Jackson Pollock: Post Avant-Garde In America

Jackson Pollock’s ultimate fan boy came in the form of Clement Greenberg, art critic extraordinaire of the 20th century. He loved the formal language of abstraction and found manifestations of his definition of art in Pollock’s work. His contemporary, Harold Rosenberg, however, would probably have been standing in the corner shaking his head at Greenberg’s enthusiasm, trying to rival it with his own definitions and excitement. To Rosenberg, painting evolved into action and feeling with a near disregard for formalities. Actually, (allegedly) in a more private setting than the essays and newspaper articles, Greenberg and Rosenberg might have even exchanged punches because of their very different views on the post avant-garde in America: abstract expressionism.

Greenberg, it would appear, loved rules. For him, “Modernism used art to call attention to art” (Greenberg, Modernist Painting). He was all about form and technique and found symbolism and realism to be secondary, if not completely
unnecessary. In fact, they seemed superfluous to him because they distracted from the painting itself. To Greenberg, “good” art had a definition and a set of rules to follow. They were about form and space and how the paint was the subject of the painting. Paintings like those of Ellsworth Kelly pleased him greatly. In a radio broadcast “Modernist Painting,” he commented that “Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first.” That is exactly why he was drawn also to Jackson Pollock and his non-objective 100% abstract drip paintings, which the critic was very eager to define as the ultimate Modernist paintings. Greenberg saw many of his own ideas about what art was manifested in Pollock’s work. For example, about Pollock’s painting ‘#1,’ Greenberg wrote that "Beneath the apparent monotony of its surface composition it reveals a sumptuous variety of design and incident."

Greenberg’s interpretation of Pollock’s work was probably about as valid as anyone else’s though. It is easy to find personal views in works one enjoys, and it seems that Greenberg did just that, for his contemporary and rival, Harold Rosenberg, found completely contrasting meanings in the same set of work. Everything Greenberg believed in, Rosenberg did not, and vice versa. Rosenberg believed in action and emotion and not in the formal qualities of paint. In fact, he seemed to think that all the formal rules Greenberg talked about were nonsensical and had nothing to do with art. In “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg wrote that “the act of painting is inseparable from the artist” and “what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Whereas Greenberg would have studied and appreciated a finished work for hours, looking for formal language and fantastic design, Rosenberg would have watched the process and tried to search for the artist’s psyche reflected in the work. Rosenberg even stated that “what matters always is the revelation contained in the act” (Rosenberg, The Most Radical Act).

It is safe to assume that Greenberg thought rather highly of himself and of his ideas about High Modernism. To him, everything in art history had led up to this, his time, when painting would be purely about painting, not conveying a message. Sure, he believed that the individual still created the painting, but they were to create it to his set of rules and standards, and anything that broke those was simply not good art and not worthy of his time. Ellsworth Kelly, for example: good; focused on color and shape with no symbolic message. In contrast, Willem de Kooning: what is going on – Formal language of painting and history thrown out the metaphorical window!
Rosenberg, therefore, challenged everything Greenberg stood for and gladly so. Rosenberg realized that an artist can not work without context, no matter the situation. An artist from Africa would never paint in the same style with the same set of rules as one from Northeast Asia, for example, because the social context each artist lives in is different. Greenberg assumed that with a set of rules, all art could be great, regardless of background. Art was art, not life. Rosenberg disregarded this narrow mindset and argued that art was what it was because of life. He believed that the Avant-Garde had been necessary and good for art and that it was still very much alive, just in other forms.
That was the first way in which Rosenberg challenged Greenberg: in defying the sentiment that the avant-garde was deadly towards art practice.
There was a grandeur to Rosenberg’s criticism; he described painting as acting on a stage. He believed the artist’s full mind and spirit were engaged in creating a work, and in the case that the artist abandoned traditional practices like perspective, well, it wasn’t too great a loss. In fact, most paintings probably worked better without those because they were sincerer in the end. That was also something he saw in Jackson Pollock during the creation of his works that Greenberg seemed to forget or dismiss. Rosenberg saw struggles in the painter and tried to figure out why he was painting the way he was. Was it because he was angry, depressed? Probably. Greenberg seemed dismissive of this, and instead went on and on about the end product, the finished work in which he found pleasure because he could make it represent his own
ideas.
The key challenge though, it seems, was that Greenberg was focused on self-criticism and Rosenberg was focused on self-creation. Both were critics and regarded paintings as such, but ultimately, they were looking for opposite elements. There was no way that their views could overlap. Rosenberg was enthusiastic about Abstract Expressionism, so much that he is remembered as the great art critic of that period. Greenberg avoided it and is instead remembered as one of the great art critics of the 20th century because he hated a lot of the things that were going on. Greenberg thought that the future held his ideas, that art was only supposed to go up hill (in his perspective) from then. Rosenberg welcomed Abstract Expressionism as something new and different, yet still influenced by the past rebellion of the Avant-Garde, and ultimately, his views were more in line with what continued to happen in art past the 20th century, for there is always more cause for rebellion than for following the rules. Very few want to follow the rules of formal art because that has been done before and it is very hard to do so. Greenberg sought to define rules but did not realize that he could only do so for the time period he was active in. Rosenberg sought to view the greater context and thus ultimately grasped a better understanding of what was going on in his time period.