Painting: The New Ancestors

No avant-garde art movement has ever won such instant recognition—and evoked such instant outrage—as did Abstract Expressionism, the movement that sprang from the lofts of downtown Manhattan and the studios at the far tip of Long Island in the turbulent years after World War II. Its trademark was a photograph of Jackson Pollock, intently swirling skeins of paint from a stick onto a canvas laid flat on a floor. "The most powerful painter in contemporary America," declared Critic Clement Greenberg. "Chaos . . . wallpaper . . . an elaborate if meaningless tangle of cordage and smears," complained the more conventional commentators.

Today Abstract Expressionists enjoy the status, both esthetic and financial, of old masters. And like old masters, they have been declared dead by the brashest of the avantgarde. But they changed the course of art. Whether for better or worse is arguable; that they did, is incontestable.

But nowhere can these Abstract Expressionists be seen as a group. Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened a show that aspired both to re-examine the movement's range and, by implication, to plead for more space to make a permanent shrine for this radical movement that first established U.S. leadership in the world of art. In a reproachful sentence intended to inspire donations to its building fund, the museum's press releases note that all the works belong to the museum or have been promised to it, but have mostly not been displayed for lack of space.

Explosion of Spirit. Just what was this movement that unhinged years of European confidence in its own authority as custodian of Western culture? Curator William Rubin, who assembled the show, carefully avoids either the term Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting. He settles for the title "The New American Painting and Sculpture: The First Generation." The catalogue defines the school as those artists who shared "common goals, a common revolutionary élan, a common disengagement from middle-class values." They were determined to challenge modernist European tradition, and the six-year interlude of the war had proved they were no longer dependent on it. What resulted was an enormous explosion of spirit that was peculiarly American.

As the show demonstrates, the major figures were highly individual artists. Perhaps their only unifying characteristic was exuberance—exuberance of size, exuberance of gesture. Instead of the carefully calculated stroke, there was the swirl of Pollock's drip paintings, the splattered brilliance of Willem de Kooning's terrifying women. Franz Kline's huge black-on-white compositions showed no more sophistication than a Chinese ideograph, but they conveyed the energy of the man that made them—and commanded a whole wall rather than a corner of a scroll. The smoldering color clouds of Mark Rothko drew a viewer in like a smoke-filled room, where unidentified objects lurk just beyond the eye's peripheral vision.

Barnett Newman used huge canvases to state the most starkly simple images—a vertical white line on a towering black canvas, for instance.