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8/3/2019 Reflections of American Modernism of the Mid-Twentieth Century: The Work of Rothko, Gottleib, Pollock, Oldenburg, and Warhol
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Reflections of American Modernism of the Mid-Twentieth Century: The Work of
Rothko, Gottleib, Pollock, Oldenburg, and Warhol
Joshua Gale
December 2011
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Harold Rosenberg once said, The attempt to define is like a game in which you
cannot possibly reach the goal from the starting point but can only close in on it by
picking up each time from where the last play landed."1
Nearing the end of the nineteenth
century, to the misfortune of such professionals as museum curators and professors of the
academies, artists began targeting the bourgeoisie,2
to remove the paintbrush from the
affluent hands of the rich and place them in the hands of workers from whom art had
been stolen. As a result, the academic institutions that had formerly been training artists
at an advanced level began losing their power and influence on society. As Rosenberg
avers, Many of the painters were Marxiststhey had been trying to paint society.
Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism)it amounts to the
same thing. The big moment came when it was decided to paintjust to PAINT.3
By recognizing and addressing the psychological phenomenon art has always
been, Marcel Duchamp4
said he wanted to put art back in the service of the mind.5
Duchamp, an immigrant from France, came to the United States with his readymades,
such as the famousFountain, and his unusual artworks, such asNude Descending a
Staircase No. 2 and saw New York as a place more open to artistic freedom. He is an
1 Quoted in Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" from Tradition of the
New, originally in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22.2 A French word that the English began using that denotes the ruling class in which
one owns capital. The original Dadaists were of European decent and aimed
to disrupt the middle class from their everyday thoughts and paradigms.3 Quoted in Jean-Christophe Agnew, Roy Rosenzweig, A Companion to Post-1945
America (Blackwell Companions to American History), Wiley-Blackwell; 1
edition (October 7, 2002).4 The Cubist movement, Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the expressionist
movement, Paul Czanne, and the futurist movement, Filippo Marinetti andUmberto Boccioni, heavily influenced Marcel Duchamps artwork.
5 Quoted inNan Rosenthal, "Marcel Duchamp (18871968)." In Heilbrunn Timeline ofArtHistory. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.
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excellent example of the type of thinkers who would set the pace for the redefining of
art over the next forty to fifty years. Walter Benjamin writes about the Dadaists, of
which Duchamp is considered a major part, The Dadaists attached much less importance
to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion.6
This progressive era of renegade artists, who completely rebelled against traditional art
forms, taking sense and making nonsense, took the task upon themselves to broaden the
art world beyond what it had been previously. Artists, including Duchamp, all over the
world banded together to erase the old artistic confines that had entrapped them, and with
as much from within them as they could muster, they went to war over what was to be
written on the next page of the history of art.
This transgression from any previously established rules opened artists creative
potential to places beyond their physical worlds; out of the subconscious, autonomously,
just because, they began creating artwork at full capacity in a way very specific to them.
The concepts that were in the early stages of development during that controversial time
period and grew to full maturity and completion during the late 1960s could, altogether,
be considered as a wonderfully sour gift, tagged From the Modernists, to contemporary
society. The works of art that are now commonly considered the art of the mid-twentieth
century are sometimes incredibly difficult to look at and interpret, but one does it anyway
at the chance of gaining a satisfaction incomparable to any other sensation.
Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottleib embraced the spirituality of the artist at work,
and the phenomenon of an existential work of art being able to capture and motivate its
6 Quoted in Encyclopdia Britannica, The Work ofArt in the Age of MechanicalReproduction, Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2011, Web. 24 December 2011,
Page 10.
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viewers. Rothkos work is commonly related to as a religious metaphor because of this
affect. He is famous for saying, The people who weep before my pictures are having the
same religious experience I had when I painted them.7
The patron of Rothkos last
murals, Dominique de Menil, stated Rothkos paintings evoked the tragic mystery of our
perishable condition. The silence of God, the unbearable silence of God.8
Rothko and Gottlieb believed that in order for the members of a society to express
basic psychological ideas, they must face the same eternal symbols, such as emotions and
identities, which were once defined in antiquity. Modern psychology points out that even
today members of society find those symbols still persisting in our dreams, our
vernacular and our art. They believed these symbols, known myths of the past, turn out
not to be fantasy at all but, instead, the expression of something very real from deep
within each person. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought, Rothko
and Gottlieb, in collaboration with artist Barnett Newman, proclaimed to theNew York
Times. There is no such thing as good painting about nothingwe are for flat forms
because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.9
According to Jackson Pollock, The modern artist, it seemsis working and
expressing an inner worldin other wordsexpressing the energy, the motion, and other
inner forces.10
The process of splintering art as an entity persisted throughout the life of
7 Quoted in Mark Rothko, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York:
Devin-Adair, 1957), 93-4.8 Quoted in Mrs. John de Menil, Address Made at the Opening of he Rothko Chapel in
Houston, Feb 27, 1971, mimeograph distributed at the chapel.9 Quoted in Letter of June 7, 1943 by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, in Edward
Alden Jewell, The Realm of Art: A new Platform and Other Matters:Globalism Pops into View,New York Times (June 13, 1943) x9.
10 Quoted in Marianne Doezema,ReadingAmerican Art, Yale University Press; 1st
Printing edition (June 16, 1998).
