr’s own preface:

The first purely abstract paintings were done as long as twenty years ago and many of the conclusions in the development of abstract art were reached before the [First World] War. Nevertheless there is today a quickening interest in the subject here, and in many countries in Europe, where ten years ago one heard on all sides that abstract art was dead. In a few years it will be time to hold an exhibition of abstract art of the 1930’s to show the contemporary work done by groups in London, Barcelona, Prague, Warsaw, Milan, Paris, New York, and other centers of activity.

This description of the “quickening interest” in abstract art and the offhand list of seven-plus “centers of activity” in which “contemporary work” is being done, not to mention the preponderance of works in Cubism and Abstract Art dated 1934–36, many made specifically for it, are wholly at odds with Dickerman’s assertion that Barr thought “abstraction was already in abeyance.” And Dickerman has not simply overlooked this passage, for she quotes it selectively in a footnote (“Ten years ago [1926] one heard on all sides that abstract art was dead”), in effect making the sentence say the exact opposite of what it says; her statement is thus a conscious falsehood, rather than a mere mistake.

Why would Dickerman distort Barr’s position so drastically? While it’s tempting to imagine curators at MoMA still fighting the cold war like a platoon lost in the jungle, I think the answer’s probably much simpler, for Barr’s actual position counters not simply the organization of Dickerman’s show but the conventional wisdom of contemporary art history. As Anna Moszynska puts it in her history of Abstract Art (1990): “Breton’s literary concern with imagery meant that Surrealist art was seldom purely abstract.” This idea has been repeated in one form or another so often that it is generally accepted as true, and Dickerman doesn’t want to challenge it, which explains why there wasn’t any surrealist art as such in Inventing Abstraction, [3] despite the fact that Barr’s chart locates “(Abstract) Surrealism” at 1924, within the period of movements she otherwise finds so determinative. But only through some arbitrary criterion of purity –such as Greenberg’s assertion that abstract painting’s purity lay in a surrender to “the flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to ‘hole through’ it for realistic perspectival space” – could you possibly defend the idea that “Surrealist art was seldom purely abstract,” when the group included such painters as Masson, Tanguy, Arp, Ernst, Miró, Seligmann, Onslow Ford, Matta, Paalen, Gorky; really the list is endless and enumeration pointless. There is, of course, much surrealist painting of a non-abstract nature –the “dream scenarios” of such painters as Dalí, Brauner, Carrington, Varo, de Chirico– because, from the surrealist point of view, as Jean-Louis Bédouin writes in the group’s official history, Vingt ans de surrealism, 1939–1959 (Éditions Denoël, 1961), the debate between partisans of figurative and abstract art is “a false dilemma”:

Faced with the categorical choice to which the partisans of non-figuration would submit painters, and, through the painted work, the spirit of those who see this choice as ruling the whole conception of life, surrealism undertakes more than ever to preserve a total freedom of choice. Since surrealist painting began . . . one could say that all the “tendencies” of plastic expression coexisted in the interior of surrealism… Surrealism does not impose any formal criterion on the artist. On the contrary, it demands that the artist become the creator of new forms, the explorer of the never-before-seen. [4]

Barr himself was well aware surrealism’s prerogatives lay elsewhere than in purely formal criteria. “Abstract art, it should be clearly understood, was no more a part of the Surrealist program than it had been of Dada,” he writes in Cubism and Abstract Art. “From a strictly Surrealist point of view an abstract design is merely a by-product.” And yet, despite the lack of any a priori disposition toward abstraction, surrealism, according to Barr, would come to revitalize and even dominate the tradition of abstract art that had threatened to wane in the mid-1920s.

