Jackson Pollock's Industrial ExpressionismAuthor(s): Barbara JaffeeSource: Art Journal, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 68-79Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134506Accessed: 01/02/2010 11:42

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Thomas Hart Benton. Illustrations from "The Mechanics of Form Organization in

Painting," published in The Arts, 1926-27. @T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamen-

taryTrusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, NewYork, N.Y.

In 1957 the art historian Meyer Schapiro suggested that the significance of avant-

garde art lay in its positing of an alternative to the technological extremes of

corporate capitalism, observing that, within the developmental logic of moder-

nity, the realm of the historically fine arts of painting and sculpture was the last refuge from total instrumentality. Schapiro asserted further that American

avant-garde painting, i.e., Abstract Expressionism, addressed this charge more

vigorously than had any avant-garde art movement before it, by formulating techniques that seemed to wed intention more closely to expression. Among these, according to Schapiro, were spontaneity and an innovative use of line,

exemplified by the allover, linear "signature" of Jackson Pollock's poured canvas- es of the late 1940s.' But the question of the relationship between technique and intention turns out not to have been trumped by Schapiro's proximity to the artists. A generation of social historians of art, examining closely the relationship

between Abstract Expressionism and power, has concluded that the movement owed its success to its usefulness to the

ideological interests of the then ruling class. Even David Craven's recent recovery of a reception of Abstract Expres- sionism more closely in line with what he, following Schapiro, has argued were the artists' intentions, seems to fall short of the demand of Schapiro's essay.2 Techniques- even those as celebrated for their originality as Pollock's

or as reviled for their repetitiveness as American industrialism's-have histories. And Schapiro's claim, that "the consciousness of the personal and spontaneous in the painting and sculpture stimulates the artist to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made," does not preclude the possibility that the social facts of industrialism determine the limits of that invention.3

What Schapiro's essay demands is a thoroughgoing interrogation of the

relationship between Abstract Expressionist technique and the techniques of industrial production. In the case of Pollock, that technique or, more precisely, its origins, presents something of a problem to the inquiring mind. Pollock's art studies were uneven at best-most famously with Regionalist realist Thomas Hart Benton in the 1930s. Much art-historical hay has been made over the

question of Benton's influence. Pollock himself described it as a negative. But Pollock scholar Francis V O'Connor argued that Benton's example was crucial to Pollock's development. His May 1967 article "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock:

1912-I 943" both rehabilitated Benton's credentials as a modernist (of admittedly complex genealogy) and offered a historically contextualized antidote to then- MoMA director William Rubin's epic formalist cycle "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition" Parts I-IV (which had linked Pollock to Cubism through reti- nal evidence alone).4 In the March 1979 issue of Arts, Stephen Polcari and Mark

Roskill revisited the question by comparing Pollock's later work to Benton's "Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting," a series of optimistically titled

essays on the theory of pictorial composition-complete with diagrammatic illustrations-published by Benton in i926-27.5 These essays outlined the major tenets of a conceptual structure that the artist was by then employing to secure the formal coherence of his own figurative subjects; Benton addressed them to readers more objectively, however, as a "preliminary effort to develop a system

Barbara jaffee

Jackson Pollock's Industrial Expressionism

I. Meyer Schapiro, "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art," Art News 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 36-42. 2. David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural

Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3. As in Michael Baxandall's concept of a "period eye," the development of distinctive visual skills and habits that become identifiable elements in a

painter's style. Michael Baxandall, Painting and

Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (London: Oxford

University Press, 1972). 4. William Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition," Parts I-IV, Artforum 5 (February 1967): 14-22; (March 1967): 28-37; (April 1967): 18-3 1; (May 1967): 28-33; and Francis V. O'Connor, "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912-1943," Artforum 5 (May 1967): 16-23. Denounced by the artist Stuart Davis as fascist in 1935 and pronounced philistine by Meyer Schapiro in 1938 (Meyer Schapiro, "Populist Realism," Partisan Review 4 [January 1938]), Benton long was considered representa- tive of an antimodernist tendency in American art. The reconsideration that began with O'Connor's 1967 essay now includes Matthew Baigell, The

American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From

Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199 I), and James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Inde- pendence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and

John Steuart Curry (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

69 art journal

68 WINTER 2004

Thomas Hart Benton. Arts of the West, from The Arts of Life in America, 1932. Mural cycle, tempera with oil glaze. 8 x 13 ft. (243.8 x 396.2 cm). Harriet Russell Stanley Fund, New Britain Museum of American Art.Art ?T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed byVAGA, NewYork, N.Y.

