[upbeat music]
>> Last week we gave a
little lead into the course
by reviewing modernism,
modernity, what's modernity about.
That train of thought led us
to encounter Jackson Pollock.
We talked through Pollock a little bit,
and I wanna resolve
what we said about him.
I mean, not fully resolve,
but I wanna say a little
more about Pollock today,
and use that as an entrance
into our talk today,
our discussion today.
And the thing about Pollock
is that it's not really clear
how to interpret him.
We've already gotten a
couple of interpretations,
I think pretty divergent
interpretations last week.
In our review of modernity,
we talked about a guy
named Clement Greenberg,
one of the most prominent art critics
in the middle of the 20th century.
There's actually a book
written about Greenberg,
what's it called, the Art
Czar, something like that.
He just had this huge presence
during the mid 20th century,
huge presence in the art world,
and the subtitle of that
book is something like
The Rise and Fall of the
Domination of Clement Greenberg,
over 20th Century Art Criticism
or something like that.
So we'll see some problems
and we'll move past Greenberg,
today, later today, this afternoon.
But Greenberg provided one of the
strongest interpretations of Pollock,
strongest as in forceful whether
you buy into it in the end
or not.
Greenberg's train of thought is this.
Purity in art, and that's what he's after,
some kind of a logical
purity, a rational purity.
Art that is self-reliant and clear, pure.
Purity in art consists in the acceptance,
willing acceptance,
of the limitations of the
medium of the specific art.
It is by virtue of its
medium that each art
is unique and strictly itself.
So what he's gonna do
is argue for a really
thorough-going formalism,
where the form is the meaning.
He doesn't want all of
the other kind of baggage
that can go along with
art and be laden upon art.
Things like narrative and
reference outside of itself.
Art is the painting, in
particular, has always
just made itself about so
many other peripheral things,
and ignoring the power and
the potential of meaning
within the medium itself.
And so purity, pure,
forceful meaning in art
is going to acknowledge the
limitations of the medium
in order to restrict itself
to the meaningfulness of the medium.
Yeah.
>> Student: I wanted to ask this
on the last class but didn't.
I was wondering how come we
focus as a progression here,
how come we only focused
on Greenberg's perspective,
even though I know he
was very influential.
I was just wondering.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We did bring in Harold
Rosenberg at the end.
We'll try to sort him
out a little bit more.
And as we go,
we'll get into some pretty
strong critiques of Greenberg.
In this class,
we're leaving out loads of
really important material,
really important artists that
we're not even talking about.
Really important critics that
we're not even talking about.
What we're hoping to do is
rather than exposing you
to sort of everything's
that's being written
or all of the major points
of view that's being written
and all of the major artists,
focus on a few in some depth,
and then you can use that as
you go forward from this class
to work out from.
So if you know what Greenberg is doing,
it will be a whole lot
easier for you to locate
the people who are
disagreeing with Greenberg,
or offering alternatives
to Greenberg, and so on.
I'll give you some of those
alternatives, obviously.
Some of those pretty
harsh critiques of him,
but, at least for the first week, yeah,
we're focusing in on him quite a bit,
and we'll continue to
focus on him this week.
After this week, you won't
hear so much about him.
Does that kind of address your question?
Yeah. [laughs]
It's one of the difficult things
about teaching any kind of history,
is it's so dense, there's so much,
there's so many different
ways to cut through it,
or so many different threads
you can pull out and say
this is the important thread.
Yeah.
>> Student: Does Pollock
mark the end of modernism?
>> Not quite.
I will argue, this afternoon
we'll try to get to
the end of modernism,
what I want to call the end of modernism,
where I want to identify it.
And that's
[student mumbles]
minimalism.
What's that?
>> Student: Was Pollock part of modernism?
>> Yeah, I mean Pollock is an interesting
transitionary figure because he's,
I mean, according to Greenberg,
he's going to be the height of modernism,
he is finally purifying the medium
and making it self-sufficient
and autonomous in a way.
Clear in a way.
He's the height of the
Modernist progression.
Well, we get a few others
that we'll talk about this afternoon.
But if you listen to other
people interpreting Pollock,
like Allan Kaprow,
who we'll talk about in a
couple weeks, few weeks.
He's gonna say, oh, Pollock
opens up performance art.
And performance art is going to be
fairly radically unmodern
[laughs] in a lot of ways.
Because performance art is
going to be so concerned
with ritual, and routine,
and social norms,
not purity at all.
But social norms is going
to be very socially laden.
Does that answer you question?
Yeah.
So you can pretty much,
in the -isms labels,
you can still locate Pollock
in modernity, modernism.
Most everything we're
going to talk about today,
I would argue if you have to
cut it one way or another,
that we're still in modernism,
up through the '60s in some ways.
The following weeks we're
gonna reach back and see
that post-modern thinking
is really getting going
at the same time in the '50s,
and you can probably even go earlier.
I mean Duchamp is kind
of the quintessential
proto-post-modern artist.
So there's gonna be a lot of overlap.
But I think Pollock is
still coming through
the modernist train of thought.
Good, 'kay.
So, Greenberg's interpretation of Pollock
is then going to be,
basically he's going to say,
yeah, Pollock is willingly
accepting the limitations
of the medium like no one ever has.
He's treating the flatness of the canvas
as an utter flatness, an
impenetrable flatness.
So much so that he's
treating it like an arena
that he walks in, that
he puts his body into.
And his movements in space,
his movements with the paint,
hit the canvas and go no further.
They create no illusion
through the canvas,
they create no sense of perspective.
It hits the canvas and
treats it as totally flat.
Greenberg would say this
is what Pollock is doing.
Willingly accepting the
limitations of the medium.
And, in doing so, is leading
to and helping us to see
a deep meaningfulness
in the medium itself.
The resistance of the medium.
Okay, so that was Greenberg's
assessment of Pollock
that we talked about last week.
And you can certainly see
how that would be arguable.
You could really argue
that from these paintings.
And it is pure formalism.
There's no illusion,
it is paint on canvas,
and it is solving a lot
of the formal problems
that painting has been struggling with.
