Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War

Daniel Neofetou

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501358395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Since the 1970s, it has been argued that Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-war US establishment in an attempt to culturally match and reinforce its newfound economic and military dominance. The account of Abstract Expressionism developed by the American critic Clement Greenberg is often identified as central to these efforts. However, this book rereads Greenberg's account through Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to contend that Greenberg's criticism in fact testifies to how Abstract Expressionism opposes the ends to which it was deployed. With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female artists and artists of colour whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world that would do justice to them.

1

Greenberg’s Trotskyism

Often taken as indicative of the development traced by accounts of Abstract Expressionism’s complicity with US imperialism is a bracketed addendum made by Greenberg to a sentence in his 1957 essay, ‘New York Painting Only Yesterday’, upon its republication as ‘The Late Thirties in New York’ in Art and Culture four years later. The essay was occasioned by an exhibition at the Poindexter Gallery entitled The ’30s: New York Paintings, and is one of Greenberg’s many retrospective surveys of Abstract Expressionism. It focuses particularly on how Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann drew influence in the late 1930s from Matisse, Klee, Miró and early Kandinsky, in developing what Greenberg was then arguing was the most advanced art of its time. Early in the essay, Greenberg writes that ‘radical politics was on many people’s minds but for them Social Realism was as dead as the American Scene’ (CEC4: 19). However, in the revised version he adds, ‘that is not all, by far, that there was to politics in art in those years; some day it will have to be told how “anti-Stalinism”, which started out more or less as “Trotskyism”, turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come’ (1961: 230).

Without the addendum, the sentence is simply an acknowledgement that the neglect of so-called ‘political’ subject matter did not necessarily coincide with a decline in political engagement on the part of the artists. With the addition of the bracketed aside, however, is implied the notion that the turn towards abstraction was both precipitated by, and eradicated, a commitment to radical politics on the part of the artists who would become Abstract Expressionists. This assumption orients many of the revisionist historians’ accounts, and these scholars understand as emblematic of this shift the way that, in his seminal essays ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939) and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940), both published in Partisan Review – whose editorial line at the time was firmly Trotskyist-by-way-of-Anti-Stalinism¹ – Greenberg depoliticized the ideas central to two pieces by Trotsky previously published in the same journal in 1938. These pieces were an essay entitled ‘Art and Politics in our Epoch’, and a manifesto for a proposed International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI) co-authored with André Breton and signed by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera in place of a fugitive Trotsky.

Now, Greenberg does not cite Trotsky in ‘Kitsch’ and ‘Laocoon’, and later in his life he consistently threw into question the notion that the essays might be understood as significantly informed by Trotsky’s preceding pieces. While assenting with Robert Burstow that ‘Kitsch’ was ‘alas’ written within a Trotskyist framework, he also claims that, despite having ‘great admiration for Trotsky’, he could only have been described as a ‘half-assed Trotskyist’ and elsewhere asserts that he ‘didn’t agree with’ Trotsky’s articles on art (Burstow 1994: 33; Greenberg 2003: 236).² However, such disclamations are in keeping with Greenberg’s tendency in old age, spurred by what he candidly referred to in 1984 as his ‘revulsion (a repentant sinner’s) against leftist cant’, to downplay his youthful commitment to revolutionary socialism (2003: 140).³

Instead, evidence, in fact, suggests that Greenberg’s engagement with Trotsky was certainly more than lackadaisical or superficial. As one of Greenberg’s biographers Alice Goldfarb Marquis affirms, throughout the 1930s Greenberg ‘had been assiduously studying the works of . . . Leon Trotsky’ to the extent that it is very likely he was acquainted with not only the two essays in Partisan Review but also Trotsky’s writing on art going back to 1923 (2006: 50–1). Indeed, while there is scant reference to Trotsky in Greenberg’s published work, his erstwhile dedication to the revolutionary is evident in his unpublished papers. His letters to his confidante Harold Lazarus reveal a young man who in 1936 enumerates as one of his paramount concerns the hope that ‘Trotsky gets safely into Mexico’, and, just months prior to the publication of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, reports to Lazarus that he was invited to join the American section of the FIARI (2000: 171; 196).⁴ In a poem ‘Ode to Trotsky’ he praises Trotsky as ‘he who is not afraid to wear on his sleeves the precious [b]lood of those whom he sent, not reckless [sic], to battle’ (1930s–1940s: n.p.). A note written subsequent to Trotsky’s murder proclaims that ‘[t]he beginning of a new epoch is marked by Trotsky’s death, not by the outbreak of the war’, and goes on to prophesize that in this coming age ‘[w]e will see khaki, the color of faeces, wherever the eye turns’ and ‘[v]omit, blood and slime will stain chevrons’ (1930s–1940s: n.p.).⁵ An unpublished essay on Harold Laski written in 1940 extensively quotes Trotsky and draws an analogy with the latter’s position in the Spanish Civil War in opposing what was seen as the commonsense position of intervention in the Second World War (1940–1). And among these papers we also find a typewritten itinerary of the Archives of Leon Trotsky. Certainly, this is not to say that Greenberg was wholly uncritical of Trotsky. In another handwritten note, Greenberg speculates that Trotsky’s ‘ashes would writhe in their urn were he to hear that the views [Greenberg] expressed represented The Trotskyite Position’ (1930s–1940s: n.p.). The note ends mid-sentence, and it is thus unclear what opinions Greenberg assumes would meet with Trotsky’s opprobrium. However, it is nonetheless patent that, as he qualifies the above claim in the same note, Greenberg was ‘proud to be called a Trotskyite’ and ‘learned almost all [he knew] about politics from Trotsky’ (1930s–1940s: n.p.).