of teaching composition and comparative analysis of structure." As visual evi-

dence, the diagrams are striking: it is as though Benton's at times luridly senti- mental subjects have been "stripped bare" to reveal their modernist heart. No less a figure than Rosalind Krauss accepted the comparison of Pollock's work and Benton's theorizing as orthodoxy when she used it as a visual aid to her

1993 argument about the "unconscious anxieties" at the core of modernism (in general) and Pollock's painted performances (in particular).6 Somewhat more

cautiously, Pepe Karmel offered an elaborate demonstration of the effect, insist-

ing in the catalogue produced by the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with its 1998-99 Pollock retrospective (and thereby updating Rubin) that what Pollock "did" in his classic poured paintings was to transform the graphic flat- ness of Benton's diagrams into optical flatness through an obsessive layering.7

For my own part, I am perfectly willing to accept the comparison, not in the sense that it tells us everything we might ever want to know about Pollock's

technique, but in that it does tell us something worth considering. The question, it seems to me then, is not, is there a connection, but what does the connection

mean.8 To answer, Benton's essay must first be considered on its own terms, within the context of its own historical moment. The five installments of "The Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting" appeared between November 1926 and March 1927 in The Arts, a popular magazine for artists and art amateurs pub- lished in NewYork from 1920 to 1931. Their author was then a young instructor of composition at the Art Students League, some three years away from the com- mission that would make his reputation-his mural paintings at the New School for Social Research-and five years away from interaction with his most famous

5. Thomas Hart Benton, "The Mechanics of Form

Organization in Painting," Parts I-V, The Arts

(November 1926): 285-89; (December 1926): 340-42; (January 1927): 43-44; (February 1927): 95-96; (March 1927): 145-48. Polcari discussed Benton's essays and their role in the development of Pollock's style while Roskill contributed a note crediting the initial insight to Robert Goldwater

(who, according to Roskill, had referred to the Benton diagrams in unpublished lectures many years before). Stephen Polcari, "Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton," Arts Magazine 53

(March 1979): 120-24. Mark Roskill, "Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, and Cubism: A Note," Arts Magazine 53 (March 1979): 144. 6. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 7. Pepe Karmel, "Pollock at Work: The Films and

Photographs of Hans Namuth," inJackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 87-137.

70 WINTER 2004

student. Benton, once an eager student of European modernism (the result of

friendships formed in Paris in 1909 with such stylistic progressives as the coin- ventor of Synchromism, Stanton Macdonald-Wright), was on the cusp of a dra- matic transition in his own work, from aspiring abstractionist to rustic realist.9 What Benton proposed in his article, pointedly in the text and vividly in the

diagrams (the diagrams were commissioned originally by the collector Albert Barnes to illustrate his 1925 book The Art in Painting, a project that fell through when Benton objected that the Impressionist painting with which Barnes was concerned was ill suited to diagrammatic treatment), was to create for an old

topic-the art of composition-a new aura of scientific rationality. In Part I of his "Mechanics" Benton focused on relationships of line and

mass in two dimensions. These consist of the qualities of equilibrium (in which

"static" horizontal and vertical lines and "dynamic" diagonal lines are deployed across the picture in carefully calculated juxtaposition), sequence (arranging lines and shapes so that there is the appearance of paths that, to the empathetic viewer, imply movement into and around the fixed rectangle of the canvas), and

rhythm (an equilibrium achieved by using measured intervals between dynamic sequences, suggestive of repeating patterns). The next three parts are concerned with techniques for suggesting depth. Benton's greatest enthusiasm was reserved for the least stable forms of construction. Regarding equilibrium, Benton recom- mended compositions be built asymmetrically. In terms of sequence, he empha- sized that the artist should capitalize on a viewer's "natural" tendency to imagine incomplete forms (like arcs) as complete and to reconcile even the most dramat-

ically opposed elements into singular movements. In his discussion of rhythm, Benton called particular attention to a form he described as "centrifugal." Unlike more common, "centripetal" forms, in which the intervals between opposed elements are designed to lead a viewer imaginatively into the center of a compo- sition, centrifugal designs coerce the viewer's eye away from implied surfaces. The most demanding of these are compositions that extend horizontally, necessi-

tating the clustering of rhythms into a series of loosely interwoven sets. Part V, the concluding section, is devoted explicitly to the analysis of paintings in which

rhythmic composition appears to be acting in deep space. In their treatment of the "inspired" art of composition as an educable skill

(in sharp divergence from the European academic tradition), Benton's diagrams were far from unique. The systematic teaching of composition had been popular in American art schools at least since the turn of the twentieth century, and Benton certainly was familiar with the best-known practitioners. In his hugely successful and widely disseminated 1899 book Composition, educator Arthur