For instance, how do you make,
how do you put paint on canvas
in a way that it doesn't create
any sort of spacial depth,
spacial illusion, focal point?
How do you subvert all of
those conventions of painting
that have come up to this point,
that have lent painting
to representing the world
and to illusion, as
Greenberg would call it?
How do you subvert all of those?
How do you withhold those?
Well, this is one pretty interesting way.
There is no focal point.
There's an extraordinary
sense of movement,
so he keeps the sense of movement
but you don't focus anywhere.
He doesn't lead you anywhere.
You just go across this sort of field,
this energy field of paint,
These records of movement,
records of an artist
interacting with the canvas,
and you get what is often
called an all-over composition.
That's a pretty important
way of addressing
some of the pitfalls of the
conventions of painting,
if you're going to move past
illusion and representation.
There's no focal point,
there's no positive and negative space,
I mean, he is really withholding
a lot of those conventions
of traditional painting.
Pollock says this, he acknowledges this.
He says this,
my paintings do not have
a center, but depend on
the same amount of interest
throughout the painting.
And all of that, I think,
could be well-interpreted
by Greenberg.
And I think it leaves you
with a kind of a present everywhere.
I'm taking about it as
sort of energy field
or an all-over composition,
in that all of the activity
of the painting leads to
a kind of present moment
where it's all over,
even though it's the traces of
a lot of movement over time.
What it adds up to is
this instant visual effect
that has no center, no focal point,
no positive space, no negative space,
just kind of energetic
movement optical experience.
That's Greenberg's
interpretation of Pollock.
But it's not at all clear
that that's the only
way to interpret this,
nor the way it should be interpreted.
So last week we also added
to that Harold Rosenberg and
Harold Rosenberg's interpretation
of what Pollock is doing.
And Rosenberg is gonna put the emphasis
in an entirely different place.
He couldn't care less about
purity, purity in painting.
What he cares about is that
the aspect of the arena
that Pollock creates.
That it doesn't have anything
to do with purifying painting,
it has to do with a human person acting,
and the painting as an
action, a meaningful action.
So, what Rosenberg is gonna lead us to is
this emphasis on American
painters, read Jackson Pollock,
and there are a few others
I'll introduce you to,
who are treating the canvas
as an arena in which to act.
It's not a space in which
to reproduce or redesign
or to express something
or picture something.
It's not for picturing.
It's not a picture, but it's an event.
It's an action.
You should read that as,
hear that as social action.
Individual action.
It is emotional action, mental action.
Action, human action.
It's not about painting and formalism.
It's about a person
asserting himself, in a way.
And Rosenberg goes on, giving
a really different reading
than Greenberg, saying,
a painting that is an
act, this kind of action,
is inseparable from the
biography of the artist.
The painting itself
is a moment in the adulterated
mixture in his life.
The act-painting, he wants
to even hyphenate them,
is of the same metaphysical substance
as the artist's existence.
The new painting has broken down
every distinction between art and life.
Now that is not at all what
Greenberg wants. [laughs]
Greenberg needs this distance,
this critical distance,
where the art doesn't refer.
Because if you are winding
art and life up together,
then you're immediately letting
in all those references.
Suddenly art, Pollock's
painting, is about him,
and it's about his life and his struggles,
and it's about his this and
that and all of those things.
What Greenberg doesn't want
is the artist living on the canvas.
Way too referential.
Rosenberg is going to put
all of the emphasis there.
And this phrase, this kind
of union of art and life.
The artist living in the
work or living on the canvas
is something that you'll
hear in the coming weeks.
It's putting the emphasis
on performative meaning
rather than formal meaning.
Maybe that's a good way of saying it.
Greenberg wants us to see
meaning in the presence of forms,
the way forms relate to each other,
the way we experience them optically.
After the artist makes the
work, the artist is irrelevant.
It's the form that carries the meaning.
But Rosenberg is saying, nmh,
the form is just an artifact
of the artist living on the
canvas, of living in the work,
and trying to make sense of the world.
That's what we read into, the performance.
It's a thoroughly
un-Greenbergian thing to say.
So here, in Pollock, we have
multiple interpretations
that we'll find, today
and in the coming weeks,
will shoot off into multiple new works
created by other artists.
I think, I just sorta wanna
leave ya in that tension,
and have you sort through what
you think of Pollock's work.
What is it?
What is he doing here?
Why is it important?
Yeah.
[student questioning]
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think both of them are
offering a general interpretation
of art, what modern art is, what it means.
And so it would be a
kind of a broad umbrella
that they're placing over
a lot of different artists.
But both of them are
primarily talking about
what's going on in New York at the time.
Pollock especially, when
Rosenberg is writing,
and when Greenberg is writing later,
the earlier essay we saw from Greenberg,
Pollock is still,
all of abstract expressionism
is still quite young,
quite adolescent.
But in the essay you read for today,
and the essay that Rosenberg wrote,
Pollock is extremely prominent
in the New York art scene.
So if they're writing about
what's going on in action-painting
and abstract painting
in general,
Pollock is going to be one
of the immediate references,
especially with the action-painting essay
that Rosenberg wrote.
Good?
Okay.
Good.
And I think this difference
in their interpretation
comes from a different priority,
what they want art to do,
but also what they see as the problems.
For Greenberg, what's the
essential problem of painting
in the mid 20th century?
It's confusion, it's logical confusion.
That's how he started
our essay from last week.
A confusion results in the arts.
When certain arts are
subservient to other arts.
Like painting subservient to literature,
is the example from last week.
So it's a logical problem,
art not doing what it should
be doing is the problem.
For Rosenberg, it seems like
the problem is a crisis.
That the modern artist finds himself
in some kind of a crisis that has to be
encountered and worked
through in a new form.
And we're going to see
this over and over today,
this idea that modern times are unique,
and so you have to have a
new form for addressing it.
It's crisis that the artist
is acting in the midst of.
Rosenberg says this pretty directly
in the essay from last week.
He says this.
The American vanguard, and
anytime you see that term,
that is a way of saying
avant-garde, rather than saying
the American avant-garde, the
American vanguard, same word,
the American vanguard painter
took to the white expanse
of the canvas as Melville's
Ishmael took to the sea.