To demonstrate this, we need first to return to Dickerman’s misreading of Barr’s chart of the development of abstraction. Her assertion that Barr felt abstraction was “in abeyance” by 1936 is based on the lack of new movements on the chart after 1924. But the point of his chart is not simply to map a network of movements, but rather to illustrate the development over time of the two main currents of abstract art as of 1935: “NON-GEOMETRICAL ABSTRACT ART” and “GEOMETRICAL ABSTRACT ART.” That is to say, abstract art is alive and well at the bottom of Barr’s chart –i.e., the then-present– and the arrows linking various avant-garde groups culminate in one or the other of these two tendencies. Barr makes this reading of his chart clear in the section of Cubism and Abstract Art headed “Two main traditions of Abstract Art”:

The first and more important current finds its sources in the art and theories of Cézanne and Seurat, passes through the widening stream of Cubism and finds its delta in the various geometrical and Constructivist movements which developed in Russia and Holland during the War and have since spread throughout the World. This current may be described as intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometrical, rectilinear and classical in its austerity and dependence upon logic and calculation. The second—and, until recently, secondary—current has its principal source in the art and theories of Gauguin and his circle, flows through the Fauvisme of Matisse to the Abstract Expressionism of the pre-War paintings of Kandinsky. After running under ground for a few years it reappears vigorously among the masters of abstract art associated with Surrealism. This tradition, by contrast with the first, is intuitional and emotional rather than intellectual; organic or biomorphic rather than geometrical in its forms; curvilinear rather than rectilinear, decorative rather than structural, and romantic rather than classical in its exaltation of the mystical, the spontaneous and the irrational.

“The masters of abstract art associated with Surrealism” is not a phrase we hear very often in art history these days, and yet here is Barr saying it as the historical events are unfolding. What is striking, too, is how consistently he develops the above picture over the course of his catalogue, connecting surrealism to the pre–World War I abstract expressionism in Munich through the direct influence of Klee –who participated in the first group exhibition of surrealist painting along with Arp, Ernst, Miró, Masson, de Chirico, Man Ray, Pierre Roy, and Picasso in 1925– and through “analogy of form and method” between Kandinsky’s abstract Improvisations and the “automatic method of the Surrealists.” Barr will conclude Cubism and Abstract Art with a short discussion of “The younger generation” that is dominated by surrealists and ends on the following note:

At the risk of generalizing about the very recent past, it seems fairly clear that the geometric tradition in abstract art . . . is in decline. . . . The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miró and [English sculptor Henry] Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cézanne and Cubism.

This passage is remarkable and perhaps accounts for the fact that Cubism and Abstract Art has seldom been reprinted. For here Barr essentially argues that surrealist abstraction is not only the present but also the future of abstract art. And he was, of course, correct that non-geometrical abstraction would “dominate for some time to come.” The abstract American painting that originally arose in the mid-’40s from surrealism and later took on the label “abstract expressionism” is quite evidently non-geometrical in character, so Barr’s remarks are truly prescient here, even though he couldn’t have foreseen the actual circumstances of the Parisian surrealists’ exile in New York City. Reprinting Barr’s book would thus restore too big a piece of what I’ve suggested is a deliberately effaced chapter in American art history.

IV: The Villain: Clement Greenberg

If Saunders were looking for a villain for The Cultural Cold War in the genre of painting on par with, say, Nicolas Nabokov’s role in the genre of music, I’m rather surprised she spent so little time on Clement Greenberg. As she herself points out, Greenberg was “the art critic who did most to put Abstract Expressionism on the map.” This alone would seem to warrant scrutiny on her part, given how thoroughly she develops evidence for Cockcroft’s original thesis concerning the cold war role of American abstract expressionism. Saunders does note in passing that Greenberg was a member of the more conservative faction of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a group that served as the domestic branch of the CIA’s aforementioned anticommunist front group, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He also wrote for numerous magazines that she implicates as recipients of CIA funding, including Encounter, New Leader, and Partisan Review. In a relatively recent biography, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (2006), Alice Goldfarb Marquis writes that Barbara Rose (and others) believed Greenberg was some sort of CIA agent, though Marquis does such a poor job of sourcing her quotations, you’ll never find out from her book when or where Rose might have made such a remark. Nonetheless, Art Czar indicates that suspicions about Greenberg’s motives and activities as an art critic aren’t new, making it all the more puzzling that Saunders merely recycles vague accusations against Barr instead of subjecting Greenberg’s role in the rise of American abstract expressionism to a thorough investigation.

