Painting: The New Ancestors

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Because the paintings of these founding fathers were mostly abstract, art historians have generally argued that Abstract Expressionism was a descendant of analytical Cubism, or the abstractionism of Russia's Wassily Kandinsky. Curator Rubin argues that the style's most immediate ancestor is Surrealism. His case is convincing.

Gathered penniless in New York in the politically volatile 1930s, artists boned up like magpies on a dozen different artistic idioms, haunting museums and devouring books when not studying at the Art Students League. Arshile Gorky, the Armenian refugee, was initially a devotee of Ingres, Léger, Matisse, Cézanne and Kandinsky. Robert Motherwell drew much of his inspiration from Matisse. De Kooning, the Dutch immigrant, was closer to Cubism and de Stijl; Pollock, the shy Westerner, studied under Thomas Hart Benton, and was influenced by Mexico's David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. They all talked—and talked. Critic Thomas Hess observes that "a long, chaotic, brilliant, funny conversation about art began in the mid-1930s and continued for more than 20 years."

Surrealism soon became a principal topic of conversation. The surrealist émigrés from Europe (Roberto Malta, André Masson, Max Ernst) arrived during World War II, and their intellectual intensity impressed the Americans. Some, including Motherwell and David Hare, worked with the surrealists and published in their small magazines. Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery gave many of the "new American pioneers" their first one-man shows.

Gorky became rather more a surrealist than anything else. His canvases seethed with strange, diseased, weirdly colored, biomorphic forms that hover in a mindless galaxy halfway between flower and viscera. Agony was completed in 1947 and reflects several personal catastrophes, past, present and to come. The burning down of his Connecticut studio, a cancer operation and a crippling automobile accident ultimately led Gorky to take his own life.

Lingering Symbols. The dream totems and the enigmatic pictographs of the early canvases of Adolph Gottlieb, Pollock and Rothko also betrayed surrealist origin. As Curator Rubin observes, the moody, poetic, apocalyptic spirit that broods over explicitly surrealistic pictures lingers in the later, totally abstract canvases of these same artists. To emphasize this point, Rothko's Magenta, Black, Green on Orange is placed in a small, partially darkened, melancholy chapel-like gallery, while the spiky Gothic tracery of Clyfford Still's painting, 1947-J shares a gallery with four other Stills—and a spiky Gothic metal sculpture by Theodore Roszak. Gottlieb's cryptic Descending Arrow hovers in a cerise dream world, halfway between traffic sign and sexual symbol.

Pollock in particular borrowed the surrealists' "automatist" technique of letting the unconscious direct the brush. The single room in which 15 of the museum's Pollocks are displayed is easily the highlight of the far-ranging exhibition.