Have any of you read Moby Dick?
Who is Ishmael, how would you
describe Ishmael in the book?
Anyone want to offer a description.
[student talking]
Yeah, obsessed with hunting
the white whale [laughs]
as it's often spoken.
Hunting the white whale,
the great white whale
that no one can capture.
The white whale in this book ends up being
some sort of a symbolic figure, right?
This thing that's lurking in the deep,
underneath the surface
appearance of things,
surface appearance of the ocean,
and to encounter the whale,
you go out into the deep.
You have to set yourself
into the abyss, so to speak,
if you're going to encounter this thing.
This thing is powerful, and mysterious.
Ghostly, it's the white whale,
it's often depicted as
this sort of ghostly thing
that is in one way or another
at odds with humanity.
Antagonistic to humanity.
They're natural enemies
in one way or another,
but at the same time,
they're tied together.
Ishmael can't break
away from his obsession
to conquer and defeat the white whale,
and the white whale seems
to go after them in a sense.
So what is the white whale symbolize?
Is it something having to do
with the modern condition?
Is it God?
Is it a kind of post-Nietzschean,
the death of God,
this lurking, haunting thing
that you can't quite kill off
and you can't quite get over,
and you're totally obsessed
with in your hatred of it,
or whatever it might be.
At any rate, you can look
into Moby Dick on your own,
it's fascinating, fascinating
book, a meaningful book.
At any rate, when Rosenberg characterizes
the American painter as a kind of Ishmael,
what he is talking
about is nothing formal.
He couldn't care less
about formalism here,
In fact, he's really violating
the whole idea of formalism.
Ishmael takes to the sea, the abyss,
in mortal, obsessive combat
with the ghostly, massive
figure haunting the deep.
The American painter takes to the canvas
with that sense of urgency
and struggle and conflict and crisis.
Rosenberg is setting
up a different paradigm
for us to understand Pollock
and abstract expressionism in general.
He continues that quote to clarify it.
On the one hand, what I mean
by comparing the painter to Ishmael,
on the one hand, a desperate
recognition of moral
and intellectual exhaustion, on the other,
the exhilaration of an
adventure over the depths
in which he might find
reflected the true image
of his identity.
So, what's tied up into this conflict?
On the one hand, a sort of exhaustion,
and on the other, a sense of adventure
in which you encounter,
ultimately, yourself.
This is a frightful,
awful, necessary conflict
that you find yourself in.
In that context, do you
see that in Pollock?
Is there a sense of
crisis in these paintings?
A sense of urgency?
We talked about the hand prints last week.
A sort of instability, a mark-making,
a responsiveness to the
abyss of the canvas.
Or, do you read him like Greenberg,
where there are formal
solutions to the formal problems
of painting?
What's at stake in these things?
Or are they just a kind of playful jazz?
They could be read in that way, too.
That these are dance, and
they're sort of celebration.
One of the things that
happens when we pull back
on representation is
that the thing opens up
to a broader possibility
for meaning something.
And it's not that we're just foisting
any interpretations on these,
we have to argue the
interpretations from what we see.
There's a multiplicity
in what this might mean
and how we might understand this,
and that too is going to be important
as we move on in the
course, that multiplicity.
There certainly have been
several comparisons made,
or several notes made, about
the vast expanse of the canvas
as an area, a space in which you act.
But it also feels like a
mural, a grand statement.
It's painted the size of
those great, grand machines,
as they call them, of
French Romantic painting.
Huge, massive paintings of
the Wrath of the Medusa,
for instance, a painting about crisis,
crisis of individuals in the
modern era, the modern state,
abandoned by the state and so on.
On the abyss, once again.
And he paints at that scale,
just does so with a totally
different visual language.
It also probably is even
more directly related
to the grand statements
of someone like Picasso,
who is making the grand paintings,
but is also making them in
this new, modernist language
that acknowledges the
flatness of the picture plane
and still uses that picture
plane to talk about,
speak about some kind of crisis going on
in the 20th century, western world.
Whether that's the crisis of World War I,
the crisis of Guernica,
or the crisis that's
immediate to Jackson Pollock,
World War II.
There's a darkness, an angst.
And Pollock could certainly
be argued as taking up
the Cubist grid, the Cubist construction
of this modern anguish,
and it's been talked
about as Pollock swallows
the Cubist grid and throws
up a web or a network.
So rather than still picturing,
I mean, if Picasso is using
this grand scale to picture
something about the
crisis of the modern age,
and modern man, and so on,
devastation of the human spirit,
and so on, if that's what Picasso's doing,
he's still using pictorial language,
even though he's really acknowledging
the flatness of the canvas.
Perhaps what Pollock is
doing is trying to paint
in the same way about
similar subject matter
and a similar crisis,
but refuse the pictorial operations
of the painting altogether.
So what do you have left?
If you don't have picturing,
a picturing of the crisis,
what do you have left?
You have this urgent kind of action,
this urgent kind of response
to this flat picture plain.
Is that a reasonable
interpretation of Pollock?
We've got these multiple
readings going of Pollock
that force us to clarify
what we think about them.
Are they pure formalism, or
a pure kind of expressionism?
Are they playful, in the
manner of dance and jazz?
Are they formal in the manner
that Greenberg is talking about,
or do they exude a sense of crisis,
aggression, fighting even?
Are they ordered, or are they chaotic?
Are they stable, or are
they incredibly fragile?
And so on and so forth.
Pollock makes it huge in 1949, or so,
you can kind of locate it about that time.
He has the LIFE magazine
article published about him,
and he is having major shows
at major museums and galleries.
He allows a photographer,
some of these photographs
that I've showed you
are from a photographer
that he allowed to come into
his studio and photograph him.
And for a variety of reasons,
Pollock just sort of went into his,
if he was in crisis before,
he went into more of a personal crisis
with regards to painting
after this major success.
In 1950 he starts introducing titles again
in ways he had pulled them
away, as we looked at last week.
The paintings start to
break down in a lot of ways.
And there's a lot of disagreement
about what happens to Pollock in the '50s.