Wesley Dow of Pratt Institute in New York created compositional formulae based on his analyses of Japanese design and encouraged art students to explore what

he called a picture's "line idea"-an intuitive division of the canvas that was to

precede and make possible the subject of representation. "A picture," Dow wrote,

may be said to be in its actuality a pattern of lines. Could the art student have this fact in view at the outset, it would save him much time and anxiety. Nature will not teach him composition."'' By the 1920s, illustrator Jay Hambidge's more scientistic Dynamic Symmetry had replaced Dow's in popularity. Based on a mathematical theory of proportion (the laws of which, Hambidge claimed, had been distilled by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks from their observations

8. Polcari's essay (see n. 5) is exhaustive in its treatment of the visual aspects of the compari- son. Meaning, on the other hand, clearly is Krauss's interest, and her provocative treatment of the Pollock/Benton case inspires my own

investigation. 9. Yet as Erika Doss has pointed out, Benton defended the style of his new pictures in 1928 in

unabashedly modernist terms. See Doss, 13. 10. Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1920). Dow was rewarded for his efforts with a

position on the faculty of Columbia University's Teachers College, and a generation of American modernists including Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber came of age under the guidance of his and similar systems.

71 art journal

DYNAMIC SYMMETRY 135

tom of the enclosing rectangle, which proportion the details of the foot and the lip, do not need explanation, beyond mention that AB is a square in the center of CD, this area being a whirling square rectangle.

The red-figured lekythos, G. R. 589, Metropolitan Museum, New York, Fig. 16, supplies the ratio 1.528 (compare Amphora, Fig. I, page 91, Chapter VIII). This form may be subdivided into two 1.309 shapes, 1.528 divided by two

Fig. 14. Lekythos G. R. 540, Metropolitan Museum, New York. (Measured and drawn by the Museum Staff.)

PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSI. TION III

Jay Hambidge. Illustration from Dynamic Symmetry:The Greek Vase (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1920), 135.

Arthur Wesley Dow. "Principles of Composition IIl," from the book Compo- sition:A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1899; repr. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, Page, 1920), 25.

George Wesley Bellows. Elinor, Jean and Anna and Old

Lady in Black, ca. 1920. Studies for paintings; pen and black ink over graphite on tracing paper. Sheet: 125 6 X 1 8'" 6 in. (31.3 x 47.8 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seth K. Sweeter Fund. Photograph @ 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

72 WINTER 2004

Walter Smith. Pages from Teachers' Manual for Freehand and Intermediate Drawing in Primary Schools (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), 124-25.

124 TEACHERS' MANUAL.

CARD-EXERCISE VI.

HORIZONTAL REPE•TITION. Guillocho. Leaves and Berries, Conventionalized.

FoRlt. ,,. - Draw five

squares, touching one another

horizontally. Fill them with an endless band, as a, inl the last canrd-exercise, was tilled. Add the parallel side-lines.

Foi:u.t b.- J)raw live squares, touclhing each other horizon-

tally. Fill them with repeated leaves like those inll b, last card-

exercise. Add the parallel side-lines. Foum c. - Draw three squares, touching horizon-

tally. Add their vertical di:amneters, as construction lines, and then fill the squares with repeated flowers, as shown in the copy.

CARD-EXERCISE VII.

Simple and Compound Abstract Curves, Balanced.

The curves 3 2, and 4 2, those which end nearest 1, and the

spirals at the bottom, are all

compound. The other two pairs are simple curves. Remenmber this when drawing the curves.

Draw 1 2. and divide it into four equal parts. Make 334, 5 6, equal to three-fourths of 1 2.

Draw, first, the longest curves 32, 4 2, balancing them

PRACTICAL DESIGN. 125

equally on each side of the vertical line. Draw the

simple curves springing from 5 and 6 to join the curves

firstdran. Divide 1 3 into four equal parts, also 14. From tile central points of division, draw the

simple curves to the centre of the vertical line; and, from the points of division nearest 1. draw the tulip- shaped curves terminating at the lowest point of di- vision on the vertical line. Draw the spirals, with their ends joining the ends of a horizontal line drawn two-thirds of one part of the vertical line above 2. See that all the lines run gracefully into one another.

CAltD-EXEICISE VIII.

Bimple and Compound Abstract Curves, Balanced.

It will be seen that this is a

slight variation of the last ex-

ercise, the spir:ls being d(rawn near the centre of lthe vertical

linle, and the long comlpound curves, terminating near 1, be-

ing drawn from the bottom of the vertical line. Draw, first, the lines on the left, and then those on the right to ialance.

TIlE SPIIRAL.