That Greenberg had a “lifelong disdain” for surrealism, as Art Czar puts it, is evident from his writings. If the movement needed to be purged from the history of the development of American abstract art, he was clearly the right man for the job. In truth, however, or at least for our purposes here, it matters little whether or not Greenberg was an actual CIA man; what is more to the point is that he did the cultural work the Agency needed done and, as a result, reaped the rewards in the form of State Department–sponsored travel and other lucrative gigs as a speaker on and international representative of modern American art. Even more importantly, his work, though much disputed, has been allowed to stand, in the sense that Greenberg’s major collection of critical essays, Art and Culture, has never not been in print since its debut over 50 years ago. His four-volume Collected Essays and Criticism (1986-1993) similarly endures, while a seminal document of modernism like Cubism and Abstract Art languishes out of print. This is, on the one hand, symptomatic of the general academic tendency to revise away from primary source materials. On the other hand, it remains the single greatest stumbling block to forming an accurate picture of the direct lineage from abstract surrealism to American abstract expressionism.

A brief look at Art and Culture suffices to show the tactics by which Greenberg erases surrealism from the narrative of abstraction while establishing the currency of the term “abstract expressionism” as a label for post–Second World War American art. When not bashing surrealism, Greenberg skillfully omits it through a terminological sleight of hand. Take, for example, his 1953 “Contribution to a Symposium” in Art News called “Is the French Avant-Garde Over-Rated?” Greenberg begins by more or less rewriting the question in the form of Is America the Greatest?: “Do I mean that the new American abstract painting is superior on the whole to the French? I do.” This jingoistic assessment is no shock and its lack of specificity precludes challenge; Greenberg names four French painters he claims to like and says they’re not as good as the great Americans of 1953: “Gorky, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Kline, de Kooning, Motherwell, Newman, Pollock, Rothko.” Leaving aside the question of the extent to which Greenberg’s “Americans” are imported –Gorky, Hofmann, de Kooning, and Rothko are all European-born– the trick Greenberg must perform is to sever this group from surrealism, and this is no mean feat given Gorky’s and Motherwell’s active collaboration with the group during Breton’s exile in NYC and even Rothko’s and Pollock’s more peripheral participation in the surrealist milieu. Greenberg’s strategy is to simply avoid the word “surrealism” altogether by performing variations on the word “cubist”:

Our new abstract painting seems to have anticipated the French version by two or three years, but I doubt whether there has been any real acceptance of American influence on the part of the French as yet (and I don’t much care). The development of post-Cubist art (say rather, Late Cubist) had brought American and French painting to the same point at about the same time, but we had the advantage of having established Klee, Miró, and Mondrian as influences before Paris did, and of having continued (thanks to Hans Hofmann and Milton Avery) to learn from Matisse when he was being disregarded by the younger artists in Paris. Also, André Masson’s presence on this side of the Atlantic during the war was of inestimable benefit to us. Unfulfilled though he is, and tragically so, he is still the most seminal of all painters, not excepting Miró, in the generation after Picasso’s. He, more than anyone else, anticipated the new abstract painting, and I don’t believe he has received enough credit for it.

