Sunday, 20 September 2009

CHAPTER 5 - THE VISIONARY TRADITION IN THE USA

The American art of the twentieth century possesses what is certainly the richest and most complex tradition of visionary imagery. This cannot be accidental, but must be due in large part to the history of America itself. From the earliest period of European settlement, America offered a home to extremely diverse religious communities, and very often the settlers came to the New World in order to live in freedom according to their own convictions. Later, the period before the American Civil War was a time of impassioned religious debate between conservatives and radicals - a debate which still continues within the accepted framework of current American politics. Conservatives stressed spiritual rather than material improvement; radicals interpreted Christianity as a call for social reform. Both sides, however, stressed that the primary goal was the regeneration of the human spirit. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) one of the dominant intellectual forces of the period put the emphasis there, rather than on the mere improvement of material conditions, though he found no inconsistency in arguing at the same time for a new social model. Emerson’s Transcendentalism anticipates many of the doctrines of Theosophy, with its references to Indian and Chinese scriptures, and to European mystics such as Emmanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme, and the similarity offers powerful reasons why Theosophy itself was so readily accepted in America. Emerson, even more than Blavatsky and later prophets and gurus, lies at the root of the American tradition of visionary art. There is a direct link from Emerson to many of the founding fathers of American Modernism, chief among them the architect Frank Lloyd Wright  (1867-1959) and the photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946).

In America, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the birth of a number of utopian communities. One of the most famous is the Oneida community, originally founded at Putney, Vermont, in 1841, and transferred to Oneida, New York, in 1847. These, in a loose sense,  provided a pattern for similar groupings of American artists, ranging from the Transcendentalist Painting Group founded by Raymond Jonson and others in New Mexico in 1938 to Black Mountain College in North Carolina which, during the 1950s, was an important focus for experimental writers, artists and musicians. Innovation in American art has not invariably been based on big cities - this offers a significant difference from the situation in Europe, where the contrary in generally the case.

The temptation therefore is to regard the development of visionary painting in the United States as something which was almost entirely independent from what was happening in Europe at the same period. From an art-historical viewpoint, this is unsafe. The most interesting ‘visionary’ artist at work in America in the early years of the century was Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917). Ryder’s dark, modestly scaled paintings, landscapes and (especially) seascapes, were included in the ground-breaking Armory Show of 1913, and he was, in this sense, but in this sense only, a recruit to the new Modernism. Long before this, however, he had been recognised as a disciple of the Trancendentalist. Clarence Cook, in the first extended essay on Ryder’s work, published almost a quarter of a century previously, in 1880, had linked his painting to the tradition of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and even to that of the Englishman William Blake, and had remarked that ‘in its own way, the work he has produced thus far is as sweet, as natural and as innocently wise as theirs.’[i] The comparison with Blake was to be repeated by other authors. Ryder, though Jackson Pollock was later to call him ‘the only American master who interests me’[ii], was in fact a modernist only by courtesy. It is easier to relate his work to that of American Romantics such as William Rimmer and Elihu Vedder. The imagery in Vedder’s Questioner of the Sphinx (1863) and in Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit (1871) is more specific but the general atmosphere is the same.

Ryder was represented in the Armory Show by ten paintings, Kandinsky by only one, but it was to be Kandinsky’s influence that was paramount in the years that followed. Kandinsky’s work was purchased by Stieglitz - he paid $500 for it, and it was by far the most expensive purchase that he made from the show. His determination to possess it indicates the importance he attached to the artist. The first generation of American modernists, among them Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Max Weber (1881-1961) and Arthur Dove (1880-1946), were profoundly affected by his work.

Hartley is perhaps  the key figure in this phase of American modernism. Stieglitz admired his work, and gave him an exhibition at his 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1909. He continued to exhibit Hartley’s working until the start of World War I. In 1912-13, the artist to travelled to Europe. where he came into direct contact with the Cubists and also with members of the German avant-garde, among them Kandinsky himself. The power of Kandinsky’s personality clearly aroused ambiguous reactions - Hartley’s comments, in his letters home, waver between the enthusiastic  and the disparaging. However, the abstractions he produced at this time were amongst the most radical so far produced by any American artist. He clearly found the German art-world more sympathetic than its French equivalent, since he returned to Berlin in 1914 and remained in Germany after the outbreak of the war, returning only with great reluctance to America. In the 1920s, he made another significant visit - to New Mexico. He was one of the first members of the American artistic avant-garde to discover its attractions.

Weber and Dove were also exhibitors at 291. Weber, the child of Russian immigrants, who arrived in the United States with his family at the age of ten, offers a pattern which was to be repeated in some respects by the Abstract Expressionists. It seems entirely appropriate that Mark Rothko should have been one of his pupils.