There are two varieties of the conlpound curve called the spiral. In tile first variety, the distance between the different spires is the same, as shown at I. This is called the equable spiral, because its

had been distilled by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks from their observations

of the organic growth of shells and the sequence of leaf distribution in plants), the sequential diagonals of Dynamic Symmetry provided the abstract scaffolding secreted within such pictorial works as George Bellows's Elinor, Jean, and Anna

(1920)." Mexican muralist Josei Clemente Orozco, an artist Pollock admired

enormously, chose the angular and mechanical forms prescribed by Dynamic

Symmetry to organize his own frescoes for the New School-a commission

executed at the same time and for the same purpose as Benton's.'2

This interest in technologically sophisticated systems for composition was

part of a relentless standardization and self-conscious modernization of artists'

methods that began in the United States immediately following the Civil War- aimed ultimately (and with increasing urgency) at assisting industry by estab-

lishing the teaching of art on a more practical basis.'3 In Massachusetts, the Free

Instruction in Drawing Act of 1870 had provided a mandate for instruction in

industrial or mechanical drawing for any citizen of that state over fifteen years of

age and established compulsory public-school drawing education in the British

style that emphasized the flattening of natural forms based on geometric con-

vention.'4 Educators reached a new consensus following the poor reception of

American decorative and applied-arts products at the Paris Exposition in 1889,

arguing that an education in broader principles would enhance a student's

appreciation of and, ultimately, ability to produce objects of beauty. " In order to

satisfy what was essentially a pragmatic need, to provide drawing education for

industry, advocates of industrial-arts education in the United States exploited

I I. See Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1920), The Parthenon and Other Greek Temples: Their Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1924), Dynamic Symmetry in

Composition as Used by Artists (New York: Brentano's, 1923), and Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932). 12. Robert Storr discusses the Pollock-Orozco connection in his essay "A Piece of the Action," in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 33-69.

13. See Isaac Edwards Clarke, Art and Industry: Education in the Industrial and Fine Arts in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government

Printing Office, 1885). 14. Enhancing their own country's competitive- ness in emerging world markets had been the

goal of art educators in England since at least the

1830s. The practical outcome of this inquiry came

following the Great Exhibition of 185 1 (and con- cern over the poor reception of British applied arts), with the development of the complex of museums and schools known in the nineteenth

century as South Kensington (the core of today's Victoria and Albert Museum). In France as well, there was an increased appreciation for the goals of popular drawing instruction such as was

offered at the Ecole du dessin, the French govern- ment's industrial-art school. Pedagogical reforms initiated during the Second Empire and directed

73 art journal

HenryTurner Bailey. Plate X from Sixty-First Annual Report of the Board of Education ... 1896-1897. (Boston: Wright and Potter, State Printers, 1898), 346-47.

PLate X.

189,.] PUBLIC DoCUMENT-- No. 2. 317

Ilunt" .1I ne, Clouds," Breton's "lecoall , the GleIaners," '' The Sower" and '' The \Water ('arrier," ),y .Millet, :re

good examples~ of Iharmn tlhrough contrnet.* 3. A third element in Irmonyv i. what i. knti own amon•g

artist s • ,, q i of line. The decoretive artists have an de W ,,if :ll oorts of

groupei of lines to fill 01'' eg:tgreehdl',

but thev are reducilnle to two t ylt, which we

may call, fir conven- ience, the fret (Fig. 5) and the wirl ( Fig. 61 In ,e, nrllMony, or repose, is ec-cured

throug.h oppiion in theotther, throughi ,/f 'line. In the fret, lines meet one a:other. -i ftr :as po,.ibl', :t right angle ; in the swirl, the lines foriii, so fra poible, ta:lngential curve.

In the firt, the vyve in

oi•tinually arreted nnd tficed labout; in the second, one line

passe. ttihe eeye along graceftilly to the next. The law of the fret in

competitition; the law1 of the swirl, co-oper-

1. Both opposition andl ilow of line are, to a dciree, inevitable in every wo,rk of art; yLt ion, or the other is

likely to, predominate, :ant. give to the picturo

strenghtt or grce. A, ,t eisui,,eei type of C ne tyle of line

In ,'t',N nos: w!k n low te tO,'ownon. tmioen oI.- s4 )A:r,, n -- n-mow. In Itnek an, tu , e ,%!.v (ao, fonr rxmp:.a In 'pT' n 0c:ud'," tfr .Sp!Ic:nl-.ic I.,V7. "',r:YA)),-- hirmoney 19 i ipctbitbrv,t agrhyhivmIc# .;%w d iInln na. I"0.-M(tlng." lCTe rhyithM tf ilelt andtki no nluh t caroi. i tlcloenint uion area. rather ithitn uun o Intcnltlej. TLe lotncpal linghts mlzho t bi arrtngol In a Fcriel frm thr IrOv! to thi imrillest, ntad h0. I , toks in r,,ti!:cr (jrr F.gl. 6).