This passage is so ludicrous, it’s difficult to know where to begin, but we might start by asking what this “post-Cubist art” he refers to is. “Post-Cubist” isn’t a term with any particular art historical signification, the way “post-impressionist” designates the reaction against impressionism led by such artists as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, et al. If we remove Mondrian from this equation, “post-Cubist” sounds an awful lot like “surrealist,” given that Miró and Masson were surrealists, and, as mentioned above, showed work in the first exhibition of surrealist painting in 1925, along with Klee and Picasso. In his 1941 essay “Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism,” moreover, Breton affirms that Klee’s automatism was a crucial influence on the movement as far back as the first Manifesto (1924), in which both Klee and Masson are mentioned by name. Restoring Mondrian to this equation only further erodes Greenberg’s credibility, for while it’s true Mondrian wasn’t a surrealist, his influence certainly made itself felt in Paris long before New York through the former members of De Stijl (1917-31) –such as Van Doesburg and Arp– who helped form the Abstraction-Création group (1931-35). Among the current or future surrealists in this venture are Calder, Gorky, Seligmann, and Paalen, and, of course, Arp himself. Saying Masson “more than anyone else anticipated the new abstract painting” would be an open admission that surrealism was at the root of the New American Painting in any universe excerpt Greenberg’s, in which the movement has been replaced with a concept of his own invention, “Late Cubism,” whose parameters are so nebulous he can include Hofmann, de Kooning, Gorky, Miró, and even Pollock within it.

At the same time that Greenberg seemingly champions “Late Cubism,” however, he is laying the groundwork for the appropriation of the term “abstract expressionism” as a way to characterize postwar American painting. In a footnote to “‘American-Type’ Painting,” Greenberg blames New Yorker art critic Robert M. Coates for saddling us with the term in 1946, “at least in order to apply it to American painting.” Yet Greenberg had already begun to appropriate the phrase as early as the same 1953 “Contribution” he reprints in Art and Culture:

Despite their seeming convergence, there are crucial differences between the French and the American versions of so-called Abstract Expressionism…

The American version of Abstract Expressionism is usually characterized, in failure as well as in success, by a fresher, more open, more immediate surface.

Greenberg’s “so-called” qualification finds him using “Abstract Expressionism” as though grudgingly, because it seems to have won the day. But two years later, in “‘American-Type’ Painting,” Greenberg redefines “abstract expressionism” for his own purposes, through a series of well-placed maneuvers:

In some ways Hans Hofmann is the most remarkable phenomenon of “abstract expressionism,” as well as the exponent of it with the clearest title so far to the appellation “master.” Active and known as a teacher here and in pre-Hitler Germany, Hofmann did not begin showing consistently until 1944, when in his early sixties, which was only a short time after his art had turned openly abstract… Hofmann… assimilated the Fauve Matisse before he did Cubism.

The years 1947 and 1948 constituted a turning point for “abstract expressionism.”… But it was only in 1950 that “abstract expressionism” jelled as a general manifestation.

Actually, not one of the original “abstract expressionists” –least of all Kline– has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art.

Let us begin at the end of this tale. By calling Franz Kline “one of the original ‘abstract expressionists,’” Greenberg definitively wrests the term away from Herzog, Barr, and Kandinsky, given that Kline was only a year old when Kandinsky painted his first abstract canvases in 1911. Locating the “turning point for ‘abstract expressionism’” at 1947–48 further severs it from Kandinsky, so that Greenberg may award Hofmann the title “master.” But if Hofmann was “active and known as a teacher . . . in pre-Hitler Germany,” surely he was aware of the stir caused by Kandinsky’s New Artists’ Federation, at the Modern Gallery, Munich, 1909, which Arthur Jerome Eddy identified five years later as the beginning of German modernism in his book Cubists and Post-Impressionism. And Eddy knows what he’s talking about; his massive bibliography of books and articles on modern art from 1908 to 1914 indicates he read French as well as German, and he’s the type of guy who can name 19 Russian fauves, among whom Kandinsky figures. Yet as of 1919, when Eddy publishes the revised edition of Cubists and Post-Impressionism and Herzog coins “abstract expressionism” in his Der Sturm manifesto, Hofmann is still nowhere in sight. If he “assimilated the Fauve Matisse before he did Cubism,” mightn’t we imagine that he did so through Kandinsky, who was well-known after the notorious 1909 show and who, after the Soviet government changed its position on avant-garde art, taught at Bauhaus (1921–33) until it was shut down by Hitler? Greenberg neatly avoids this question through the adverbial display of “openly abstract,” as if Hofmann’s own abstraction had been deeply hidden, yet present even before he’d heard of Kandinsky. This replacement of Kandinsky by Hofmann as the master of abstract expressionism was a necessary prerequisite to Greenberg’s appropriation of the term for American art, for it would not do, at the outset of the cold war, to have an aristocratic Leftist mystic Russian fauve working in Germany as the ultimate origin of “the new abstract painting” with which America hopes to conquer the art world. Kandinsky must go, so Greenberg elsewhere tars him with the ultimate insult on the abstract brush, “illustration,” essentially the same rationale used to exclude surrealism from the history of abstract art.