As we will see, in his essays Trotsky propounds that dedication to art’s ‘own laws’, rather than prescription in terms of content, is necessary if art is to be allied with revolution. He thus identifies a crisis in the fact that such revolutionary art was contemporaneous ly losing the bourgeois patronage by which it had been hitherto fostered – albeit only to ultimately assimilate it – and hence, rather than existent Stalinist organizations, which exacted servility from artists and thus stymied dedication to art’s laws, he calls for the establishment of an anarcho-communist federation to support revolutionary art. Greenberg’s essays argue a markedly similar case. Greenberg, too, posits that art dedicated to its inherent laws was a threat to capitalism’s existence in 1939, and he similarly calls for socialism to preserve it in lieu of bourgeois patronage. However, whereas Trotsky’s pieces bear a political urgency at the expense of discussing aesthetics in any specificity, Greenberg’s pieces are concerned overwhelmingly with aesthetics, and the dynamics by which socialism was to preserve an avant-garde art which supposedly posed a threat to capitalism, or, indeed, the dynamics of how avant-garde art posed a threat to capitalism, are not addressed to any meaningful extent. Accordingly, the revisionist historians argue that Greenberg thus developed a paradigm which both legitimated the Abstract Expressionists’ praxis in pseudo-politically radical terms, despite – indeed, due to – its ‘distance from party politics and political organisation’ (Orton and Pollock 1985: 181), and by the same token allowed for the sloughing off, or total assimilation, of these terms by the time the work was exported in efforts of US imperialism during the 1950s.

In the face of these accounts, art historians defending Abstract Expressionism against its synonymy with US imperialism over the last three decades have been eager to establish how such a move from Trotskyism to an art for art’s sake applies only to Greenberg’s criticism. David Craven, for instance, writes that ‘far from encapsulating the dominant ideological journey of the US art world’, the transformation from ‘Trotskyism’ to ‘art for art’s sake’ ‘merely summarizes [Greenberg’s] own rather lonely, even singular, trek to the right of the political spectrum’ (ACC: 42), and David Anfam stresses that this move was ‘Greenberg’s private odyssey’ (1990: 55). Accordingly, Stephen Polcari accuses the revisionist historians of ‘specious associations . . . dismissal of the personal, cultural, and intellectual concerns; sweeping abstractions and generalizations; and wilful ignorance of intentions, subjects, forms, and imagery of the artists’ (1988: 177). Guilbaut’s case, especially, relies upon homogenizing claims that the American art world was able to aggressively impose its painting as the heir to European Modernism because it comprised ‘liberal Modernists’ unified behind ‘the leading force’ of Abstract Expressionism in full knowledge of its ‘symbolic role in international cultural politics’ (1990: 33–6). Yet, while other Marxist New York intellectuals such as Sidney Hook moved to the right in the same era (see Wald 1987: 193ff), it has been ably demonstrated that there was no such broader ideological shift for the artists and intellectuals associated with Abstract Expressionism, who generally retained their left-wing convictions (not least Jackson Pollock, whom Greenberg himself dubbed a ‘Goddamn Stalinist from start to finish’ in an interview with Clark, a claim which Clark thinks Greenberg ‘meant . . . seriously’ (1999a: 442 n16)).⁶

However, in this chapter I do not want to trace the development of the paradigm by which Greenberg championed Abstract Expressionism as a move from Trotskyism to art for art’s sake as microcosmic of a wider ideological shift in the New York art scene. Rather, I want to identify Greenberg’s criticism as rooted in Trotsky’s art theory because I will contend that the fundamental dynamics of Trotsky’s account of revolutionary art as art which refutes hete ronomous constraint and yet progresses by determinately negating elements of preceding art, are central not only to the way in which Greenberg’s criticism, when hypostatized, contributed to Abstract Expressionism’s co-optation, but also to how Greenberg’s criticism bears witness to the way in which Abstract Expressionist artworks indict the ends for which they were enlisted.