St T", O•t Is frbowthe Mznc,-, te cu, d fnmow a O,,thnle wind,•.

cultivated habits of neatness and accuracy, taste, imagination, and the powers of

invention.'6 In 1902, the largest educational organization in the United States, the National Education Association (comprising members from every level of educa-

tion, kindergarten teachers to university presidents), adopted design, defined as the fundamental elements of color, tone, and their harmonious composition, as the goal of art education for the whole country." As a result of this conflation of the utilitarian and the ideal, the effects of modernization may be traced in the

professional practices of painters and sculptors, so-called fine artists, at least as much as in the vocational contexts for which it was intended. '

Benton encountered "modernized" art education as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) between 1907 and 19o8. According to

Benton, what he learned at SAIC was his

first insights into the art of designing-of consciously planning, or compos-

ing, pictures before attempting to execute them. Japanese prints were, very largely because of James McNeill Whistler's influence, much in favor at this time. Fredrick Oswald, my favorite teacher at the Institute, was enthusiastic about these and encouraged continuous study of the way they were put together. Through continued observation of the prints I learned to arrange my pictures in definite patterns and acquired a taste, from such artists as

Hokusai, for flowing lines which lasted all my life...'9

Despite its reputation as a conservative, Beaux Arts academy (due in no small part to anecdotes such as Georgia O'Keeffe's disastrous encounter there with academic figure-drawing teacher John Vanderpoel in 19go, and various

toward training a new generation of industrial

designers (both by making fine artists responsive to industry and by educating a wider population in the basic principles of design) resulted, according to Albert Boime, in the French Academy's adop- tion of abbreviated methods of instruction in 1863. See Stuart Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (New York: American Elsevier

Publishing, 1970), 169-70, 181-82, and Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971) and "The Teaching Reforms of 1863 and the Origins of Modernism in France," The Art

Quarterly I, n.s. (1977): 1-39. 15. Henry T. Bailey, "Report," in Sixty-First Annual Report of the Board of Education... 1896-1897 (Boston: Wright and Potter, State Printers, 1898), 332-61. 16. See Framing the Past: Essays on Art Education, ed. Donald Soucy and Mary Ann Stankiewicz

(Reston, Va.: National Art Education Association, 1990), especially Paul E. Bolin, "The Massachu- setts Drawing Act of 1870: Industrial Mandate or Democratic Maneuver?" 59-68, and Patricia M.

Amburgy, "Culture for the Masses: Art Education and Progressive Reforms, 1880-1917," 102-14. 17. Langdon S. Thompson, "Report of the Com- mittee of Ten on Elementary Art Education," Proceedings of the National Educational Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1902): 594-614. 18. Professional art schools responded to the pressure to offer students more "practical" train-

74 WINTER 2004

accounts of reactionary students and faculty during the 1913 exhibition of the

Armory Show), SAIC was from the beginning an eclectic and pragmatic institu- tion.20 Chicago was one of the nation's largest centers for commercial printing, including binding, lithography, photoengraving, and electrotyping-industries that employed large numbers of artists and craftsmen-and SAIC offered techni- cal training to working-class men as early as 1882. Composition courses were introduced in I897, in the context of the school's new program in the "modern arts" of illustration and advertising.2' SAIC's catalogue for 1901 notes that acade- mic life- and antique-drawing classes were restricted to mornings only; after- noons featured more progressive fare-including still-life painting, courses that concentrated on drawing geometric forms from solid blocks, composition, illus-

tration, and figure classes for beginners that emphasized sketching and memory practice.22 In fact, SAIC so enthusiastically embraced the latest trends in peda- gogy that, upon the occasion ofVanderpoel's death in 1911, Art Institute director William M. R. French was moved to observe that, in line with the trend of the

time, the school had become a "modern school of color and composition." It is no coincidence that the question of how best to train young artists

had acquired its urgency at the same moment that the emphasis in America's factories was on increasing industrial output through the rationalization of the

processes of production. Taylorism, the system of time management originated in the late nineteenth century in the United States by Frederick Winslow Taylor and publicized in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, encouraged the idea that there was a "science" for the efficient implementation of every job- and art was no exception. Yet Taylor not only did not eschew spontaneity in his initial formulations, his system actually depended on a certain amount of it. As

Taylor observed and analyzed both the laboring body and the processes of pro- duction, breaking down tasks into their constitutive parts and assigning each an ideal time for its execution, he made no prescriptions as to how (that is, by what techniques) a worker was to satisfy the increased demands of the new

schedule. Taylor simply dismissed anything less than ideal performance as "sol-

diering"-his term for intentional malingering or laziness. In 1957, however,

Meyer Schapiro was able to offer the simple fact of Abstract Expressionist spon- taneity as self-evidently critical of the culture of work. (Craven, though not

Schapiro, fingers the ideology and restrictive practices of Taylorism by name.) This is because the efficiency movement in American manufacturing escalated in the increasingly competitive and profit-driven climate of the 192os, as con- cerned Taylorites moved to redress the absence of direct demonstration in their founder's system. For Taylor, who understood human efficiency as analogous with that of a machine, it had been enough to link the analysis of work processes with ideal times for their execution. The problem for Taylor's followers and

rivals, notably the contracting engineer Frank B. Gilbreth and his wife, the psy- chologist Lillian M. Gilbreth, was that this left the exact motion required subject to interpretation-more a matter of art than science.