But they seem much less
patient, if you can say that.
Much more agitated.
And he reintroduces the
mark-making directly on the canvas.
So there are brushstrokes,
there are pen strokes,
he's drawing on the canvas.
And he starts introducing imagery again,
so that by 1953, you have full-on titles,
Portrait and a Dream, and
one could ask which is which.
But there are recognizable
things going on,
face, some sort of a, there
is recognizable imagery there,
some sort of a nude woman
having something going on,
whether it's birth or something violent,
maybe a violent birth.
We get imagery going on, in
this kind of agitated way,
really agitated composition in a way.
The all-over composition that
does seem awfully harmonious
and well-structured that we saw before
is breaking down into this.
It's kind of a hideous
painting, isn't it? [laughs]
That was too editorial.
And he goes back, he goes back
to the all-over composition,
he brings it back,
and this time he's painting
on the canvas with brush,
so it's a kind of combination
of splatter and brushstrokes,
and the paint gets very
thick and very dense.
This is a detail of it,
this is called White Light.
But there seems to be
something quite wrong,
in the sense that
he only made two paintings
during this year, is that true?
There are few, anyway.
Fairly few, that certainly
could be reflected
in that there's a lot of time
invested into this painting.
But there also seems to
be a kind of instability
in him in a way.
The paintings keep looking
very different from each other,
one after the next,
even though there aren't
all that many coming.
So he's not seeming to work through ideas.
In '55 he only makes two paintings,
I'm quite sure about that,
and this is one of them,
this is perhaps the last
painting that he made,
that is an interesting painting,
still dealing with this kind
of all-over composition,
but it sort of feels like he's
not really sure where to do.
At the same time,
his own life is fairly
chaotic in a lot of ways.
He has all sorts of strife
with his wife, Lee Krasner,
who's a very interesting painter
that you should make yourself aware of.
He had been struggling with alcoholism
for most of his adult life,
and it really amped up
during this period of time.
He was having flings, affairs,
was doing all sorts of
fairly erratic behavior.
By '56, he doesn't make any
paintings for the entire year,
and then in August of '56 is involved
in this single-car car crash
in which the car he's driving
runs into a tree and kills
him and kills his girlfriend,
I believe, and there's one
other person in the car
who survived, who was injured.
But he kind of, there's
something going on in Pollock
that maybe is a pure formalism,
but there seems to be
a kind of crisis in him
all the way along that is
wound up in the painting,
maybe lending a little bit more credence
to Rosenberg's interpretations
of what he's doing.
So what do we make of Pollock,
what do we make of him?
He at one point said this,
and I think this is a
very interesting quote,
and a good quote to end our
discussion of Pollock on.
He says this,
the strangeness of modern art,
he's acknowledging it's strangeness
and it's distance, its
remoteness from most people,
the way most people think
about art and see art.
The strangeness will
wear off, it will happen.
It has happened.
Modern art is being taught
in every university art
department, art history class,
the 20th century, the
strangeness has worn off.
I mean, they're still strange,
but they're part of the art
history canon, the institution.
The strangeness will wear off
and I think we'll discover
the deeper meanings in modern art,
once the strangeness wears off.
What kind of deeper meanings
is he talking about?
What is he after?
Is it, this seems to suggest, I think,
that there is more at stake in modern art
than philosophical questions,
the problem of painting,
there seems to be something
pretty human at stake,
or urgent at stake.
I think we can get a better idea of what
these deeper meanings of
what modern art might be
if we move on and consider
a couple more of the artists
that are involved in this movement.
Before we move past Pollock,
any comments, questions?
Okay.
So I want to couple
Pollock with Mark Rothko.
As with Pollock, you should assign Rothko
the rough date of 1950.
Obviously his working career
extends much far beyond that,
but when Rothko is
important to our narrative
here in this class is about 1950.
And Rothko is a fascinating guy.
He's born in Russia, lives
there until about the age of 10.
He is born into a
fairly, I think we'd say,
a fairly secular Jewish family.
His father was very bright
and very well-educated
and educated his children
in philosophy and politics,
much more so than in religion,
Jewish theology and so on.
When he's 10, because in 1913
and kind of leading up to that
there is all sorts of
difficulties, struggle in Europe.
Europe is ramping up towards World War,
[audience member murmurs]
[laughs]
and so there is a pretty
strong immigration
of Russian Jews especially
to the United States,
and that includes Rothko's family.
His given name is Markus Rothkowitz,
very Jewish name, and
eventually he would shorten it,
right around World War
World War II when there was,
well, actually, before World
War II, it was in the '30s,
when there's all sorts of
concerns, Nazism is going on,
and there are a variety of
anti-Semitic sentiments going on
here and there and in the United States,
and certainly in Europe.
So he, like a lot of Jews at the time,
end up altering their names
so it's not quite so telling,
or quite so Jewish sounding, I
guess is how it's often said.
So he shortens his name
to Mark and goes by Rothko
rather than Rothkowitz.
And this is one of Rothko's paintings.
This is also often categorized
as Abstract Expressionism.
That the two largest figures
in the Abstract Expressionist
movement are Jackson
Pollock and Mark Rothko.
This doesn't look anything
like Pollock's work, though.
I mean if Pollock is abstracting
for the sake of pure activity,
if that is what he's doing,
Rothko does something very different.
There's very little activity here.
Certainly not the gestural motion
that Pollock is painting with.
These seem to be hazy blocks
of color on top of a color.
They seem very stable, not gestural.
They seem to be very
formal in their own way.
So we have to make a distinction
within Abstract Expressionism,
and this a common distinction to make.
There's something that
ties these together,
they're working in the same time period,
they know each other,
they are kind of categorized
under the same label,
even though they would in
varying ways refuse it.
Rothko didn't want to be called
an Abstract Expressionist.
But I think there's enough going on here,
enough commonality to link them,
whether you call it Abstract Expressionism
or something else,
but we'll use the kind of canon,
these are the typical categories.
Within Abstract Expressionism
there's a distinction
often made between
action-painting, which Pollock
quintessentially is,
and color field painting, which
Rothko quintessentially is.
