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22 - Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso

from Section C - Abundance, 1961–1971

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Summary

Most of Alloway's revisionism in the 1960s focused, understandably, on Abstract Expressionism because so much art of the 1960s was a reaction against it. As the orthodoxy it had provided had been successfully challenged, it was time to re-evaluate it. The re-evaluation would have largely to focus on the individuals who comprised it because, as he argued in 1965, initially, “their impact on the world was as a group or, at least, as a cluster of individuals identified with the United States. Now, however, the personal attitudes and unique characteristics of each artist are visible within the general experience of breakthrough and drastically modified tradition.” Furthermore, the early deaths of Gorky (1948), Pollock (1956), Kline (1962), Baziotes (1963), David Smith (1965), and Hofmann (1966 but not early) led to a spate of retrospectives.

Alloway, while still in England, wrote three times about Jackson Pollock in 1961. At this stage he was still preaching to the unconverted, but as Pollock's reputation became less controversial during the 1960s, his occasional articles on the artist turned to a more art historical re-evaluation. For example, in 1969 he reassessed Pollock's so-called black paintings of 1950 and 1951. The purpose of the text is art historical: he is disagreeing with Michael Fried that Pollock's abandonment of contour in his black paintings in 1951 represents a diminution of his avant-garde contribution. He provides a close analysis of several paintings and concludes that “a close look at the black paintings shows why Fried is wrong: as a rule, Pollock's iconography is not conveyed by volumeinducing lines. The lines not only have a non-directional property, as they stain out onto the canvas, but the sign system in use is not one based on the perception of solids and their translation into a two-dimensional system.” He explains why this matters: “I see the originality of the drip paintings, 1947–50, as extended unexpectedly, brilliantly, and successfully by Pollock through the first year of the black paintings, whereas Fried makes a 1950 cut-off point which I regard as brutally premature.”

Other Abstract Expressionists were re-evaluated. Just after the Arshile Gorky exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962–1963, Alloway wrote an analysis of the artist's work which shifted the emphasis away from his influence on Abstract Expressionism, toward a re-evaluation of his earlier work.

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Art and Pluralism
Lawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism
, pp. 263 - 269
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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