The Gilbreths devoted themselves to the study of motion-literally to the

quest to find each task's perfect execution-by concentrating their attention on talented individuals and the specific tasks at which they excelled. Marshaling the

technology of the chronocyclograph to record ideal motion as exactly as possible, the Gilbreths later "fixed" the results of their photographic motion studies in the

ing in composition as well. In 1899, for example, the popular mural painter Will Low accused the traditional art academies of "glutting" the art mar- ket with too many ill-prepared young hopefuls (he named the School of the Art Institute of

Chicago in particular). According to Low, art stu- dents needed training in composition-what he described as the art of "welding" together the raw materials of representation into articulate

expression-in order to be competitive: "As at

present constituted our schools serve principally to enable a student to draw and paint, more or less correctly, a figure from life .... He advances

through various grades of the school, and at last steps out into the world to find that he has learned how but not what to do. . ." Low laid out his argument in practical terms. Art schools, he claimed, were producing more artists than the market reasonably could be expected to absorb.

Only a tiny proportion of these possessed the

genius to operate ahead of trends and tastes. It was therefore the duty of the art school first to be more selective about admitting only students

likely to succeed at their profession, and second to provide those students with the tools to prac- tice within the mainstream world of commercial art. The perfect school, Low argued, would be similar to the workshops of the Italian Renaissance, where students imbibed the secrets of their art

through the pragmatics of its execution. Absent this possibility, Low recommended that more sig- nificance be attached to such courses in composi- tion as already existed in some art schools. W. H. Low, "The Education of the Artist, Here and Now," Scribner's Magazine 25 (June 1899): 766-67. 19. Thomas Hart Benton, An American in Art (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1969). When his name first appears in SAIC's 1902-03 catalogue, Oswald is listed as an advanced student acting as assistant teacher in the juvenile classes held on Saturdays-this at a time when course work in Arthur Dow's meth- ods was required of all student teachers by the School's Normal department. 20. See listings in The Art Institute of Chicago, School Catalogue (Chicago: Art Institute of

Chicago, 1886 and 1890). I discuss the early- twentieth-century tradition of integrated fine- and industrial-arts education and the case of the Art Institute of Chicago in particular in my article "Before the New Bauhaus: From Industrial

Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago," Design Issues 21 (Winter 2005). 21. The Art Institute of Chicago, School Catalogue (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 190 1). 22. The Art Institute of Chicago Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Trustees for the Year Ending June I, 1901 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1901).

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Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth. "Move- mentTranslated into Wire Models," ca. 1912, from Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers on the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness (New York: Sturgis and Watson, 1917).

!"c. 11;

Fio. 17

form of three-dimensional wire models that carefully calibrated movement

against axes representing time and space. In theory, these could then be studied

by other workers (in this example, the model illustrates successive attempts to

perform a specialized task by a retired, though once expert, worker).2" The

Gilbreths' Darwinian determinism, with its codification of what was once indi- vidual ingenuity and initiative, triumphed in the 1920s over Taylor's less obviously hierarchical or exacting methods. So did Benton's mechanics, themselves an

escalation of earlier, more or less spontaneous approaches such as Dow's. Not

only was Benton's compositional system more demonstrative and less technical than others, it was more directly concerned with metaphysics-with under-

standing the new paradigms of time and space posited in the psychological the-

ory of empathy, for example.24 In their foray into the all-important case of deep space-for Benton, the expressive apotheosis of painting (he notes that in com-

position two forms of diagrammatic representation are necessary, one that fol-

23. Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers on the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness (New York:

Sturgis and Watson, 1917). While it is difficult to imagine their demonstrations worked well in actu- al practice, the Gilbreths achieved minor celebrity on the basis of personal efficiency-documented in the classic memoir about them (and 1950 movie of the same title), Cheaper by the Dozen (New York: Crowell, 1948), authored by two of their children, Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. 24. Referencing perceptual psychology, Benton criticizes its practitioners for their too willful

obscurity: "What can actually be seen to work and what can be diagrammatically expressed is alone valuable," he writes, "The rest is verbal inference good for people more interested in the- ories than in the study of constructive facts." He

rejects William James explicitly as "vague" and "sentimental," comparing James's work unfavor-

ably to his own, presumably more rigorous indict- ment of color as of only secondary importance.