Unlike Rothko, however, Weber’s art was largely formed by study abroad. From 1905 to 1908, studying at the Académie Julian and with Henry Matisse. His choice of Matisse as mentor at such an early period indicates how keenly attuned he was to the new developments then taking place in Paris. His work gradually shifted from Matisse-inspired Fauvism to a version of Cubism, and like many ‘fringe’ Cubists, including those who flourished in his native Russia, he seems to have interpreted the style in a much more mystical fashion than its creators originally intended. His Study for ‘Interior of the Fourth Dimension’ (1913) makes an obvious reference to the doctrines of Ouspensky.

Later in his career Weber was to revert to the mystical part of the Jewish tradition, making paintings on Hasidic themes.

Arthur Dove is  an elusive but attractive figure, increasingly respected today though he enjoyed little success in his own lifetime. He, too, attracted the patronage of Stieglitz, exhibiting at 291 in 1910. By that time he, too, had already spent a period in Paris, influenced less by the Fauves and the Cubists than he was by the Impressionists and Cézanne, and exhibiting twice at the Salon d’Automne. He, too, however was a very early convert to abstraction - he was already producing abstract works in 1910-11. For Dove, painting was not a means of representation, but a way of conveying internal essences and states of feeling. One of his links with Kandinsky’s way of thinking is that he was a strongly kinaesthetic artist, interested not only in music but in finding ways of conveying the effects of various sounds in visual terms. These mystical inclinations are yoked to an ironic, almost satirical strain, and critics have sometimes seen an affinity between Dove’s work and that of the Dadaist Francis Picabia. He might have had a more profound impact on the history of American art but for his own innate reclusiveness and sense of privacy. For example, he was invited to exhibit in the Armory show, and was one of the few artists who refused.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was Stieglitz’s best known discovery, though he did not exhibit her work until 1916. Unlike the other artists whom he promoted she had little direct connection with the European avant-garde, and did not in fact travel abroad until after World War II, by which time she was already a very celebrated American artist and had indeed been so for many years previously. On this occasion she rejected the idea of an introduction to Picasso, saying that, as she did not speak French and he did not speak English, they would not be able to have any meaningful communication with one another.

The works by O’Keeffe which initially impressed Stieglitz were early drawings and water-colours, produced while she was working as a schoolteacher in Texas in 1915-16.

These are perhaps he most radically abstract works, and powerfully express O’Keeffe’s feelings about the power and divinity of nature, as she experienced these on the Texas plains. At this period she seems already to have been aware of Kandinsky’s doctrines, as these were expressed in the key text On The Spiritual in Art, and to have been interested but not wholly convinced by them. Her more typical paintings, produced after she had allied herself with Stieglitz (she became his mistress, and they married in 1924 after he had obtained a divorce from his first wife) are often mysterious  and often ambiguous views, often seen in tight close up, of objects such as bones, skulls and flowers. These struck an immediate chord with the public Stieglitz found for her. As an American art historian has noted:, ‘[Her] rise to prominence in the 1920s rested on a reading of her work as shaped and infused by a woman’s special access to the natural.’[iii] She also explored the forms of New Mexican architecture, having discovered the region in the mid-1920s, though she did not settle there permanently until 1946, after Stieglitz’s death. These images - their play with scale owes a good deal to photography and O’Keeffe was one of the first modern artists to borrow so heavily from this sister art-form - was influenced not so much by the work of her husband as by that of Paul Strand (1890-1976), another Stieglitz protégé. Strand’s photographs are ‘pure’ and apparently objective, created from negatives which have not been manipulated in any way. At the same time, he uses the camera in a way which disrupts perspective and dislocates the spectator’s established sense of scale. O’Keeffe does precisely the same thing in her paintings, often adding an element of radical simplification. The fascination of her work (which often, perhaps significantly, makes a more powerful impression when seen in reproduction, as a poster or an illustration in a book, than when it is experienced in the original) lies in the combination of objective and subjective elements. The close ups of flowers, for example, take on sexual connotations, often with Jungian overtones, without surrendering their claim to be fairly exactly representations of forms the artist has seen, with no element of Expressionist distortion.

Her most directly spiritual works are those whose imagery can be linked to the New Mexican Hispanic-Catholic cult of the Penitentes. Her canvases featuring large crosses make obvious allusions to this, and the reference is also present, in more subdued guise, in her famous image of Ranchos de Taos church. Yet it is clear that O’Keeffe remained an observer of this cult, not in any sense a participant.

No member of another group of artists who lived and worked in New Mexico before and after World War II enjoyed the national celebrity which was accorded to O’Keeffe. Despite this, they are in many respects more central to the story which is told in this book. These were the Transcendentalists (they used the word in a different sense from that in which is was employed by the followers of Emerson), whose importance to American twentieth century art is now gradually being recognised. In purely social terms, the Transcendentalists represent a rebellion against the need to live and work in New York if one was to make a successful career as an artist. Taos and Santa Fe were amongst the first non-metropolitan artists’ colonies in the United States. Those who chose to life and work there often did so because they felt spiritual yearnings which seemed to be at odds with what they found in New York, or in other urban centres such as Chicago.

