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American Masters, NGA: Pollock, Warhol, Rothko, Mapplethorpe, Goldin

A master is someone who can teach us something; but what can we learn from these modern American artists?

Ed & Nancy Kienholtz’s television sets made of cans. All images from the exhibition American Masters: National Gallery of Australia.
Ed & Nancy Kienholtz’s television sets made of cans. All images from the exhibition American Masters: National Gallery of Australia.

Far too many books about art are publishe­d, especially in proportion to the real understanding that they contribu­te to the subject. The vast major­ity are picture books mindlessly repeating familiar commonplaces or, in the case of contemporary art, glorified self-publishing, paid for by the galleries that promote the artist’s work; and as all artists know, when the gallery pays, it means they pay.

One of the results of this relentless flow of uncritical publication is that the art of the past century has been constantly recycled as canon­ical instead of being properly reassessed or understood in relation to its social and historical circumstances. For there are few other periods in history in which art is so closely tied to historical events, from the great explosion of modernism in the decade before the Great War, like a canary in the mine for the catastro­phe to come, to dada during the war, surrealism and new realism between the wars, and the ubiquity of abstraction in the aftermath of World War II.

The other thing particularly characteristic of the art of the 20th century is that it consisted of so many brilliant dead ends, episodes that were remarkable in themselves and motivated rather than arbitrary, yet that could not be repeated, imitated or extended. Analytical cubis­m is one of the best examples, precisely becau­se it is far from an arbitrary fashion: on the contrary, it arises out of a reflection on the whole history of spatial representation in Western art. Yet one cannot repeat or imitate the works of those years without making a lifeless pastiche, such as those produced in schools and even art schools. There is nowhere to go with this style beyond its own specific meaning.

The same could be said of most other styles of the 20th century. You can’t do fauvism, orphis­m, futurism or even surrealism without repeating the works of these artists: they do not, in other words, offer a more generally applic­able style that can be adopted, varied and made one’s own. Even in the 16th and 17th centuries there was some awareness of this, in relation to Raphael and Michelan­gelo. Mich­elangelo was a supreme geniu­s, but it was dangerous to imitate him, for he had taken his style to an extreme; Raphael had created a style that avoided ­extremes and eccentricities that could therefore be imitated and extended in other directions.

That is why an exhibition title such as America­n Masters is inherently question-beggin­g. In what sense are they masters? A master is someone who can teach us something; but what can these artists teach us? Jackson Pollock is even less amenable to imitation than most of the others I have mentioned. Meanwhile the exhibition labels, predictably, talk about turning the art world upside-down and other cliches, but what does that really mean?

Detail from Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Owl box) c.1946-48.
Detail from Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Owl box) c.1946-48.

As we can see all too clearly today, disruption, one of the buzzwords of our time, does not always equal progress. Meal deliveries on bicycl­e do not represent a step forward for human­ity; they create a new category of underpaid workers and a horrifying amount of extra packaging waste, as well as encouraging immobilit­y and obesity and discouraging home cooking. The gig economy feels cool because it is all done on mobile phone apps; our addiction to the form of mobile technology blinds us to the substance of an unregulated market.

I have observed before that the American abstrac­t painters were overdue for reassessment. When the National Gallery of Australia collection was being formed, they were at the high tide of fashion: consequently we acquire­d a large number of their works, which apparently have never before been shown together in this way, although most of the more important abstrac­t paintings have long been hung together. For many years these pictures enjoyed pride of place on the ground floor, but more recently they were moved upstairs in what felt at the time like a discreet recognition of the fact they had not aged very well.

Of all of them, the work whose purchase attracte­d enormous controversy at the time, Pollock’s Blue Poles, remains by far the most impressi­ve. One reason it is interesting is that here Pollock realises the potential of an idea that had arisen in surrealism, that of automatism: the surrealists had regularly practised automatic writing but, although Andre Masson and others had experimented with the possibilities of automatic painting, they had never really made anything of it.

Automatic writing was done by writing continuously without taking the pen or pencil from the paper; the same thing was not practicable with a brush and paint. So the possibility of such a practice was opened up only by Pollock’s idea of placing the canvas on the ground and dripping paint on to it from above. In this way he could create continuous and complex skeins of colour, weaving in and out of each other. The process was automatic because it was guided by pure intuition, not by any intention or finality.

Interesting as such a proposition may be, its limitations are immediately obvious, and attemp­ts to imitate such a process are doomed to triviality. What makes Blue Poles more interesting than that is the inclusion of the deliber­ately painted poles, conscious structures attempt­ing to assert the claims of reason and order in a storm of unconsciousness.

Detail from Andy Warhol’s Elvis (1963).
Detail from Andy Warhol’s Elvis (1963).