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Thomas Hart Benton. Page from "The Mechanics of Form Organization, Part IV," The Arts I I (February 1927): 95.Text @ T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamen- tary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, NewYork, N.Y.

MECHANICS OF FORM ORGANIZATION IN PAINTING

BY? THOMAS fI. BE, N T()ON EIDiwroui NaOITE: •s this essay enters ( tIont-

paratively newJi field int hich there is much to be ditscovered, the author iould be Ivery glad to Irecive suggestions or criticisms from readers.

The first three parts of this essay appeared in our N'ovember, December and January issues.

PRTi IV.

T H-E first figures of this paper were devoted to

rhythmical arrangements of lines and masses; it will be necessary nol w to show that the same prin- ciple of mtovement and counter-movemrent holds good ior the relations of convexities and concavities. A simple demonstration of this can be found very readily in the lhuman body. Take for instance an arm stripped to the shoulder (Fig. J). There are here a series of masses which bulge and hollows which recede. These are organized around a cen- tral vertical, the bone, and are so distributed that there is no possibility of collision between the bulg- ing masses a when a change in the arm's position causes them to shift. This shifting takes place alongt the lines of the hollows -which are filled, emptied and refilled with the chaniging positions of the arm. For every cmoavement of a mass there is an equilibrat- ing counter-movement whict h finds "expression" also in a new alignment of the hollows (Fig. K). It. will be noticed that the arrangement of these hol- lows andt bulges forms a very clear rhythmical pat- tern, that is, thear are rlpetitions at alternate inter- vals of similar movemenfts, different in the different positions of the arim.

During the Renaissance in Italy beginning withi Siginorelli iand finding consummate expressiion in the sculptures and single figiures of Michael Angelo, this phytiiological principle was consciously appliedt in a form of direct transference to the building tup of plastic structures. Muscular shift and counter- shift as visible external phenomena became a specific compositional determinant. Facts of direct muscu- lar experience were projected into the actual build- ing process.

'his finds an interesting sort of theoretical parallel in the Einffihlung Theory of Lipps andt Groos, paraphirased in England under the iname of Empathyiv by Lee and Thompson and later in this country used tfor esthetic evaluations by Wtn . H. Wright. Simply stated, the theory presents

:esthetic perceptionsl as the results of changes in physiological functions which produce feelings of exhilarationi, keenness, expansion; or negatively, de- pression, weariness, disgust, which are automatically projected back into the object originally engaging the perceptive activitivities causing us to like or dis- like it, to resptond to it or turn away from it.

Like most theories which attempt to explain the

J K

whole oft art on the basis of some single principle, it fails by omission. The physiological facts on which the theory is based accotmpany every perceptive activity and could hardly be sufficiently descriptive or explanatory of the special form of atsthetic ex- perience to be worth their isolation for the purpose. They accompany our tm sthetic responses but are no more determining factors than many other psycho- physiological concomitants of such experience.

In the practical field of actual construction, how- etver, observation of the rich and intricate field of mutscilar action is responsible for much fine com- positional work:. Engaging developments of the principle as applied to "color construction" were madeI by the neo-C'ezannists. In this country the work of S. Macdonald Wright from 1916t to 1918 grew very richly from such interests.

The whole development of Renaissance form in its material aspect, blossomed one might say ftrom an interest in anatomy! The strictly mechanical values of all Renaissance composition irom Sig- norelli to Rubens can be traced to an extension of muscular action patterns, Had the theories of Lipps and his followers been limited to a simple

95

lows superficial rhythmic relationships and another that translates these patterns into their cubic equivalents)-Benton's diagrams do more than provide the gen- erative framework of Dow's two-dimensionally oriented line-idea or Hambidge's flexible triangles. Like the Gilbreths' wire models, Benton's diagrams insist upon the priority of a "one best way."

Line, for Benton, signaled intellectual activity (thus his diagrammatic treat-

ment) but also remained rooted in the immediacy of bodily performance. In fact, Benton's mechanics emphasized deep space, a space distorted for maximum

psychological and expressive effect. More significantly, he argued that all compo- sitional organization is based on a shared experience of embodied movement: "In the 'feel' of our own bodies," he wrote,

in the sight of the bodies of others, in the bodies of animals, in the shapes of growing and moving things, in the forces of nature and in the engines of man, the rhythmic principle of movement and counter-movement is made

25. This, of course, had always been the goat of

Taylor's methods; what the Gilbreths add is the means.