The Transcendental Painting Group was founded by a group of artists living in Taos and Santa Fe in June 1938, and its life was effectively over by the end of 1942, strangled in part by the war. The majority of its leading members had a much longer connection with the area. The significance of the group, despite its short life-span, was that it codified certain attitudes within American art. The artist Ed Garman (b. 1914), now almost the sole surviving member, has written as follows:

            Possibly the most significant accomplishment of the Transcendental Painting       Group was our bringing the word transcendental to prominence within the             semantic dialogue. Because the criterion became feeling rather tan visual             context, it included both abstract and non-objective art contexts in their greatest             spiritual potential and allowed the debate of terms to end. We believed that    because the implication of the word transcendental pointed to an ideal condition or one of expanded awareness and acceptance, a cultural significance could be ascertained. The ideal (represented by a work of art free from nonconstructive            biases, emphasizing internal harmony, and reflecting the spiritual value of the      choices of each artist), could then serve as a model for human orientation,          making transcendental painting a potent reference for cultural values.[iv]

The Group was informally divided into a junior and a senior membership, and of these the senior members were by far the more important, in terms of artistic achievement. As Garman acknowledges, all of these senior members were heavily influenced by Theosophy. Interestingly enough, he equates aspects of Theosophy with things to be found in Zen Buddhism:

            Most important was Theosophy’s interpretation of spiritual context as being       formless in an objective sense, yet powerful in an undefined space. The word         formless did not suggest the absolute absence of form, but merely the absence            of derivative figuration as in a Zen void.[v]

Garman adds:

            To make art that was formless in an objective sense yet powerful in an   undefined space was precisely what the TPG set out to do. We made an effort, each in his/her own way, to show that our art not only transformed and converted the abstract or non-objective image from the usual painting        derivations taken from subject-matter, symbolism or personal style, but also that       it moved beyond its sources to evoke an ineffable environment that would be     perceived as having achieved the transcendental. Then, for the viewer, the      spiritual quality could follow.[vi]

Raymond Jonson (1891-1982) was undoubtedly the central figure in the group. Born in Iowa and raised in Portland, Oregon, he cut his teeth as an artist  in Chicago, working chiefly as an illustrator and designer of innovative stage sets. In 1921, while living in Chicago, Jonson read Kandinsky’s The Spiritual in Art and also met Nikolai Roerich, of whom he said, “I feel very close and am moved beyond words by this man’s spirit - his work.’[vii] He helped Roerich organise Cor Ardens, an international brotherhood whose function was to hold exhibitions without juries, and establish universal museums where works donated by members would be permanently housed.

These cloudy ideals failed to give permanent satisfaction, and in 1924 he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, At this stage he was still a figurative painter, doing work which shows unmistakable signs of Roerich’s influence. Indeed, am early painting like The Decree (1918) suggests that Jonson was already aware of Roerich’s work, and had been influenced by it, some time before they met in person. By 1933, however, he was painting in a purely abstract style. The floating, transparent forms typical of his work at this time suggest that the influence of Roerich had been decisively replaced by that of Kandinsky. But Jonson is not, as this description might initially suggest, as essentially derivative painter. His best work has a cleanness of shape, and a tranquillity of mood, which suggests a meditative universe rather different in scope from Kandinsky’s shamanistic one.

Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) visited New Mexico - in the first instance through her friendship with Mabel Dodge Luhan, who was also to play hostess to D.H. Lawrence - but did not live there. In fact, she never returned after 1919. She was nevertheless invited to become a member of the TPG, since her ideas seem so closely allied to those of the rest of the membership.

Brought up in comfortable circumstances, Pelton travelled widely throughout her life, and was in touch with many of the esoteric and avant-garde influences of her time. In 1913, she had exhibited two paintings at the Armory show, but then fell back into making less radical paintings - as a student of her work remarked: ‘In the 1920s and 1930s of American Modernism, we find a painter (Pelton) ideating “pure abstractions” while painting representational landscapes.’[viii] By 1926 she was making some purely abstract work, and this tendency was reinforced by the intensive study of Agni Yoga (‘Fire Yoga’, named after the Hindu god of fire) which she began in 1930. Roerich had published a book on this subject in 1929.

The first important organisation for practitioners of Yoga in the United States was the Self-Realization Fellowship founded by Paramahansa Yoganda in 1920. Yoga as taught thereafter in the west often became identified both with doctrines borrowed from Theosophy and others taken from the Hindu version of Tantrism which, for example, believes that transcendent reality divides into two guiding principles, one male, representing pure consciousness and transcendent passivity, the other female (shakti) representing mental activity. It is these concepts which often seem to be imaged in Pelton’s abstractions and semi-abstractions, many of which are concerned with fire imagery.