Other artists have held up less well. Why exact­ly did we ever think it was a good idea to stain canvases with diluted oil paint instead of painting on them? And how did we convince ourselves that pouring so-called veils of thin paint over each other was a way to liberate the expressive power of colour? Surely the most ludicro­us piece in the whole collection of American abstractionists is the vast empty canvas on which Morris Louis has painted gratuitous stripes on the two lower corners.

One could go on, including about the terribly overrated Mark Rothko, as well as some others who have been virtually forgotten and whose works can safely return to storage after this exhibit­ion, but the more important question is why a whole generation of artists turned so resolut­ely from the world and why audiences and critics of the time were willing to go along with them. Again, this is the sort of question that is implicitly suppressed by taking the canoni­c status of these artists for granted.

On this occasion, the question was fortuit­ous­ly brought home to me with a new concreteness when I left the exhibition and walked upstairs to find another devoted to the conceptual movement. At the top of the long staircase I encountered a small landscape by Sisley, followe­d by a beautiful little Seurat study for a painting held in the Courtauld collection in London, and then one of Monet’s grainstacks. The effect was almost overwhelming; it felt rather like a psychoanalyst coming out of a morning spent with depressive or psychotic patien­ts to walk in a park filled with trees and sunlight.

Treating these American painters as master­s and assuming their genius, not to mention their necessity within a teleological model of art history, inhibits our understanding of their work. It is no coincidence that Pollock was an alcoholic who deliberately or accidentally killed himself, or that Rothko suffere­d from depression and committed suicide, dying in a pool of blood that must have looked uncannily like one of his own compositions. The fact is that you don’t turn away from the world of light and nature unless there is something very wrong: the inward turn of abstraction is itself the expression of some kind of alienation, whether merely narcissism and neurosis or, in the most serious cases, deep unhappiness and trauma.

None of that is surprising in the aftermat­h of World War II, but the insistence on viewing the movement as an expression of American creat­ive energ­y and the transcendent vision of iconoclastic individuals tends to confuse our perception of the inherent meaning of the work. This is why some, although not all, of the pop, conceptual and minimalist artists who follow are less un­satisfactory — because it is clear that they are respondi­ng to deeply disorienting cultur­al force­s. Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg need to be thoroughly reassesse­d; their work has been accepted with a suspension of critical judgment for too long. Rauschenberg’s large combine work gratuitously draws attention to itself by its clumsy association of disparate elements, while Oldenburg’s project for a monument in Piccadilly Circus is self-indulgenc­e masquerading as provocation.

Nan Goldin’s Siobhan in the shower, NYC, 1991.
Nan Goldin’s Siobhan in the shower, NYC, 1991.

Much more interesting are the mock televisio­n sets made out of petrol cans by Ed and Nancy Kienholz, and especially an intriguin­g little work by Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Owl box), c. 1946-48, in which we make out the image of an owl seen behind frosted glass and through a frame of trees or rocks. This little work is particularly intriguing for the way it seems to anticipate the elaborate mise-en-scene glimpsed through a keyhole, Etant donnes, that his friend Marcel Duchamp began to work on in secret about the same time and continued addin­g to for two decades.

Photographic works stand out in the later rooms, particularly, if predictably, the pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, as well as Chuck Close’s photorealist painting, Bob (1969). There are four images by Mapplethorpe, including a nicely balanced pair in which a black man becomes almost a sculpture, while an ancient marble inspired by the Aphrodite of Cnidus is animated by moody lighting. Some of Mapplethorpe’s more sexually explicit work in shown upstairs.

Goldin’s photographs, from the memor­ably named series The Ballad of Sexual Depend­ency, covering the years 1979 to 1986, evoke a world of sex, drugs and violence, including one shot of her lover sitting on the edge of the bed after sex, and another self-portrait with her face bruised and swollen after the same man had bashed her. Not included in this exhibition but shown upstair­s in the same room as the Mapplethorpe works is a series from Goldin’s older contemp­orary Larry Clark, revealing the desperate world of American cultural desolation documented in his book Tulsa (1971).

Andy Warhol stands out in this final section for his ability to combine acuteness of perception with detachment. His screenprint Electric Chair (1967) is haunting precisely because it is not made in a spirit of protest or indignation: it is just there, a machine for killing people. It is for the viewer to respond to the bare fact.

And in his Elvis (1963) he has put his finger on the chasm of meaninglessness at the heart of the commercial culture that the US has given the world: the singer adopts a rock-star swagger, draws an empty gun and stares past the viewer, looking at nothing.

American Masters

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Until November 11

Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen has been The Australian's national art critic since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/american-masters-nga-pollock-warhol-rothko-mapplethorpe-goldin/news-story/d3175c207c49de00b1918bed221ae4bf