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Jackson Pollock. Number 10, 1949. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas mounted on board. 18Y x 107Y in. (46 x 272.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,Tompkins Collection and Sophie M. Friedman Fund.@ Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork. Photograph @ 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

manifest. But in our own bodies it can be isolated and understood. This mechanical principle which we share with all life can be abstracted and used in constructing and analyzing things which also in their way have life and reality. 6

The illusion of depth, according to Benton, whether it appeals to the visual sense (through such devices as the overlapping of flat planes) or to the tactile

(through perspectival projections of cubic forms), is always a function of anal-

ogy-always, in his word, inferred. Human anatomy, he insisted, is the basis of that analogy: the characteristic action of muscular movement, with its succession of rippling bulges and recessions organized around a fixed center of bone, Benton told his readers, is "responsible for much fine compositional work." What Benton's mechanics do, in other words, is to aestheticize the country's industrial-age obsession with efficient movement.

No one learned this lesson better than Jackson Pollock. To be sure, Pollock's

concept of allover composition closely follows Benton's recommendations-but the connection between Pollock's technique and Benton's pedagogy is deeper than surface similarity. What Pollock did certainly looks like Benton's diagrams (obsessively layered or not); it is also deeply, ideologically implicated with them. What Pollock did, I suggest, was to invert his mentor's system, using it to recon- ceive the relationship between the schematic representation of the gesture or

pose of the human figure in action and the representation of his own embodied

gesture. In this sense, the image of human motion visualized in the early twen- tieth century by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth may serve as a model for reading Pollock. I'll remind you that the Gilbreth models represent successive attempts to

recapture past performance by a once-expert worker-not simply the "one best

way," but the incremental progress through which perfection was to be achieved. Under the force of the comparison, the artist's gestures appear not so much

spontaneous as mechanical-repetitive marks arrayed diagrammatically within the flattening of time and space that is the (presumptive) perspectival grid of the

canvas.27 One imagines that as Pollock flailed somewhat awkwardly toward the elusive goal of mastery, covering his tracks (so to speak) as he went, his faith in the ideology of the "one best way" was sorely tested. The pathetic beauty of the

26. Benton, February 1927, 96. 27. Choreographed, to use the suggestive terms of Andy Warhol's 1962 series Dance Diagrams. 28. Howard Singerman traces the interweaving of these threads in his Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). Lisa Fellows Andrus has argued further that all American art schools have their origin in technical education- even when teaching art traditionally, through exclusive emphasis on figure drawing and anato-

my. See Lisa Fellows Andrus, Measure and Design in American Painting, 1760-1860 (New York: Columbia University, 1976), especially Chapter Five, "The Development of a Practical Basis for Institutionalized Art Education." 29. My book Diagrammatics: Industrialism and the Modernizing of American Art (University of

Chicago Press, in progress) will explore this point.

78 WINTER 2004

work that resulted dramatizes the uneasy relationship between movement and

mechanization, the individual and the assembly line, becoming, paradoxically (or perhaps I should say, as the Gilbreths would have hoped), the model for successive generations of mannered performance.

Produced under the standardizing imperative of industrialism, Pollock's work is more like work-ordinary work-than art history has been able to

acknowledge. At the very least, recognizing this similarity restores to Pollock's

project an aspect of its ambivalent sociability. At the same time, the recognition serves to dispel the kind of reactionary logic that has posited the "mechanical" art of the i96os as a reaction to the "manual" art of the I9gos. Celebrated for its

physicality, Pollock's innovative line (to use Schapiro's term) signifies within a tradition of scientifically managed production the loss of spontaneity that such

systems as Taylor's made inevitable. The ironic substitution of terms (mechanical for spontaneous, ordinary for heroic, standardized for original) gives the case of Benton and Pollock its particular pleasures. But my argument has larger impli- cations. The tangled trajectory of fine- and applied-arts education in the United States-the conflation of the utilitarian and the ideal in progressive-era move- ments such as manual training and industrial arts-ensures that most early- twentieth-century American artists had some form of technical education.28

Pollock's own first brush with progressive education came several years before he met Benton, at, as it turns out, approximately the same moment that Benton's

essays were appearing in print: between the fall of 1926 and spring 1927, when Pollock was enrolled at the Manual Training School in Riverside, California, and

immediately after, through fall 1929, when he attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. If this troubles our understanding of what modernist painting was (in my own late-modernist art-school education we learned to paint as if it were a natural act), then all the better. With due apologies to Schapiro, making visible the effects of this largely invisible history on the "advent" of American modernism (and abstraction in particular) must be part of the project to recon-

ceptualize modernism's developmental contexts in their full complexity.29

Barbara Jaffee is assistant professor of art history at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. Her work on American modernism and design has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies.

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