Though widely exhibited  - she had fourteen solo exhibitions between 1911 and 1936 -Pelton’s work failed to make the kind of impact  achieved by Georgia O’Keeffe for several reasons: its own lack of stylistic consistency until a fairly late stage in her career; the painter’s comfortable economic circumstances, which eliminated the need to push for recognition; and perhaps most of all, the fact that she never had access to the promotional genius of a Stieglitz. She is, nevertheless, a fascinating rediscovery, and the creator of a number of very beautiful paintings.

Emil Bistram (1895-1976) was born in Hungary, and emigrated with his parents to America in 1906. He began his career as a highly successful commercial designer, and later taught art at Parsons between 1920 and 1925. Later, between 1925 and 1930, he worked for Roerich, teaching at the New York Institute of United Arts (Corona Mundi) at the Roerich Museum. Like all Roerich’s post-Russian schemes, the Institute was wildly ambitious - or over-ambitious. It aimed to link together all the fine arts, offering classes in music, painting, sculpture, ballet and drama. Though receptive to Roerich’s ideals, Bistram was resistant to his style as a painter. In 1931 he began to fall under the influence of Kandinsky (whose work was available through the collection then being formed for his Museum of Non-Objective Art by Solomon R. Guggenheim, under the influence of his dogmatic adviser, Baroness Hilla Rebay), and in the early thirties his interest in abstraction was reinforced by a growing interest in Native American art. ‘This began a change in my whole life,’ Bistram said. ‘I realised for the first time what abstract artists were trying  to do. Suddenly all my years of studying Kandinsky’s On The Spiritual in Art suddenly came into focus, and from that point on I became seriously interested in abstraction.’ [ix]

Bistram opened his Taos School of Fine Art, later renamed the Emil Bistram School of Fine Art, in Taos in 1932, and became an influential figure on the New Mexico art scene. Among the writers studied by his students were Emerson, Nietzsche, Jung, Mme. Blavatsky, Kandinsky and Ouspensky. The students also looked at Zen Buddhist texts, and there were experiments with spiritualism and classes in meditation.

The fourth senior member of the TPG was the leading Canadian painter Lawren Harris (1885-1970), who spent a fairly brief period as part of the New Mexico art colony in the late 1930s, after being forced out of his own country a few years earlier by a messy divorce. Harris came from a wealthy background, and had studied art in Europe before World War I, arriving in Berlin in 1904. Fairly soon after his arrival, in 1906, he came into contact with theosophical ideas through one of his instructors. He persisted with this interest, and was later to be vice-president of the Toronto Theosophical Society and member-at-large of the International Theosophical Society.

On his return to North America he worked as an illustrator for both Canadian and American magazines, among them Harper’s, and increasingly involved himself with modernist tendencies in art,  in 1913 becoming a member of what was, some ten years later, to name itself the Group of Seven - the foundation stone of a recognisably Canadian modernism. He was also in touch with the latest manifestations of avant-garde art in New York, In particular he exhibited in the ‘International Exhibition of Modern Art’ organised at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 by the Société Anonyme, a modernist ginger group which was the joint offspring of Marcel Duchamp and the wealthy American patron of the arts Katherine Dreier. While Duchamp might be a sceptic in these matters - he once said ‘I’m afraid I’m an agnostic when it comes to art. I don’t believe in it with all the mystical trimmings’[x] - Dreier was a fellow theosophist. The exhibition, thanks to Harris, was also seen in Toronto the following year. All of this made Harris and invaluable link between the TPG and artistic developments elsewhere. His aid might have been even more effective if his stay in New Mexico had lasted longer. Through him, for example, the Group was represented at the Golden Gate International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1939. But in 1940 he felt compelled to return to Canada because of the war.

The Transcendental Painting group bridges the gap between the early pioneers, such as Marsden Hartley and Max Weber, who had direct experience of European modernism in its formative years, and what was to happen in New York during the 1940s, It represents both the end of something and the beginning of something. The specific tie to Kandinsky - and also the less generally recognised by still very important tie to Roerich - now began to be loosened, and other influences began to take their place - influences which perhaps could be thought of as more specific to America, though the TPG had already made the discovery of Native American art.

There has long been a debate about the precise extent to which Abstract Expressionism, the triumphant new style of the 1940s and early 1950s, could be described as ‘visionary’ - critics, following the lead of Abstract Expressionism’s early advocate Clement Greenberg, have often preferred to describe it in more formalist terms, without reference to mystical or visionary content. But no-one now doubts that its visionary basis must now, to some extent at least, be admitted into any account of what its practitioners attempted to do.

