WHY I LIKE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

The criticism of Abstract Expressionism that you often hear is that the painterly examples are just glorified artists palettes, that any competent painter produces beautiful patterns on his palette in the act of painting. The hostile critic asks, "What's so special about that?"

Well, far be it from me to disparage palettes. If artists were smart they'd sell their palettes instead of throwing them away.

Even so, a palette-type painting (above) wouldn't be very satisfying.  It's a limited form of expression. 

But, come on, Abstract Expressionism is obviously more than that. Here's (above) a picture by AE artist-in-good-standing, Willem DeKooning. Okay, it superficially resembles a palette, but surely you'd agree that it's more than that.

These are carefully chosen colors that evoke strong emotions and the blended textures and color fields deliberately prompt questions about how and why color works. I haven't seen such an interesting study of color since Nolde and the Fauves.

Here's one of Frank Stella's three-dimensional Sculpture-paintings. Wow! How exciting! It's a celebration of life and intellect and the senses. What's not to like?

Here's a guilty pleasure of mine...a black and white canvas by Franz Kline. Kline took a lot of flack for being "merely" a calligrapher. He's actually more than that but it's hard to appreciate his work if you haven't seen it large, and in real life.

Kline's work is highly decorative and looks great on living room walls. That's not a Kline above, but it'll serve to make my point.

I shouldn't have to say this but there's nothing wrong with art being decorative. Matisse was decorative. The Cluny Tapestries are decorative. Decorative is fine. A work can be challenging and decorative at the same time.

While I was gathering pictures for this post I did a search for  "Abstract Expressionist Architecture" and was surprised when I came up with nothing. I did find clusters of buildings that collectively seem to make an Abstract Expressionist mosaic, but no single buildings in that style.

I guess AE is a busy style that requires lots of angles and, as any contractor would tell you, the more angles the higher the price.

My guess is that the best real-world place for AE to take root is in landscaping. It's hard to believe that this landscape designer (above) wasn't influenced by that movement.

Haw! Jackson Pollack would feel right at home in this forest.

EMIL NOLDE'S PAINTINGS

I've blogged before about the mysterious and aggressive quality of color, especially when it's relatively unrestrained as it is in the Nolde picture above. Lots of people wouldn't agree with that. For them color is sentimental and comforting. I envy them. My own innocence about color has been shattered by the discoveries of a painter named Emil Nolde (1867 - 1956) who's the subject of this post.

Nolde couldn't draw people. Maybe that's a good thing because his difficulties with line may have been what led him to concentrate entirely on color.

Nolde's early paintings (above) were influenced by Van Gogh. 

Later he shows the influence of Gauguin and the Nabis.

He was even influenced by Matisse. Here (above) he takes what I call the the bold, aggressive quality of color and successfully harnesses it to decoration as Matisse did. The public liked what he was doing and he might have profitably painted this way for years to come, but around this time he seems to have become interested in color for its own sake. He became obsessed with the idea that color had a life of its own which was suffocated by line.

 Nolde wasn't the only artist to dream of liberating color. Fauves like Vlaminck and Derain (that's a Derain, above) attempted it but they confined color with line and that had the effect of taming it down.

Kandinsky (above) did the same. Even in his abstract pictures he was usually afraid to remove the lines.

Bonnard got rid of the lines but still didn't liberate the color. He just confined it a different way, in this case by muting it with white. It's as if all the painters I've mentioned wanted to open the cage door to give color its freedom, but once it was on the outside they insisted on walking it on a tight leash.

Not so Nolde. He opened the door and let the tiger escape. He allowed his color, indescribably brutal and mindful of nothing but its own will to live, to leap out and grab the viewer by the jugular.

Look at this landscape (above). The liberated red comes off as a predatory beast roaming the landscape and looking for victims. I don't know about you, but I hear the strident parts of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" when I look at it.

 Nolde painted almost exclusively in watercolor during the WWII years, and therein lies a story.

According to Wikipedia, Nolde became a passionate Nazi while he was still living in Denmark in the 20s. His work became very well known and even caught the attention of Goebbels who was a fan of Expressionism and who arranged for Nolde to work on an infamous anti-semitic film. It must have seemed to Nolde that he had it made, but fate had something else in store for him.

It turns out that Hitler loathed Expressionism and he gave Nolde pride of place in his Degenerate Art show. Goebbels, being the toady that he was, not only dropped Nolde like a hot potato but claimed to have discovered that the artist had a Jewish ancestor. Nolde was given a rifle and shipped off to the army where he painted watercolors in secret. He was forbidden to work in oils.

So Nolde was not what you'd call a nice guy, and his pictures have a very disturbing, neurotic quality to them. Even so, you have to credit the man with liberating color in a way that nobody else had. It's impossible to imagine DeKooning or Hoffman or many of the Abstract Expressionists or even Mary Blair without reference to Nolde. What can I say? Nature distributes its gifts in ways not understandable by man.