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Pollock and his action painter and New York School colleagues. Drawing inspiration
from the work of past Surrealists and the contemporary avant-garde, Pollocks approach
to art can best be expressed in examining the process of which he painted. He would
begin by laying the canvas with its back to the ground. In a autonomous state of mind he
would pick up his paintbrush and paint bucket and as if a part of a choreographed dance
he would drizzle, splatter, and dump globs of paint onto the canvas, never knowing where
his next stroke would go, completely forgetting where his last drop had landed. He
allowed that involvement, the action that sprung up from deep within his conscious, to
guide him throughout his career as innovative artist, and with it, art, as if it were a kind of
social organism, reacted and spun off into yet another new direction.
Andy Warhol of the pop artists, taking into consideration the technological
influence of the industrial age and the affects of commercialism on art, makes his retort:
No. The reason Im painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that
whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do11
Warhol attempted to
completely remove spirituality, the mystery, and any physical or psychological
connection from his artwork. Walter Benjamin, who makes a more precise breakdown of
what it means for something to be replicated, clearly influenced Warhol with his essay,
The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin states, even the
most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time
and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to beThe presence of the
11 Quoted in Andy Warhol, in gene Swenson, What is Pop Art? Part I,Artnews 62
[Nov. 1963], 26.
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original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.12
By utilizing repetition and
machine-like products and processes, he wanted, much like the minimalists did, to
remove the artists authorial mark from their creations. History books are being
rewritten all the time. It doesnt matter what you do.13
Finally, Oldenburg blatantly states, I am for an art that is political-erotical-
mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.14
Oldenburg, to
capitalism what Warhol is to commercialism, makes an obvious statement about seeing
something magnificent in ones day-to-day reality. Mark Rothko, working twenty years
prior to Oldenburg once said that art must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to
interior decorationpictures for over the mantle.15
Oldenburg, as one might suspect of
an artist to be after such extremes had presented themselves, was a hybrid of the artists
before him. His heightened awareness of the objects of his surroundings, those interior
decorations and pictures for the home, is what inspired him. Though his monumental
sculptures of everyday life were not authorial, they were autobiographical and therefore,
inherently, metaphysical; What I see is not the thing itself butmyselfin its form.16
With this, the period of modern artwork came to a close. Oldenburg and his
colleagues marked a time of transition that would bridge the gap opened by various artists
of the twentieth century and allow the next generation of people to utilize the knowledge
assimilated from the modernists. Warhol embraced commercialism. It could be said he
12 Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Page 2.13 Ibid.14 Quoted in Encyclopdia Britannica Online, s. v.Realist Manifesto, Encyclopdia
Britannica Inc., 2011, Web December 25 2011.15 Quoted in Andy Warhol, in Andy Warhol, exh. Cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet,
1968), unpaginated.16 Claes Oldenburg, notebook entry, Dec. 1-7, 1960; cited in Claes Oldenburg and
Emmet Williams, Store Days (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 65.
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martyred himself for arts sake. He did this to overwhelm the viewers with so much
obvious imitation and fabrication that the viewer is forced to step back and look within
him or her self to fully appreciate his artwork. Rothko and Gottleib despised anything
that was commercial, but also persuaded viewers to look within him or her self.
Pollocks work hangs in museums, but standing in front of a Pollock could give one the
sensation of standing anywhere while Oldenburgs sculptures stand tall outside of various
museums, but his work, permanently immobile, finds its strength in its environment.
Warhol had begun to play with the notion that many artists have approached the same
goals from his or her own various angles and were ultimately headed in the same
direction while being completely unaware that they might end up in a similar place. He
said this on the subject, Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and
then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.17
The contradictions, theories and works of art of the mid-twentieth century prove
that one can only close in on [a definition] by picking up each time from where the last
play landed."18 Some argue that art during that time period was liberated while others
contend that art as a sanction was destroyed, but everyone must face reality and accept
that the current, post-modern perception of art is unique to its own place in time.
Whether one likes it or not, art is evolving, and really it always has, into something
completely fresh. Through much discovery, artists of the mid-twentieth century did
nothing but embrace the time and etch their own initials into the course of art historys
development.
17 Quoted in Andy Warhol, in gene Swenson, What is Pop Art? Part I,Artnews 62
[Nov. 1963], 26.18 Quoted in The American Action Painters
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Jean-Christophe Agnew, Roy Rosenzweig, A Companion to Post-1945 America(Blackwell Companions to American History), Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition
(October 7, 2002).
Marianne Doezema,ReadingAmerican Art, Yale University Press; 1st Printing edition
(June 16, 1998).
Encyclopdia Britannica, The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2011, Web. 24 December 2011.
Encyclopdia Britannica Online, s. v.Realist Manifesto, Encyclopdia Britannica Inc.,
2011, Web December 25 2011,http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/493121/Realist-Manifesto.
Mrs. John de Menil, Address Made at the Opening of he Rothko Chapel in Houston, Feb
27, 1971, mimeograph distributed at the chapel.
Claes Oldenburg, notebook entry, Dec. 1-7, 1960; cited in Claes Oldenburg and
Emmet Williams, Store Days (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 65.
Colin Painter (Editor), Contemporary Art and the Home, Berg Publishers; First Edition
edition (October 1, 2002), page 41.
Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" from Tradition of the New,
originally in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22.
Nan Rosenthal. "Marcel Duchamp (18871968)." In Heilbrunn Timeline ofArtHistory.
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/duch/hd_duch.htm (October 2004).
Mark Rothko, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair,1957), 93-4.
Letter of June 7, 1943 by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, in Edward Alden Jewell,
The Realm of Art: A new Platform and Other Matters: Globalism Pops intoView,New York Times (June 13, 1943) x9
Andy Warhol, in Andy Warhol, exh. Cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968),
unpaginated.
Andy Warhol, in gene Swenson, What is Pop Art? Part I,Artnews 62 [Nov. 1963],26.
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