When you subject it to even the lightest historical scrutiny, Art and Culture crumbles on the basis of its factual inaccuracies alone, irrespective of any formalist analysis Greenberg might hazard. But the narrative Greenberg helped construct –erasing surrealism from the development of abstract art and transferring the term “abstract expressionism” from Kandinsky and his followers in the 1910s to the abstract American painting emerging out of surrealism in the 1940s– has proven a formidable structure, not so easy to dismantle, as the recent Inventing Abstraction suggests. Art and Culture might thus be bad art criticism, but it’s first-rate propaganda.

Nonetheless, cracks have begun to appear in this edifice. I have mentioned the work of the Weinstein Gallery, whose curatorial prerogative has sprung directly from Gordon Onslow Ford and flowered in major retrospectives for such abstract surrealist painters as Jimmy Ernst, Gerome Kamrowski, and Enrico Donati. But even the museums are getting in on the action. At the same time MoMA was staging Inventing Abstraction, the Morgan Library was hosting the splendid Drawing Surrealism, curated by Leslie Jones and originating at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Like Weinstein’s Surrealism: New Worlds, Drawing Surrealism wasn’t specifically about abstract surrealism; it’s probably best described as works on paper from the movement’s inception through the late ’40s, showcasing the bewildering variety of techniques the group employed or invented during its heyday. Yet the show nonetheless asserted the relationship between this work and American abstract expressionism through a couple walls of “Late Surrealism,” where usual suspects like Matta, Onslow Ford, Baziotes, and Kamrowski rubbed shoulders with the likes of Pollock, Rothko, Pousette-Dart, Louise Bourgeois, and John Graham. To see two major shows operating on such fundamentally opposed historical premises some 20 blocks apart in Manhattan was striking, to say the least, and sadly MoMA was on the wrong side of history.

V: A Bunch of Pigs

The surrealist Lee Miller took a great photograph of Alfred Barr during a visit to her and Roland Penrose’s Farley Farm in East Sussex, England, in 1952. Looking dapper in a tweed coat with pocket square and black fedora, Barr is by no means dressed for farm labor, but Miller has him posed with a metal bucket by a trough, not so much slopping the two pigs present as gently tilting the bucket for their inspection of its contents. With anthropomorphic expressions the photo surrealistically encourages, the pigs sniff at the contents in smug curiosity rather than hunger, while Barr stands there expressionless, patient and dignified, as if there were no humiliation to waiting on a bunch of pigs. It’s hard not to see this as an allegory for Barr’s relationship to the board of trustees at MoMA. The reference to Barr’s “fine Italian hand” that Saunders seizes upon in The Cultural Cold War to establish his complicity in the museum’s anticommunist activities I think refers more to the behind-the-scenes dealings and gentle persuasions he’d continually had to perform as director of MoMA; I’m sure he’d had to suffer many a moneyed fool in order to make the museum great. As a reward for this labor he was dismissed, yet even then, in the face of offers from other museums, he stuck around at a reduced salary, ostensibly to tie up loose ends and finish certain research projects. It seems he couldn’t bring himself to part from the institution he’d built. But neither could the museum do without him, and within four years of his dismissal, he was back, with less executive authority, under the new title “director of collections.” People like Picasso or Breton –people whose participation was vital to the museum’s success in staging world-class shows of modernist art– they didn’t do business with MoMA, they did business with Barr, because only Barr had the necessary tact to move between the realm of the largely communist and anarchist artists of European modernism and an institution founded and funded by American capitalists, in an effort to benefit the public at large.