* * *

In his two Partisan Review essays preceding ‘Kitsch’ and ‘Laocoon’, Trotsky espouses his conviction that revolutionary art must be free from heteronomous constraint as opposed to the mandated socialist realism of the USSR, from which he had been exiled by Stalin a decade before. He writes of how, in the USSR artists ‘who still [consented] to take up pen or brush’ had been reduced ‘to the status of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it [was] to glorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions’ (LA: 117). For Trotsky, socialist realism was to be discredited as ‘based on lies and deceit’ (LA: 106). He, for example, indicts Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Bread (1937), which glorifies the military exploits of Stalin and Voroshilov at Tsaritsin, when in reality both were relieved of their posts, and various paintings which portray a then-recently retrospectively fabricated auxiliary central command of the October revolution consisting of figures who were contemporaneously faithful to Stalin (LA: 107–9).

It is understandable, then, that in discussing Trotsky’s influence on Greenberg, Erika Doss surmises that Trotsky’s opposition to art ‘determined by its function, such as the Soviet style of socialist realism’ was ‘shaped’ by ‘personal anti-Stalinism’ (1991: 327). However, Trotsky had already maintained the necessity of artists’ independence fifteen years before in his work Literature and Revolution (1923), when Lenin was still head of the government and socialist realism was not mandated to artists. In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky claims that a ‘work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art’ (LA: 37). He affirms that the ‘Marxist conception of . . . the social utility of art, when translated into the language of politics, does not at all mean a desire to dominate art by means of decrees and orders’ and Marxists do not ‘regard only that art new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker’ or describes ‘a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital’ (LA: 31).⁷ Instead, for Trotsky, if free of heteronomous prescription, art fulfils its revolutionary role whether or not ‘it appears in a given case under the flag of a “pure” or of a frankly tendentious art’ (LA: 30).

Thus, it is wholly in keeping with his earlier writing on art when Trotsky counterposes to Stalinist socialist realism art for which what is decisive is its significance as art, contending that ‘true art’ cannot tolerate orders ‘by its very essence’, and becomes ‘a strong ally of revolution’ by remaining faithful to ‘its laws’ (LA: 114). Commentators have seemed to interpret Trotsky’s Partisan Review essays as thus advocating fidelity to one’s conscience, values, ideological commitments or whatever other concept might come under the rubric of ‘self’. Robert Wistrich and Isaac Deutscher make such assumptions, both apparently paraphrasing a letter which Trotsky wrote to Breton subsequent to the publication of the manifesto, in which he vaguely defines ‘the struggle for artistic truth . . . in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self’ (LA: 124). Wistrich writes that for Trotsky the ‘ultimate criterion for the artist’ is faith in their ‘inner self and in [their] struggle for truth’ (1979: 156), and Deutscher claims that for Trotsky an artist might act as ‘a necessary part of revolution’, through ‘unyielding faithfulness to himself’ (1963: 433).

Now, it is certainly the case that extra-aesthetic impulses are central to Trotsky’s account of radical art. Trotsky’s ferocious invectives against the formalism of Victor Shklovsky, whose ‘assertion of complete independence of the aesthetic “factor” from the influence of social conditions’ Trotsky condemns as idealism, mean that one could never assume that he considers art’s laws wholly internal to it (LA: 32–41).⁸ For Trotsky the notion that art dedicated to these laws is ‘unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society’ is bound up with his conviction that unmet and repressed ‘inner needs of man and mankind’ are engaged by this dedication (LA: 117). However, he continually stresses that these needs are mediated by artistic technique – ‘artistic creation is . . . a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar law of art’ (LA: 34) – and implies that they cannot be transparently expressed in rhetoric shared with art which serves as an apology for the status quo.⁹ As Adorno would assert twenty years later, for Trotsky in 1938 it seems that the latter cannot be countered ‘simply by a determination to look at things in what purports to be a more objective manner’, but, instead, art reveals ‘whatever is veiled by the empirical form assumed by reality’ by the progress of its autonomous laws (2007b: 162).

Trotsky accordingly contends that ‘the development of tendencies in art’ unhindered by heteronomous prescription, always bespeaks ‘a protest against reality’ (LA: 104–5). To elucidate this point, it is helpful to adopt a distinction in German decisive to Adorno’s aesthetics between two words both of which translate as ‘content’, Inhalt and Gehalt. As Robert Hullot-Kentor writes in a translator’s footnote to Aesthetic Theory, Inhalt means ‘the idea of thematic content or subject matter’, while Gehalt means ‘content in the sense of import, essence, or substance of a work’ (AT: 19 n.7). Ulrich Plass notes that Adorno inherits these terms from Goethe and Schiller, and draws this quote from Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby to further elucidate the distinction:

If we are capable of responding to the totality of the form the artist has made, then we have access to the ‘meaning’ inherent in it, a meaning which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Greenberg’s Trotskyism
• 2 Figuring negation
• 3 Making things of which we know not what they are
• 4 Greenberg’s Kantianism contra Greenberg’s positivism
• 5 The silent world of the sensible
• 6 Denunciation and anticipation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright