Jews And The Abstract Truth

New Jewish Museum exhibit shines a light on the two Jewish art critics who helped provide the intellectual framework for modern art in America.

Jackson Pollock’s “Convergence” (1952), below, a seminal work of Abstract Expressionism, is part of The Jewish Museum’s new exhibit.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

If Modernism — the cultural zeitgeist that lorded over European intellectual life for over 100 years — was born in Europe, around, say, the mid-1800s, it did not quite die there. More an intellectual temperament than a clearly defined movement, Modernism is characterized mainly by an impulse to advance society by tearing down its traditional structures and building it up again from a new set of principles. In politics, Marx did it by attacking class hierarchies and arguing for a more egalitarian communism. In philosophy, Nietzsche did away with following religious orthodoxies and favored the individual’s ability to define his own fate.
And in the fine arts, Impressionists like Monet through Cubists like Picasso steadily eroded art’s emphasis on accurately depicting the physical world in

favor of illustrating its deeper truths. Suffice it to say that many of Modernism’s children were killed in the two World Wars.
But Modernism in art was given another life in America, albeit short-lived, just after the Second World War. In large part, we can thank a small coterie of influential critics, which is the argument of The Jewish Museum’s lean and sophisticated new exhibit “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976.” Two critics in particular — Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg — were modern art’s chief proponents in America. And if you have heard of the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning; Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko; of Gorky, Reinhardt or Jasper Johns, you can thank both these New York Jews. As critics for the nation’s leading magazines writing in the post-war years, they offered the intellectual framework necessary to understand this befuddling new art.
Oddly enough, they could not have disagreed more on what made Abstract Expressionism the new, quintessentially modern art form. For Greenberg, writing chiefly for The Nation, abstraction reduced art to its most basic elements. By ridding itself of identifiable objects, art could be judged purely by how well it lived up to its essential parts — color, line, form and an embrace of the canvas’ fundamental flatness. “The essence of Modernism lies,” Greenberg wrote, “in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.” Abstract Expressionism was modern insofar as it met two fundamental criteria. It advanced art — progress being critical to modernism. And it did so by reducing art to its fundamental elements and re-organizing them into a new set of principles.
For Rosenberg, who wrote his most important treatises on Abstraction Expressionist in art journals (though he later became the New Yorker’s art critic, in 1967), abstraction offered the key to self-expression. The physical actions necessary to make abstract forms — a whip of the brush, the splash of paint, the crude deformation of an object — made abstraction important, though not quite for the forms themselves. Rosenberg was not interested in judging, as Greenberg was, art for its own sake, but for how well the art conveyed the artist’s personality, his expressiveness (and mainly his; both critics mostly neglected writing about women, as well as homosexuals and African-Americans, a fact rightly critiqued in the exhibit).
As Norman L. Kleeblatt, the show’s chief curator, writes in the richly informed catalogue: “This shifted the emphasis from the analysis of the completed picture to the process of its creator.” Both critics fought over these important differences for decades — on the page, but occasionally with their fists, like Mailer and Vidal. But both catapulted the same artists into the international spotlight. With the Abstract Expressionists, the art world’s seismic shift tilted in America’s direction.
If there is a hole in the exhibit itself — which features 50 works, some of them seminal, by 31 artists — it is partially made up in the catalogue. Still, viewers are given little insight into the personal backgrounds of these eminent Jewish thinkers, which may or may not have helped shaped their views on art. Both were born in New York: Rosenberg in 1906, Greenberg three years later. (Greenberg died in 1994; Rosenberg in 1978.) And both evolved their views writing for publications with deep liberal, secular Jewish roots, like Commentary, in its early years, and the Partisan Review. These biographical details are sprinkled throughout the two-floor exhibit, and one room displays copies of the two critical essays that might provide a clue.
Two articles in the catalogue follow this lead. One of the essays on view in the exhibit, plumbed in Mark Godfrey’s excellent catalogue entry, is Greenberg’s “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism: Some Reflections on ‘Positive Jewishness’,” published in Commentary in 1950. Greenberg argued against the prevailing trend in post-war American Judaism to explicitly assert one’s Jewish identity. Rather than seeing this as a sign of strength, Greenberg viewed it as the opposite: a symptom of the insecurity that still defined most American Jews. “Jewishness should be a personal rather than a mass manifestation,” Greenberg wrote. “What I want to be able to do is accept my Jewishness more implicitly, so that I can use it to realize myself as a human being in my own right, and as a Jew in my own right.”
Greenberg’s essay has canonic status today, though the one that Rosenberg wrote at the same time, and in the same magazine, does not. Perhaps this is because Rosenberg, in “Jewish Identity in a Free Society,” argued from a similar viewpoint. He was against a collective expression of Jewish identity because, for him, one’s identity was chiefly arrived at by the individual. As Godfrey succinctly summarizes both critics’ view: “Jewishness was a personal matter for each Jew.” Therefore, the theory holds, each critic kept it out of his professional art criticism.
And yet. ... The critics were perpetually asked: is there something Jewish in Abstract Expressionism? After all, many of its most important figures — Rothko, Newman, Frankenthaler, Guston, and Krasner — were Jews. Newman and Guston even said there were Jewish features in some of their work. But Greenberg near completely avoided the question in his writings, if anything stressing the artists’ fundamental American-ness. Some critics have suggested that this was Greenberg’s effort to assimilate himself and his favored secular Jewish artists, but Godfrey dissents. He argues that Greenberg stressed their American identity to emphasize America’s supremacy in modern art in the post-war years. The most intellectually consistent explanation for Greenberg’s silence, if not an entirely fulfilling one, is this one, offered by Godfrey: he assessed art by its purest elements, which simply made it impossible to read anything more into it. Art was line, color, form — no more, no less.
Rosenberg left more of a trail. He tackled the question head on in a lecture he gave at The Jewish Museum, in 1966, published in essay form as “Is There a Jewish Art?” In essence, he said no. Rosenberg’s emphasis on abstraction negated the idea that Jewish icons — a menorah, Torah scrolls — could ever truly make art Jewish. Anyone could draw the Star of David. When some artists tried to make art inspired by the Holocaust, even using abstract forms, Rosenberg summarily retorted: the “Holocaust ... does not have a hue.”
The only defining sensibility he found in the Abstract Expressionists who were Jews, then, feels like a conceit. In any event, here’s what he said about their work: “inspired by the will to identity, [their work] has constituted a new art by Jews which, though not a Jewish art, is a profound Jewish expression, at the same time that it is loaded with meaning for all people of this era.”
It may have made some of the hearts in the audience swell, if just a little, but Rosenberg probably said it through clenched teeth. In the end, Abstract Expressionism belonged to the artists who made it — and perhaps, a few feuding critics. n
“Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976” opens on Sunday, May 4 and runs through Sept. 21. The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. (212) 423-3200.