That’s a tough tightrope to walk, and his loss of MoMA’s directorship suggests Barr ultimately fell too far on the artists’ side for the trustees’ comfort. And he’s still paying the price, inasmuch as the passage of time hasn’t restored his reputation or brought his writing back into print. Unless Cubism and Abstract Art is made available again, critics will feel safe misrepresenting Barr for their own purposes. In her essay on Barr’s catalogue, Leah Dickerman writes that “mounting Cubism and Abstract Art at that moment had everything to do with what was going on in Europe. A single poignant sentence in the catalogue introduction sets the project in relation to the rise of fascism: ‘This essay and exhibition might well be dedicated to those painters of squares and circles (and the architects influenced by them) who have suffered at the hands of philistines with political power.’” Robert Rosenblum, in his Reaganite introduction to the 1986 reprint of Cubism and Abstract Art, has a similar, albeit less charitable take on this passage, calling it “poignantly strained” even as he notes its basis in “the grim new facts of contemporary life in Germany and the U.S.S.R.” Such assertions of what is, in fact, the very real connection between Barr’s 1936 show and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe again mislead through selectivity, for what both commentators omit to mention is Barr’s own footnote to his dedication:

As this volume goes to press the United States Customs has refused to permit the Museum of Modern Art to enter as works of art nineteen pieces of more or less abstract sculpture under a ruling which requires that sculpture must represent an animal or human form. Some of the nineteen pieces are illustrated by figs. 47, 49, 96, 97, 104, 105, 155, 202, 209, 210, 216, 221, 222, 223. They are all considered dutiable as plaster, bronze, stone, wood, etc., and have been entered under bond. The hand-painted canvases in the exhibition were, however, admitted free, no matter how abstract.

The “philistines with political power” that Barr refers to in his dedication clearly aren’t limited to Europe, as this footnote suggests; through the United States Customs, the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt appears to have actively interfered with MoMA’s assembling of Cubism and Abstract Art by taxing various sculptures according to their materials. In keeping with his penchant for understatement, Barr protests this decision not by denouncing it but merely by reporting it in such a way as to allow the reader to identify the pieces and draw his or her own conclusions. Looking at the sculptures Customs refused to acknowledge as human or animal puts that organization in rather a bad light, for examples like figures 96 and 97 –Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s The Lovers (1913) and Horse (1914), respectively– while not photorealistic, are quite evidently related to their titles. Whatever Dickerman’s and Rosenblum’s motives for ignoring this footnote in order to make the dedication seem solely directed at European events, their silence is a disservice to Barr. Certainly unsubstantiated claims against Barr as a cultural cold warrior ring false against documented challenges to the propriety of the U.S. government’s decisions, such as we see here.

The truth is that Alfred Barr is a hero. Our whole notion of a museum for modern or contemporary art, a museum that includes film, architecture, design, and photography alongside painting and sculpture, comes from him. On top of this, the catalogue to Cubism and Abstract Art remains the most valuable book on its subject, at once a primary and a secondary source on the quintessential formal development in the visual arts during modernism. Our knowledge of abstract art is truly indebted to his occasional personal acts of boldness, whether it was tiptoeing around Moscow to see Rodchenko’s officially “repressed” paintings in 1928 or smuggling Malevich paintings out of Nazi Germany wrapped in his umbrella in 1935. Yet Barr has been continually disparaged, insinuated against, and lied about in the years since his death, and today Lee Miller’s allegorical photograph has an even wider application than it did in 1952. A bunch of pigs, indeed.

NOTAS

1. Tanning (8/25/1910-1/31/2012) would die within 12 days of the original publication (1/19/2012) of my review of the show.

2. In Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, Leah Dickerman cites Barr’s outrage after a 1933 visit to Nazi Germany as the genesis of his two 1936 shows: “Fuming about the censorious yellow-and-black labels already affixed alongside certain modern pictures in public collections in Nuremberg and Munich, flagging them as ‘degenerate,’ and the dismissal of museum personnel deemed unsuitable, instead of sunbathing he wrote a series of impassioned articles called ‘Hitler and Nine Muses,’ describing the impact of Nazi policies on the cultural sphere. In these texts, produced only a month after the National Socialists won election, Barr observed that their party was already ‘able to dominate to an extraordinary degree almost every phase of the cultural life in Germany.’ Culture, he made clear, was a first target for the Nazis. To his surprise, Barr failed to find a venue to publish his on-the-ground cultural reportage, with the exception of a small section on film and nationalism. Margaret Barr reports her own indignation: ‘He has never been turned down. As it turns out neither the daily newspapers nor the periodicals –The Nation, Harper’s, Scribner’s, North American Review, The New Republic– are interested. Is it indifference or disbelief?’ Barr’s understanding of the cultural repercussions of European fascism, and his commitment to articulating the threat that it posed to modernist art and its producers, served as key motivations behind his paired 1936 shows. Preparations for Cubism and Abstract Art began soon after his return.”

3. There are, to be sure, plenty of future surrealists and close associates of the group in the show, mostly grouped under Dada, including Arp, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, and Tzara. Apollinaire, who coined the word “surrealist,” is also present, while Picasso, who had a long on-and-off relationship with Breton’s group, is the show’s very fountainhead.

4. “Face à l’option catégorique à laquelle les partisans de la non-figuration voudraient soumettre les peintres, et, à travers l’oeuvre peinte, l’esprit de ceux qui la regardent de telle sorte que cette option commande toute la conception de la vie, le surréalisme entend plus que jamais garder une totale liberté de choix. Depuis qu’il existe une peinture surréaliste… on peut dire que toutes les “tendances” de l’expression plastique ont coexisté à l’interieur du surréalisme… Le surréalisme n’impose à l’artiste aucune critère formelle. Il lui demande au contraire d’être le créateur de formes nouvelles, l’explorateur du jamais-vu.”

GARRETT CAPLES (United States, 1972). Poet and former music and arts journalist. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he currently lives in San Francisco, California, after fifteen years in Oakland. He is the author of the Wave Books publication Proses: Incomparable Parables! Fabulous Fables! Cruel Tales! as well as the poetry collections Lovers of Today (Wave, 2021), Power Ballads (Wave, 2016), Complications (Meritage, 2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (Black Square, 1999). Wave published his book of essays Retrievals in 2014. He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series, and has edited books by such poets as Will Alexander, mimi tempest, Joyce Mansour, Norma Cole, Frank Lima, Stephen Jonas, and Diane di Prima, among numerous others. He is also the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (California, 2013). He lives in San Francisco.

TRIANA VIDAL (México, 1992). Artista plástica multidisciplinaria con experiencia en producción en barro, manejo de pastas, vidriados y control de quemas, modelado y manejo de torno alfarero. Tarotista por tradición familiar, su trabajo figurativo tiene bases en los arquetipos junguianos y en la exploración de los elementos presentes en el inconsciente colectivo. Su formación comenzó en el taller “Tres Piedras” en Monterrey Nuevo León y actualmente radica en la ciudad de Cuernavaca donde se dedica a la producción de su obra. Triana Vidal es la artista invitada de esta edición de Agulha Revista de Cultura.