The usual approach to the birth of Abstract Exppressionism is through its origins, not in Kandinsky’s form of abstraction, but in Surrealism. Before the outbreak of World War II, the only American artist generally admitted to be a true surrealist was the isolated and eccentric Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), who exhibited at the Julian Levy Gallery, which formed the accepted New York outlet for artists linked to the European Surrealist Movement, and who was actually included in the first American exhibition of surrealists, held in New York in 1932. In recent years, visionary status has been claimed for him, a claim perhaps reinforced by a statement the artist made in an interview printed in the December 1957 issue of Art News. Cornell said that two things had changed his life:

            The first was a visit to a pet show in Maspeth, Long Island, where, he said, “I    heard a voice and I saw a light. And the second thing was on West Fifty-Second      Street. I saw Fanny Cerrito [the 19th century ballerina, who was a cult figure             for Cornell] on top of the Manhattan Storage Warehouse.”[xi]

This seems a rather slender basis for placing Cornell among the artists who have an assured role in this book, His exquisite boxed assemblages are exquisite expressions of nostalgia and desire, frequently, though mistakenly, classified as being no more than upmarket toys at the time when they were first produced. His claim to visionary experience looks like a rather typical  piece of obfuscation. As his most recent biographer remarks, ‘Cornell had a fear of being understood.’[xii]

A much more convincing candidate for visionary status in the Armenian-born Arshile Gorky (1904-1948). Born Vosdanik Adoian in a village near Van, in Turkey, Gorky and his family fled the Turkish persecution of Armenians and settled in the United States. The family was dispersed during its flight, and Gorky did not reach America until 1920. As his change of name implies - ‘Arshile’ after the Greek hero Achilles, ‘Gorky’ after the Russian writer Maxim Gorky (the word also means ‘bitter’) - he consciously constructed himself a new personality after he settled in a new country.

Gorky was the become the bridge between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Like many of the leading New York artists of his generation, he served an exceptionally long apprenticeship, imitating  the French masters of modernism, chief among them Picasso, though  their work was known to him largely through reproduction. At the same time, he steeped himself in modernist concepts in general  - he was, for example, familiar with Kandinsky’s On The Spiritual in Art, where the approach to the problem of being modern would have been very much in step with his own enthusiastic and idealistic temperament.

The key event for Gorky was the arrival of a core group of French surrealists in New York, in flight from World War II. Their interest in his work liberated him, and set him free to discover his own originality. A large part of this, as he soon recognised, came from the Armenian heritage he had been forced to abandon. In 1944 he wrote to his sister Vartoosh, to whom he had always remained close, ‘I respond to modern life as an Armenian from Van.’[xiii]

The paintings in which this response demonstrates itself most clearly are those from Gorky’s Garden in Sochi series, which rank among his masterpieces. When the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought a work from this series, Gorky supplied it with a statement, written in characteristically idiosyncratic terms, to say that the garden itself had been one near his father’s house, remembered from his boyhood:

            This garden was identified as the Garden of Wish Fulfilment and often I had       seen my mother and the other village women opening their bosoms and taking     their soft and dependent breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun, the rain, the cold and     deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself don’t know why this tree          was holy but I had witnessed many people, whoever did pass by, that would           tear    voluntarily a strip of their clothes and attach this to the tree. Thus through             many years of the same act, like a veritable parade of banners under the pressure           of wind all these personal inscriptions of signatures, very softly to my innocent         ear used to give echo to the sh-h-h-h-sh-h of the silver leaves of the poplars.[xiv]

Not surprisingly, this statement has attracted a great deal of exegesis. Gorky, it seems, both confessed and disguised the Armenian origins of his inspiration. The place-name ‘Sochi’ belongs, not to the region round Van, but to a Russian seaside resort on the Black Sea. It seems, in this context, to be a deliberate garbling of the Armenian word for ‘poplar’ - ‘sos’ or ‘sosi’. To make a Holy Tree bedecked with strips of cloth was a very ancient Armenian custom. Divination by listening to the rustling leaves of poplar trees is an Armenian practice which can be traced back as far as the fourth century b.c.

On this occasion, therefore, Gorky was making reference to shamanistc rites of a sort which would have been perfectly familiar to a number of other and earlier modernists, especially those who were well-read in Sir George Frazer’s The Golden Bough  (1911-15), a vast work in twelve volumes, whose general theme was that of a general development of modes of thought from the magical to the religious and, finally, to the scientific.. What he did was to use information of this kind, as well as his own memories, as a way of charging the painting with a kind of sexual magic - the biomorphic forms seen in the Garden in Sochi series clearly allude to women’s breasts, as the artist’s statement implies. That the basic context should be a memory of Gorky’s mother (who died of starvation before she could leave Turkey) is significant in itself. Gorky is here trying to use memories of an age-old ritual to heal a deeply personal wound: something which can be seen as typical of Abstract Expressionist painting in general.

The two Abstract Expressionist artists most often cited when the ‘visionary’ strain in twentieth century American painting is discussed are Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). In many ways the two present a striking contrast. Pollock benefited from his status an all-American original, who had spent his formative years in the wide open spaces of the American West.  The legend was not fully in step with the reality, but the reality was interesting enough. An important part - perhaps, indeed, the most important part of Pollock’s education to place at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, when his peripatetic family put down roots for a while in that city. At Manual Arts he fell under the influence of a charismatic teacher, Frederic John de St. Vrain Schwankowsky. It was Schwankowsky who introduced the young Pollock to the ideas of the Theosophical Society, still flourishing strongly in California, though now perhaps somewhat in decline elsewhere. He took him to the theosophical retreats at Ojai, where Krishnamurti taught, preaching that inspiration was to be cherished more than schooling, because ‘intellect, left to itself, will only waste its energies in systematisation and in this way will become divorced from life.’ [xv] The impression made on Pollock was not a temporary one. Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, recalled that he ‘often spoke of Schwankowsky and Krishnamurti later in life.’[xvi]  The initial influence was reinforced by Pollock’s later friendship with the Russian-born painter, connoisseur and critic John Graham, a convinced believer in Theosophy, and intellectual guru to many of the New York artists of Pollock’s generation.

To this theosophical influence Pollock added ideas borrowed from Native American culture. He had first become fascinated by this when quite young. In the early 1920s Pollock and his brothers investigated the Indian mounds and cliff-dwellings near Phoenix, Arizona. The influence was strongly reinforced by Dr Joseph Henderson, Pollock’s Jungian analyst  between 1939 and 1941. Henderson  was obsessed with Indian culture and believed, with Jung, that a colonising people - in this case white Americans - would inherit the racial memories of the natives they displaced. Knowing of Pollock’s youth in the West, Henderson assumed that his patient’s unconscious was already filled with Indian imagery, and encouraged him to ‘dredge it up’.

Because of Pollock’s inarticulacy, the communication between therapist and patient was often based on the drawings Pollock made and brought to their sessions. Thanks to Henderson’s urging, Pollock began to explore the imagery of Navajo sand-paintings, and the patterns used for their skin shirts by North West Coast Indian tribes. Some of the drawings also demonstrate that Pollock was interested in shamanistic masks. Violet Staub de Laszlo, who took over Pollock’s therapy from Henderson in 1941, thought that Pollock consistently displayed what she called ‘a shamanistic primitive attitude’ during the entire period that she saw him. Pollock also discussed shamanism with friends outside the therapeutic context. He was, they reported, keenly interested in shaman-induced transformations between human and animal form, and in the shaman’s ability to travel through spirit worlds.[xvii]

These iinfluences clearly make themselves felt in the paintings Pollock was producing in the period before his so-called ‘drip paintings’. A well-known example is Guardians of the Secret, painted in 1943. Here the references to shamanism could hardly be more explicit. The drip paintings themselves can be, and indeed often have been, perceived as being essentially the residues of shamanistic rites or ceremonies - the traces left in the arena after the shaman has left it. Many are not entirely abstract, but hint at figurative images which remain secret or private within their enveloping veils of paint.

Pollock was not alone in pursuing these interests. By the year 1943 references to the primitive and archaic had become a conspicuous feature of the cutting-edge modernist painting then being produced in New York. Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) had already developed a style based on pictographs derived from mythology and from primitive rock-carvings. Rothko and Barnett Newman (1905-1970) were moving in the same direction. The interest was linked both to their feelings about the terror and brutality of a world at war, and their conviction that primitive expressions contained within themselves an element of high spirituality ‘which participated in the critique of the materialism, secularism and scientism in modern life.’[xviii] In this sense, they had come full circle to Kandinsky and his associates in the Blaue Reiter.

Of all the Abstract Expressionists, the one who put most stress on the spiritual value of his own art was Mark Rothko. He insisted that ‘only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless’[xix] Like Gorky and Pollock, Rothko was a slow developer, and reached his mature style comparatively later. During the 1930s, he worked in a rather drab realistic style, geared to the social preoccupations of the time. In the early 1940s, in common with other members of the New York school, he moved towards a semi-abstract biomorphic surrealism, often, as in his watercolour Vessel of Magic (1946) with alchemical or mystical overtones. Only in 1948 did he arrive at the ‘signature style’ for which it he is now known, with soft-edged blocks of colour floating against a lighter or darker ground.

It is the apparent simplicity of Rothko’s mature work which has provoked so many quarrels about its correct interpretation. Clement Greenberg, one of the great propagandists for Abstract Expressionism, was vehement in his insistence that ‘visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience’.[xx] Irving Sandler, the chief historian of the movement, has protested against ‘the flood of turgid and subjective analysis’ provoked by Rothko’s painting. Yet Rothko himself often stressed that he was not, in his own mind at least, primarily a colourist. He also made it clear that his primary aim was to induce an emotional response, to reduce them to tears, as he said, without  their knowing why. He actively encouraged the use of his paintings in quasi-religious contexts. He pulled out of a commission to provide paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, on the grounds that what he had produced was two serious for its setting, and eventually donated the pictures to the Tate Gallery in London on condition that they always be exhibited in a kind of shrine on their own. The last major enterprise of his career was the series of works he painted for a non-demonimational chapel funded by the de Menil family in Houston. Robert Rosenblum has said of this that it ‘hovers between a shrine of the spirit and a shrine of art’.[xxi] Another American critic, Hilton Kramer, was surely not far off the mark when he headlined his review of the retrospective held at the Guggenheim Museum in 1978 ‘Rothko: Art as Religious Faith.’

Critics have recently looked for ways out of the dilemma, pointing for example to Rothko’s admiration for the monumental single-figure paintings produced by Old Masters such as Velasquez and Rembrandt. Rothko once wrote:

            For me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the   probable and the familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human    figure alone in a moment of utter immobility.[xxii]

The suggestion has been that, just as many of Pollock’s drip paintings now seem to contain hidden figuration, so too Rothko’s floating blocks of colour can be read as ultimate reductions of the human form. In support of this one can cite the fact that Rothko, throughout his career, always claimed that he was not an abstractionist, and insisted that his paintings had to have and did in fact have subjects.  If his mature works do in fact present radically simplified figures, would align Rothko with the kind of reductionism which has already been noted in Kandinsky’s work - the sign becoming more and more simplified until at last it becomes wholly unrecognisable. Yet it must also be noted that Rothko admired neither Kandinsky nor Mondrian.

One thing is certain: Rothko, though he possessed a notoriously difficult temperament, might not be displeased by this attempt to solve the dispute - by the attempt, perhaps, more than the actual solution. As he once remarked, ‘there is more power in telling little than in telling all.’

Barnett Newman, though a contemporary of Pollock and Rothko, was much slower than they were in making his mark. During the heady days of Abstract Expressionism’s rise to worldwide celebrity, he was chiefly known as a curator, and as a propagandist for the new art, rather than for his own productions. His pronouncements at this period very much catch the intellectual tone of the epoch. ‘Primitive art,’ he said, in an article written in 1946, has become the romantic dream of our time.’[xxiii]  This remark was made apropos an exhibition of art from the South Seas. Newman was even keener on Native American artefacts, and especially impressed by the art of the  North West Coast Indians, which he interpreted according to his own intellectual predilections. He described the art of a typical Kwakiatul artist as follows:

            The abstract shapes he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a         ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding.[xxiv]

 He was not slow to apply these concepts directly to the art of his own day, and, by implication to his personal production .In a preface to an exhibition called ‘The Ideographic Picture’, held in 1947 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, he remarked that ‘Spontaneous, and emerging from several points, there has arisen during the war years a new force in American painting that is the modern counterpart of the primitivist art impulse.’[xxv] All those who Newman at this time became accustomed to what his friend Harold Rosenberg called his ‘rapturous philosophising’.[xxvi]

Newman’s mature paintings, with their broad fields of colour, interrupted and articulated by the vertical stripes he called ‘zips’, have regularly been interpreted as being purely optical in intention, and in this case, too, Greenberg’s polemics have imposed an interpretation which would not have been sanctioned  by the artist himself. As late as 1967, for example, one finds him making a speech entitled ‘Spiritual Dimensions of Contemporary Art’. The real clue, however, often lies in his titles, where  Newman adopted phrase from biblical, Greek, Talmudic and Cabalistic sources and used them to try and match he own thought processes. The radical simplicity of his compositions is such, however, that to some extent at least the spectator has to take the metaphysical content on trust.

It s more specific in the work of certain American artists who worked in modes related to Abstract Expressionism, but who did not belong to the movement. An example is Mark Tobey (1890-1976). Though Tobey’s use of abstract calligraphic markings - what he described as ‘white writing’ - anticipated aspects of Jackson Pollock, his formation and intellectual background were very different. He was one of the first American artists to take a substantial amount from the art of the Far East. He studied under the Chinese painter Ten Kuei in Seattle in 1923, and a decade later travelled to China and Japan, though, as he afterwards noted, what he learned there taught him that he was essentially a westerner.

Tobey also took things from Islamic art and thought. He joined the Baha’i faith in 1918, and continued to adhere to it for the rest of his life. Founded in the mid-19th century by the Iranian mystic Mirza Hoseyn ‘Ali Nuri, Baha’i is a heterodox offshoot of Islam. It teaches the essential unity of all religions, which according to Baha’i beliefs teach and identical truth,  and also the unity of all humanity. It may have been his interest in Baha’i tenets which directed Tobey’s  attention to Persian and Arabic calligraphy, as well as to the Chinese and Japanese method of writing. The result of these eclectic impulses is a kind of art clearly allied to the mystical tradition. As Tobey himself said: ‘I do not work by intellectual deductions. My work is a kind of self-enclosed contemplation/’[xxvii]

Another American artist influenced by the art and thought of the Far East is Morris Graves (b. 1910). Like Tobey, Graves grew up in the American North West, on the Pacific rim, and the influence therefore seem a more natural one than it might have done of the East Coast. Just as Tobey did, Graves travelled to the China and Japan to study - he made three trips there between 1928 and 1930, and they made a lasting impression. In 1935, he wrote:

            The artists of Asia have spiritually realized form, rather than aesthetically            invented or imitated form, and from them I have learned that art and nature are         mind’s Environment, within which we can detect the essence of man’s Being             and Purpose, and from which we can draw clues to guide our journey from        partial consciousness to full consciousness. I seek to move away from that   Western aesthetic which emphasizes personalised expression of forms without a          profound content to support them... and toward the Eastern art’s basis of          considerations of metaphysical perceptions which produce creative painting as a   record - an outflowing - of religious experience.[xxviii]

Graves, too, has made use of a form of white writing, which in his case has been described as resembling ‘the meshed wave of spiritual energy throughout the universe.’

As the work of Rothko and Newman demonstrates, the spiritual or visionary element in Abstract Expressionism often brought the style close to what came to be described as Minimalism. In Minimalist or near-Minimalist works one sometimes finds a version of the same conflict that divided the Russian Suprematists from their contemporaries and rivals the Constructivists. Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) is an example of this. Working within the context of Abstract Expressionism, and apparently influenced at one point by Zen, he made himself deeply unpopular within the New York art community by mocking its more gaseous pretensions to exalted spirituality (in the process earning the sobriquet ‘the mad monk’), and insisting that art must remain entirely separate from life, and that if a ‘subject; was present than that subject could only be art itself.

One artist who has successfully trodden the fine line between the mystical and the totally self-referential is Agnes Martin (b.?). Martin has been an occasional poet as well as a painter, and one can get a glimpse of her sensibility by looking at some lines from one of her poems:

            Everyone is chosen and everyone knows it

            including animals and plants

            There is only the all of the all

            everything is that

            every infinitesimal thought and action is part and parcel of a wonderful victory

            “freedom on the mountain, a glimpse of victory”

            but in reality there is no losing

            The wiggle of a worm is as important as the assassination of a president[xxix]

Her apparently Minimalist paintings and drawings, often executed in fine parallel lines which cover the whole of the available visual field, are linked to studies in Taoism and Zen, which Martin, as a child of her particular generation, regarded as an alternative to the existentialism which became fashionable in the United States during the 1950s.

Like a number of the American artists discussed in this chapter, Agnes Martin has strong career-links with New Mexico. She  was born in Canada, and first arrived there in 1946, becoming a member of the faculty of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1947. She left to continue her studies in New York, but returned to New Mexico in 1952. In 1957 she again went to New York, returning to settle permanently in 1967.

She thus represents a generation younger than that of Raymond Jonson and his peers in the Transcendentalist Painting Group, but having some affinities with the TPG - not least an attraction to a region of America which always seems to have nurtured the visionary spirit. There are also, however, profound differences. The artists who revolted against American materialism in the period following World War II had a much wider range of cultural references than their predecessors. In particular, they were much more open to influences from Chinese and Japanese culture, whereas the ‘exotic’ elements within Theosophy had stemmed almost entirely from the Indian sub-continent.

Martin was exceptional, in that she based her system largely on Taoism. The chief eastern influence on the younger generation of artist was Zen Buddhism, as taught by the Japanese Zen Master D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966). Suzuki had already begun to teach in the United States before World War I. His first stay lasted for thirteen years, from 1897-1909, and he attracted attention with his Outline of Mahayana Buddhism, published in English in 1907. His real impact, however, came through the discipleship of the avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1972). Cage had arguably more influence over visual artists and poets than over members of his own discipline, and in particular profoundly influenced those who studied with him  in the 1950s at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

The result of Zen studies was to link the visionary impulse to a kind of passivity which changed its nature. Artists proved to be especially receptive to Suzuki’s idea that a grasp of ultimate reality (the ultimate objective of all transactions with the visionary realm) must be the object of intuition rather than logical enquiry. This tended both to democratise visionary experience and also to fragment it. Artists in America could no longer see themselves as hierophants, divinely endowed with a mission to redeem humankind.

Nevertheless two developments in American art led to an unexpected continuation of the visionary tradition. One was the rise of feminism, which led to an exploration of a new kind of spirituality, centred on female rather than on male ideals. The other was the exploitation by artists of new technologies, and especially of video. These will both be dealt with in my final chapter.