In Pollock, color doesn't
play that big of a role,
rather it's a priority
of gesture and activity.
With Rothko, gesture and
activity is mostly withheld
or subdued, and you get
color, simple color forms
doing all of the work, most of the work.
Okay, so we'll make that distinction,
and I want to,
since I'm not going to
talk about these artists,
I'm going to focus primarily
on Pollock and Rothko,
I do want to gesture
towards the other artists
that are often included
under the Abstract Expressionist title
so that you can look them up
for your own understanding
and perhaps for your papers.
Lee Krasner is Pollock's wife.
Willem de Kooning is a fascinating painter
but we just don't have
time to talk about him.
Elaine is his wife, and
then on down the line.
Your reading for today
included Robert Motherwell.
Is Robert Motherwell an action-painter?
I don't know. [laughs]
So these are some action-painters
that you can look up
and familiarize yourself with.
And I also want to point
you towards some other
color field painters
that you can be aware of.
>> Student: These are all action painters?
All qction, yeah.
In differing ways, they're all doing
something a little different,
but they could all be loosely associated
with action-painting.
Some of them coming a little
earlier or a little later
than Pollock.
You got 'em?
Moving on, almost.
In color field painting,
a few other painters
that you can be aware of.
Is Robert Motherwell
a color field painter?
I don't know. [laughs]
If so, there's not a whole lot of color.
He seems to be a black and
white, color field painter.
Or an action-painter
that seems to really care
about the colorful forms
of black and white, gray.
Again, some of these
come a little earlier or a little later,
but they're mostly all contemporary.
We'll talk a bit more about Ad Reinhardt,
Helen Frankenthaler this afternoon.
You got 'em, no.
And these two ways of painting
have two different looks to
them, but it's not just look,
not just a superficial difference.
They've got the two ways
of organizing a response.
If Abstract Expressionism
does have an expressionistic
component to it,
which I think it does,
these are two different ways of organizing
that expression and that response.
Okay, let's look at Rothko.
Let's get into Rothko a little bit
and try to understand him.
Earlier Rothko, he's painting
scenes, subway scenes,
he's painting people figures,
those sort of things,
but you already get the sense here
that he doesn't so much
care about the figures
or what he's painting.
Already you have a real strong prominence
of the grid structure,
no interest in the individual identities
of the people being pictured,
and this kind of brushstroke,
brush work that withholds
clarity, I suppose.
It's sort of fuzzy forms
meeting up against each other.
Is there anything to
read into the kind of,
if this is a modern
landscape painting in a way,
or genre painting in a way,
it's very grid-oriented,
and feels fairly cagey, right.
It feels tight, it feels like a grid,
like you're living in a grid.
Perhaps there's some
comment going on there
that lines up with the
comments he'll make later on.
He also, like Pollock,
is extremely interested in
Surrealism, European Surrealism,
and in psychotherapy, right?
So we talked about last week,
Pollock being interested
in the work of Carl Jung
and dreams and how they reveal
archetypes and those sort of things.
Rothko is interested in
the same sort of things,
and he's making paintings
that are related to that,
especially in the late '30s, early '40s,
up to the mid '40s, really.
Rothko would talk about
something like this,
which is the omen of the eagle,
and you've got 1942, I mean,
what's going on in 1942?
War.
Yeah.
Europe is totally in the midst of war,
deeply in the midst of war,
and the United States is getting
into it, launching into it.
So you have these massive
countries, world powers,
in conflict with each other,
and perhaps we read the
eagle, the sign of the eagle,
as symbolic, representative
of those states,
those political powers.
The eagle is very commonly associated
with the United States but
various empires in the past
and various political powers in the past.
So Rothko would talk about
this as in one way or another
being an archetypal image
in which man and bird and beast and tree
merge into a single, tragic idea.
Oh, is that the portrait
of a state, an empire,
a man, bird, beast and tree
merged into a single, tragic idea?
Already it's important
to see that in Rothko,
tragedy is going to be really important
in his language and even in his painting.
He'll go in the '40s, mid '40s,
increasingly towards
a Surrealist language,
pulling up, trying to get
at dreams and archetypes
that one way or another
oriented around drama,
specifically tragic drama.
And so why the Surrealist bent?
Why is he pulling back from
representation as much as he is?
It could have something
to do with increasing
formalist conversations going on
with people like Greenberg and others.
But when Rothko talks
about his pulling away
from representation,
he seems to come at it
from a different angle.
He says this.
If I've faltered in the
use of familiar objects,
it's because I refused to
mutilate their appearance
for the sake of an action which
they are too old to serve.
[laughs]
Representation as a mutilation.
Some might respond
that you're mutilating even
more by doing this. [laughs]
Anyway.
Or for which perhaps
they've never been intended.
So, I pull away from
representing familiar objects
in order to not mutilate them
and put them into service
of things they weren't intended to serve.
Gradually, he'll pull away
from representational imagery
altogether, and this happens
as with Pollock in 1947,
roughly, this move towards
toward total abstraction.
'47 is when Pollock pulls
his brush off the canvas
and begins the drip paintings.
Rothko starts withholding
imagery altogether,
and moves to the numbering system,
or the untitled, or the
lack of a provocative title,
which had been present in
all of his other paintings
up to this point.
And these paintings gradually
start getting simpler.
And they seem like,
with the previous ones,
they seem to have been drawn
on the canvas and painted,
or painted as a sort of drawing,
with a drawing priority.
Getting the grid right, getting
the figures to work out.
Here it seems to be the
application of broad, colorful
brushstrokes, swaths.
And he's intentional
about this. He says this.
The fact that one usually
begins with drawing
is already too academic.
We start with color, is what he says.
And he likes to talk about
we, he's part of a movement
and believes very deeply
in what he's doing.
In opposition to Pollock, perhaps,
or in distinction to Pollock,
he's removing the gesture as well.
And the paintings gradually
get simpler and simpler
in their compositional structure.
They gradually become all vertical.
All of them will go vertically.
And they gradually then,
within that verticality,
start achieving this stacking
of horizontal rectangles.
