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Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Ann Eden Gibson

The Abstract Expressionist movement has long been bound up in the careers and lifestyles of about twelve white male artists who exhibited in New York in the 1940s. In this book Ann Eden Gibson reconsiders the history of the movement by investigating other artists—people of color, women, and gays and lesbians—whose versions of abstraction have been largely ignored until now.

Gibson argues that the origins and promotion of Abstract Expressionism were influenced by sexual and racial biases, and she shows how both the themes and physical appearance of Abstract Expressionism were gradually defined and refined by the white male artists who became its spokesmen, by critics, and by private and institutional supporters. She offers a justification for rethinking the definition of Abstract Expressionism through the work of such well-known contemporaries as Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Alfonso Ossorio, Aaron Siskind, Leon Polk Smith, Anne Ryan, and Hale Woodruff, as well as such lesser known artists as Ruth Abrams, Ronald Joseph, and Thelma Johnson Streat. Gibson contends that the current description of Abstract Expressionism has not only deprived it of such themes as masking, maternity, domesticity, and the experience of African American and Native American culture but has also limited it formally by excluding smaller, representational, and more personal work by canonical as well as noncanonical artists. She demonstrates that exposing the movement's true diversity makes this important heritage even more valuable than it was before.

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Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date November 1999 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300080728

EISBN 9780300229011

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Illustrations 191

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

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List of illustrations

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Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Contents

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

“WE ARE FREEING ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings,” wrote Barnett Newman in 1948. Forty years later, Ronald Joseph recalled, “Sometimes I felt that these things were being imposed on me: that I should be an American, or European, or Cubist. ... I was no …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

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Acknowledgments

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

BECAUSE WRITING THIS book required both expansion and revision of my art historical methods, sources, rosters of artists and critics, and cultural attitudes, I found myself needing a lot of advice. There are two people, however, to whom I am particularly indebted. The first is ceramist and filmmaker Camille Billops, who with her husband, scholar James Hatch, runs the Hatch-Billops Archives in New York City. She introduced me to authors and artists who have been crucial for this book and …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

AS THE MYTH of Abstract Expressionism developed from the late forties through the fifties, it established the reputations of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and others. A rebellious movement, it aimed not only to revolutionize representation by superceding America’s regionalism, realism, and recognizably national styles like French Cubism, but in doing so also to oppose America’s isolationism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism. In its …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pagesxix - xxxviii

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesAbstractionPolitics in artRace in artGender identity in art

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1. The Abstract Expressionist Hero

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

JACKSON POLLOCK PEERS from a dark interior over a foreground crowded with cans of paint, squinting warily at readers from the pages of the 9 November 1959 issue of Life magazine (fig. 2). Despite its title, “Baffling U.S. Art,” the article accompanying the photograph calls Pollock’s work the most influential in the world and credits him with having created a style that was “tense, explosive, mysterious, and altogether new.” The tone of the posthumous article (Pollock died in an automobile …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages1 - 17

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesAbstractionGender identity in artMale artistsSexism in art

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2. Subjects of the Artist

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

POSTWAR AMERICA WAS anxious. Its mood was described by W. H. Auden in The Age of Anxiety (1946): the prophet and the professor, he wrote, …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages18 - 42

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesAbstractionPolitics in artArt--Themes, motivesHuman figure in art

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3. Individualism, Universalism, and the Cold War

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

IN 1945, JEAN-PAUL Sartre observed of Americans, “It is when he is acting like everyone else that he feels most reasonable and most American; it is in displaying his conformism that he feels freest. . . . The peculiarity of the American, on the other hand, is that he regards his thought as universal.” In fact, the belief that the individual is the source and the repository of all social rights and human creativity was a legacy of the great eighteenth-century revolutions in the West. To …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages43 - 57

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesArt and societyPolitics in artHuman figure in artIndividualism in art

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4. The Anonymity of Abstraction

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

AT THE END of his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault asked, “What difference does it make who is speaking?” He was asking readers to rethink the assumption that works of art directly communicate the meaning intended by their makers. In making this appeal, Foucault was in some ways continuing a tendency that had been a standard part of the New Critical attitude—the reigning “disinterested criticism” that Norman Lewis disparages—for nearly thirty years. But Foucault had noticed that …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages58 - 86

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesGender identity in artGeometry in artCities and towns in artArt and society

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5. The Relevance of Contingency

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

A CRITIC WRITING about Perle Fine in 1945 complained that she had “not yet solved the important problem of inventing a personal style.” By 1946 she had moved from Kandinsky through Klee and Miró (fig. 87). But at the same time she was painting works like Nautical Composition Provincetown, 1946 (fig. 88), a pastiche of representational modes such as trompe-l’oeil (the rope), symbol (the stylized forms standing for water in the lower right), and nonobjective geometricity. The Guggenheim Museum’s …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages87 - 113

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesAbstract expressionism--United StatesPolitics in artRace in artSex in art

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6. Painting Through Primitivism

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

LIKE MANY AFRICAN Americans of his generation, Harlan Jackson had been a youth during the Harlem Renaissance and had absorbed its respect for ancestral culture. He differs from other artists in this book in that he spent the 1940s mostly in California, coming to New York for the first time in 1949. As a student at the California School of Fine Arts, however, working in a postwar atmosphere where abstract issues were defined after 1945 by Elmer Bischoff, Hassel Smith, Clay Spohn, Minor White, and …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages114 - 133

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesPrimitivism in art--Themes, motivesMasks in artAbstractionRitual in art

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7. Resistance and Negotiation

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

MOST AMERICANS DURING the 1940s—often including women—thought that women belonged at home as wives and mothers. Films such as The Snake Pit (1948) even went so far as to suggest that women’s mental health depended on their domesticity. Such thinking was a reversion to prewar attitudes about women’s proper role: in 1936, 82 percent of Americans said they thought that wives should not work if their husbands were employed. Even during the war, magazine articles that encouraged women to take wartime …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages134 - 165

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesWomen in artFemininity in artPolitics in artSex role in art

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Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

The purpose of this book is not to destroy the pleasures and benefits of contemplating canonical Abstract Expressionism, but to question certain processes on which that pleasure depends and some of the ends to which it continues to lead. Georges Bataille noted that the category of the heterogenous includes everything that homogenous society considers to be unproductive expenditure. The controlling forces in society see the heterogenous as unknowable, dangerous, shocking, other. Bataille …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Pages166 - 168

Subjects: Abstract expressionism--United StatesAbstractionPolitics in artRace in artGender identity in art

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Biographical Sketches of Artists

Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

To maintain an emphasis on arguments in the text, salient biographical events appear here to familiarize readers with the outlines of the lives of artists with whom they may not be familiar and to enable comparisons between prominent and lesser-known figures. Because this book focuses on the first bloom of Abstract Expressionism in the late forties, following a few cases into the early fifties, these biographies likewise pursue their subjects’ careers only to those years. Unless otherwise noted, …

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Subjects: Art, American--20th centuryAbstract expressionism--United StatesArtists--United States--Biography

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Ann Eden Gibson

Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

Index

Author

Ann Eden Gibson

PublisherYale University Press

CopyrightYale University Press 1999

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics

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