Art: The Tribal Style

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Ab Ex at the Whitney Museum

As the first "grand" American style, mature abstract expressionism (painted from about 1950 onward) has been studied and shown almost to exhaustion. Shaped into an institution by the growing system of critics, dealers, curators and Government cultural agencies, the once fragile and isolated-looking works of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Gorky and their peers became the emblems of a cultural empire: no style or movement since surrealism was diffused so fast, or imposed itself as completely on painters around the world. But the earlier work of these artists, done before, during and just after World War II, is still patchily known. Last week the first thorough retrospective of it, "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years," went on view at New York City's Whitney Museum: an altogether fascinating show of 120 paintings by 15 artists, assembled by Art Historians Robert Carleton Hobbs and Gail Levin.

It should give the coup de grâce to the lingering idea that abstract expressionism was a "native" movement. On the contrary: it was unimaginable without its source, surrealism. Indeed, it was the last great efflorescence of romantic imagery in art. The New York painters were very selective about the modernist enterprise. They had lived through the Depression and arrived on the edge of a world war. They were not apt to believe in art-induced utopias—the rationalization of mankind through ideal form. So the Bauhaus-constructivist line meant little to them. Surrealism, however, was more congenial. To begin with, it was an art of subject matter; and although platoons of later critics would discuss abstract expressionism in purely formalist terms, the painters themselves were obsessed by content. "We assert," said Mark Rothko, "that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." His "we" included Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes, Theodores Stamos and, in greater or lesser degrees, all the abstract expressionists with the possible exception of de Kooning.

But tragic and timeless subjects were not to be found on the street. The American artists wanted to locate their discourse beyond events, in a field not bound by historical time, that went back to preliterate, "primitive" tribal antiquity. The notion of ritual occupied the same place in their work that the idea of the "marvelous" did in French surrealism. Totem, cave, prison, sentinel, medium, personage, priest: such were the recurrent images of the '40s.

In a real sense the abstract expressionists in their early years were like religious artists without a context, practicing a deeply felt but homeless (and culturally impossible) totemism. Some, like Pollock, drew direct inspiration from Southwest Indian art, transforming it—as in The Key, 1946—into the congested, baroque rhetoric of shape which would later be refined as the allover skeins and webs of his drip paintings. Still and Rothko regarded their art as mediumistic: it was, Still declared, a way of "being with in a revelation," and this kind of priestly bombast was a regular feature of abstract expressionist utterances. Painting accumulated resonance by appealing to myth.