Until, by the late '40s, '49,
some in '48, you get this.
Which is once again, vertical orientation,
which is usually the
orientation of the person,
the portrait.
You paint portraits of people, vertical.
That's the human orientation.
Landscapes are horizontal.
They coordinate themselves
with the horizon, landscape.
So he's painting vertical compositions,
and we have to insist on that,
because he does it over
and over and over again,
and never uses horizontals
until much later for
a long series of them.
But it's always vertical, but
within that vertical frame,
is always horizontal bands
and horizontal blocks.
There's something about
those two going together
that's really important to him.
What is it?
How is he engaging the
orientation of the human figure,
upright, with the orientation
of the horizontal landscape,
and combining them in each
of these compositions.
Now, just as with Pollock,
we've got some pretty divergent
interpretations that we
could associate with Rothko.
After all, you could
definitely go back to Greenberg
and explain what Rothko
is doing pretty easily
using Greenberg's train of thought.
Purity in art consists in the acceptance,
willing acceptance, of the
limitations of the medium.
What is Rothko doing?
Really accepting those limitations.
The flat canvas, he's just
going to work with simple things
like verticality, and
horizontality, and color,
and get powerful results just
from those few working pieces.
Those few moving pieces.
And Rothko's own language
does seem to signify this
in some ways.
He says things like this,
we, once again, and in
this case he's writing
with some other artists
including Motherwell,
who are responding to a
bad critique that they got,
[laughing]
a bad review, rather.
We favor the simple expression
of concrete thought.
We are for the large shape
because it has the impact
of the unequivocal.
We wish to reassert the picture plane.
We are for flat forms
because they destroy illusion
and reveal truth.
Woo, that's interesting.
It's very Greenbergian,
this particular statement.
But is also points to the fact that
sometimes we look at abstraction
and we see it's just not about anything,
you're not saying anything,
or so on and so forth.
Where Rothko is saying, no, no, no.
What we're after is truth.
And we thing that you
can only get to the truth
by destroying the illusions,
the sort of mirror maze
that painting has become.
Smoke and mirrors that
represent this and this
and tell these stories and
do so through illusion.
We reveal truth by
acknowledging the truthfulness
of the object that we
encounter, the flat canvas,
and responding to it in
ways that are faithful
to it's flatness and what it can do.
We reveal truth in the meantime.
So you could, certainly,
interpret Rothko in terms
of Greenberg in that way.
I think you could also go a
step further with Greenberg.
Last week we talked about how Greenberg.
in his argument he's
eventually going to say,
you know what paintings should do,
they should pay attention
to how music works.
How does music work?
It doesn't clutter
things up with references
and with lyrics and all of that stuff,
not good music, in Greenberg's vernacular.
Rather, it moves you
powerfully just by organizing
purely abstract form.
Pitches and rhythms, compressions
and expansions of sound.
Look to music and you'll figure
out how painting can behave
in a purely formal way.
If you use that kind of analogy
or that comparison to music,
Rothko's paintings do
make quite a bit of sense.
They sort of operate
analogously to music as a chord,
a musical chord.
[hums]
They hum in different pitches.
Some of them very tight and piercing.
Others of them very expansive and warm.
And there's a kind of
musical chord that just hums.
I think that's a pretty
wonderful way to look at these.
Not such that you're
literally hearing music,
although that might be interesting.
We call that, what, synesthesia.
Multiple senses working together.
Certainly Kandinsky was
interested in synesthesia,
actually hearing things
when you look at paintings.
But with Kandinsky, it was orchestra,
I mean what Kandinsky was
painting was Stravinsky.
What Rothko is doing
is more like a medieval Gregorian chant.
[hums]
All together, just held.
I think that's quite compelling,
they're humming musical chords in a way.
Not so that it's mimicking
music but it's operating
analogously to the way
that music can operate,
as pure, powerful form.
We'll see some of these next week.
Not these particular ones,
but we'll see some of his paintings
and they are powerful visual experiences.
A lot of those paintings are,
if we think of them as
musical chords that hum,
they're extremely beautiful.
Much of his work is, I
think, extremely beautiful.
Extremely sensitive layering of colors,
and there's been a lot of
research done lately about
exactly what kind of
materials he was using.
It's not what we expected it to be.
He's using all sorts of
other things in there,
egg, and wax, and various
resins and things like that
that we weren't aware of
until they started doing chemical samples.
So they're very beautiful,
they're very sophisticated
color combinations.
But there's also this pervasive
darkness in his paintings.
If they're kind of like musical chords,
some of them are pretty dissonant.
[hums]
[chuckles]
There's a kind of yawning
darkness that appears
in a lot of them.
In the center of them sometimes.
The spaces, and we could think
of them as musical chords,
we could also think of
them as kind of spaces
that advance and recede in a way,
that some colors just tend to
come forward and some recede.
And there seem to be fairly
dark passages in his paintings
that recede into a kind
of abyss, if you will.
Maybe that's a legitimate way
to read those black spaces,
maybe not.
But one's suspicions that that's the case,
that there's this pervading
darkness in the work
seems to be reinforced
when you actually listen
to what Rothko is saying.
I quoted him before as using
pretty formalist language,
but if you go and you
continue to hear him talk
he says things like this.
A clear preoccupation with
death permeates my work.
The only valuable subject
matter in painting
are the tragic and the timeless.
Ooh, once again,
it doesn't seem like he
is talking about formalism
and just trying to get
colors to move back and forth
and make pretty things, that's
not what he is after at all.
I just equated formalism with prettiness,
you don't have to do that,
don't accept that. [laughs]
He's not trying to do
either of those, I think.
Pure formalism that's just
an optical experience.
If it is an optical experience,
a purely formal experience,
it has to launch us
into experiences of
tragedy or timelessness,
or, as he says here, death,
which might touch on both of those,
the both incredibly tragic
and the timeless, in a way.
Yeah, Brooke.
>> Brooke: Can you
repeat that quote for me?
>> Yeah, sure.
A clear preoccupation with
death permeates my work.
Actually, the permeates
my work comes earlier,
so it's, yeah.
Permeated throughout my
work is something like,
it goes like that.
A clear preoccupation with death.
A second quote,
the only valuable subject matter
are the tragic and the timeless.
Yeah, Amy.
[student murmurs]
Yeah, different media.
Pollock used a variety of things.
I mean,
in some of his paintings there's
all sorts of junk in there,
just stuff, like coins and
cigarettes and things like that.
He also tended to use house
paint, especially early on.
Big cans of house paint.
Which is one reason why
when you see a Pollock now,
they're not looking all that good,
because house paint
isn't all that durable.
It was more so then.
And, I think he's using
oil-based house paint,
but he's not using it out of tubes.
He has, I mean, he does
some of that as well.
I'm pretty sure Rothko is almost all oil,
but, as I said before,
he evidently mixed it
with all sorts of things,
try to get it to dry faster.
And in fact, actually,
I don't even know off the top of my head
when acrylic paint was invented.
I don't know if they could
have got acrylic paint
at this point.
Lauren, do you know that?
[woman speaks in distance]
Yeah, I think it was later.
By the way, Lauren Baker,
the chair of our department,
is here, it's good to
have you here. [laughs]
I could have introduced you earlier.
Okay, so we get with Rothko
these dark passages opening up
in the paintings,
and a kind of coloristic
dissonance that happens
in the paintings,
and we get him talking about
death and tragedy a lot.
Here's a few details so
you can get right up close,
get your nose in it.
And the paintings do seem
to progressively get darker.
Maybe, deeper in a way.
More simple.
More is withheld, so that
forms are somewhat withheld,
in that you get very simple shapes,
but even those shapes
don't have clear edges.
There's something about these edges,
the shapes not even being clearly defined.
They then tend to float in a way.
They tend to be not locked down.
But then he starts, I think,
withholding even more color.
So that they get darker,
there's more withheld.
And again, you can read loads from Rothko,
and he is, his language
continues to reiterate
this sort of there's a
darkness going on here.
He talks about this, here's a quote.
The exhilarated, tragic
experience is for me
the only source of art.
He believed that the task
of the modern painter
is to enact tragedy and to
help a culture, a society
deal with its own tragedy,
its own sense of lostness
difficulty, and specifically,
the lostness that he
locates in our culture,
the culture in mid 20th
century America, anyway,
was a culture in which all
of its images and its myths
and its languages had
been thrown into default.
And I want to sort that out more.
What does he mean by that?
What is he talkin' about?
I want to give you a couple more quotes
that might help sort through this.
My interest is, as he said,
my interest is only in
expressing basic human emotions,
tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.
The people who weep before
my pictures are having
the same religious experience
I had when I painted them.
And if you, as you say,
are moved only by their
color relationship,
then you miss the point.
[laughs]
There are so many
interesting things going on
in this quote.
First, what he's after in his painting
is what's basic to human
experience and human emotion.
And, for Rothko, even though
he includes ecstasy in there,
his emphasis is almost
always going to be on tragedy
and doom, I think, when he talks about it.
And ecstasy happens
sort of in spite of the,
or maybe in the midst
of the tragedy and doom.
And I think once again it's important to
situate him historically.
He is, he has experienced,
quite a bit of tragedy and doom.
Was very in touch with it
from his time in Russia,
and had an ongoing sense
of alienation or isolation in a way,
not fitting even while
in the United States,
as the United States is
entering wars with Europe
and Europe seems to be
caving in on itself,
destroying itself.
Those emotions, those
basic human emotions,
are operating at a higher
volume at this time, I think.
So we have to understand
it in this context.
But then, he starts to
talk about his paintings,
and he continues to talk about them,
as religious experiences.
They come out of a religious experience,
and if you are to experience them truly,
I think he would say,
it's going to be a religious
experience that you have.
And this ties into your
first reading for today
by Robert Motherwell,
where he's talking about
the modern painter's world,
or the world of the modern painter,
and basically, his argument
is that, towards the end,
is that what art has to do
is it has to be religion
for people whose religion has collapsed,
and whose religious meaning
and religious symbols
and religious ideas are in default.
Do you know what the word default means?
When you don't pay your student
loans they go into default.
That's bad.
They become bankrupt.
They become useless.
They become a sort of void.
And there is this kind of on-going theme
with a lot of these
painters, including Rothko,
that what has happened in the modern world
is a defaulting of spiritual,
and religious symbols and beliefs.
That they are thrown into crisis.
The religion of the age is
a kind of de-humanizing,
scientific technology that allows us
to destroy each other well,
and allows us to control each other well,
and those sort of things.
It cuts up our experience into categories
and classifications and genus
and species and all of those things,
and it makes authentic, spiritual,
human existence impossible.
And the problem is that it's the images
that have gone into default.
They no longer carry power
in the way that they used to.
The images, the religious images,
no longer carry the power that they did.
So how do you get at this
religious experience?
How do you revive this authentic
spirituality in people.
You have to do it by somehow
withholding the images.
You can't keep working
through the same old images
and try to revive them.
So, one might understand his paintings
as a kind of image-less icon,
that they're intended to
specifically be drained
of their representations
and you are supposed to, I think,
encounter the absence
of the representation.
What are you looking at?
You are looking at an
emptiness. [chuckles]
Does that make sense?
Where something used to
reside and no longer does,
and that absence, that
yearning, that longing
for God to appear, or for the
gods to appear, or whatever,
however he would have put that.
The yearning for the gods to appear
is the religious experience.
If you feel yearning when
you look at these paintings,
and a sense of absence and
void, then you're having
the experience that he
had when he painted them.
I think that's how we can argue that.
And just to kind of put
him in historical context,
you'll see in the Motherwell essay
and in Rothko's essay, I
included in your course packets,
it's not part of the assigned readings,
but it's a short essay called
The Romantics Were Prompted.
They keep talking about
the Romantics, Romanticism.
Romanticism is where they come from,
these particular painters.
And Romanticism, German
Romanticism specifically
was all about encountering
that abyss, that depth,
the thing that you can't
get your hands around
and you can't control
through scientific or
technological advance.
The thing that persistently
alludes your grasp.
And that thing that
alludes the grasp is what
we have traditionally
referred to as the sublime.
Have you ever heard that word before,
in modernity or wherever?
That the sublime, we can
define as that which is
simultaneously beautiful
and terrifying in the ways
that it exceeds our grasp and our control.
So Romantic painting, and
Friedrich specifically,
you have figures who are dwarfed
by an overwhelming expanse
that they have no control over.
They can peer out at it,
and they can witness it,
but they can't control it.
And that is the sublime, the unspeakable.
That which is beyond
comprehension and control.
And Friedrich does that
better than anyone, I think.
The Monk by the Sea is once
again a religious figure
having a religious experience,
and where is he having it?
He's having it in front of
the deep, under the deep.
He's peering into the
deep, the vast expanse.
That might bring us back
around to Captain Ahab,
that Rosenberg was referring us to.
Sometimes the sublime is terrible.
Notice the boat.
Sometimes the sublime undoes
us in its being un-graspable.
When you get to Rothko however, he's not,
maybe we could say he's
a Romantic painter,
he's after the same kind of experience,
but he just thinks that you can't do it
by representing nature anymore.
Because nature is something different
in the mid 20th century than
it was in the 19th century.
Nature really was unexplainable in a way,
or much less explainable,
much less controllable.
By the 20th century, we
do have a considerable
more control and explanation
for how nature works,
we think we do.
And we are, in fact,
devastating it, very often.
We're more danger to it,
than it appears to be to us.
And if that's the case,
then how does Rothko get
at that same trajectory
of Romantic painting?
What does he do?
If you can't do it
through representational
landscape painting,
nature, or the unconscious,
which is what the Surrealists tried to do
and what he did for the
early part of his career,
he eventually dissociates
himself from the Surrealists,
says, nah, that's a dead end.
What do you do?
You withhold it.
You have to withhold it.
You have to somehow make a painting
that prompts experience,
powerful experience,
and these are visually powerful things.
It has to be powerful enough
to prompt that experience,
but in it's power to withhold,
to not give you anything
to look at, in a way.
At least not a representational object.
We have remnants of landscape,
in that we kind of have
horizon lines, maybe
multiple horizon lines.
But nature can't be
depicted, so the idea goes.
Arthur Danto, who's a well-known
art critic writing today,
wrote this about Rothko.
He said.
Under the Hudson River School,
which is American Romantic painting,
somewhat similar to Friedrich.
Under the Hudson River School metaphysics,
natural and artistic beauty
were entirely of a piece,
as Kant had believed.
Their landscapes delivered
the kinds of meaning
nature itself did when it was beautiful.
A beautiful landscape
painting means the same thing
as a beautiful landscape,
is what he's saying.
One main difference between
those painters and ourselves
is that we cannot believe
in transcendent beings
who address humanity through the media
of volcanoes and cascades anymore.
So, for just that reason, a painting today
done as realistically as a
Hudson River School landscape
could not convey to us
the meanings Kant believed
natural beauty was designed to transmit.
And so, Rothko withholds
and negates the landscape,
leaving us only this.
This idea of our language
being in default,
our religious language being in default,
you can't use landscape,
you can't use crucifixes,
you can't do any of those things.
In many ways, emptied out of meaning
by the mid 20th century,
so the thought goes.
Saying more about that, he says this.
Without monsters and gods,
art cannot enact our drama.
Art's most profound moments
express this frustration.
When they were abandoned
as untenable superstitions,
namely the monsters and gods,
art sank into melancholy.
It became fond of the dark
and enveloped it's objects
in the nostalgic intimations
of a half-lit world.
You get where Rothko's coming from?
You have the strong sense of the dark,
the absent, the place
where the god used to be
and he's no longer there.
Somehow encountering that absence leads us
to the kind of religious experience,
the longing for God to come
back, to show up again.
Let me see.
Just a couple more things and
then we'll break for lunch,
and we'll probably finish
off Rothko a little bit
at the second half of class.
In the context of the sublime,
Romantic landscape painting,
perhaps we could talk
about Rothko's painting
as being an attempt to
speak the unspeakable.
To gesture towards the unspeakable.
The undefinable.
The thing that eludes
rational categories and grasp.
Which I think is one reason
he doesn't put edges on this thing.
He doesn't even want you
to refer to geometry.
He wants a landscape as
stripped down as possible,
so there's not a geometry,
there's maybe a horizon line,
but nothing else except
color forms that appear,
[chair thud]
present themselves.
We got some enthusiastic
studying go on upstairs.
[audience member mumbles]
It would seem like it.
[furniture thuds]
[audience laughs]
Maybe I won't say a few more things,
maybe we'll break for lunch after all.
I wanna leave us,
I want to show you one more image
and then we'll come back
and pick it up second half of class.
The paintings get very dark, as I said.
Maybe not all the way
to the end of his life.
There's some disagreement about that.
They get very dark.
I think Robert Hughes,
who's another art critic,
says it well.
He says this.
In an age of iconography,
Rothko might have been
a major religious artist.
But he didn't live in such an age.
So, what is he?
Maybe he's a major religious artist
who's not an iconographer. [laughs]
Or maybe he is an iconographer
of the modern age,
this kind of post-Nietzschean,
death of God, tragic world
is, I think, the kind of train of thought.
After the break we'll look
at one more set of works
by Rothko that kind of
holds together this argument
or the suggestion that he's
essentially a religious painter
with the paintings that
he did for what's called
the Rothko Chapel.
It's in Houston, Texas,
and what you see are very
large, very dark paintings,
in which almost everything
has been withheld
except dark color.
In what way is this a chapel,
and serving as a chapel?
Yeah.
[student murmurs]
A secular prophet.
I think that could certainly be argued.
Yeah, I'd entertain the argument.
I don't know if I'd.
[audience laughs]
I don't know if I'd say
that so definitively,
or at least I would qualify
it in a lot of ways,
by what I meant by prophet,
and what I meant by secular,
and those sort of things.
But he certainly, that's
how he would view himself,
and he's certainly functioning that way
for a lot of writers.
>> Narrator: Biola
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