Dubuffet believed the art of children, the mentally unbalanced, pris-
oners, and outcasts was more direct and genuine because those who
created it did so unrestrained by conventional standards of art. He
promoted “art brut”—untaught and coarse art.Abstract Expressionism
In the 1940s, the center of the Western art world shifted from Paris to
New York because of the devastation World War II had inflicted across
Europe and the resulting influx of émigré artists escaping to the
United States. American artists picked up the European avant-garde’s
energy, which movements such as Cubism and Dada had fostered, but
in the postwar years, modernism increasingly became synonymous
with a strict formalism—an emphasis on an artwork’s visual elements
rather than its subject. The most important champion of New York
formalist painting was the American art critic Clement Greenberg
(1909–1994), who wielded considerable influence from the 1940s
through the 1970s. Greenberg helped redefine the parameters of mod-
ernism by advocating the rejection of illusionism and the exploration
of the properties of each artistic medium. So dominant was Greenberg
that scholars often refer to the general modernist tenets during this
period as Greenbergian formalism.
Although Greenberg modified his complex ideas about art over
the years, he consistently expounded certain basic concepts. In partic-
ular, he promoted the idea of purity in art. “Purity in art consists in
the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium
of the specific art.”^2 In other words, Greenberg believed artists should
strive for a more explicit focus on the properties exclusive to eachmedium—for example, two-dimensionality or flatness in painting,
and three-dimensionality in sculpture.It follows that a modernist work of art must try, in principle, to
avoid communication with any order of experience not inherent in
the most literally and essentially construed nature of its medium.
Among other things, this means renouncing illusion and explicit
subject matter. The arts are to achieve concreteness, “purity,” by
dealing solely with their respective selves—that is, by becoming
“abstract” or nonfigurative.^3Abstract Expressionism,the first major American avant-garde
movement, emerged in New York in the 1940s. As the name suggests,
the artists associated with the New York School of Abstract Expres-
sionism produced paintings that are, for the most part, abstract but
express the artist’s state of mind with the goal also of striking emo-
tional chords in the viewer. The Abstract Expressionists turned inward
to create, and the resulting works convey a rough spontaneity and pal-
pable energy. The New York School painters wanted the viewer to
grasp the content of their art intuitively, in a state free from structured
thinking. The artist Mark Rothko (FIG. 36-9) eloquently wrote:We assert man’s absolute emotions. We don’t need props or legends.
We create images whose realities are self evident. Free ourselves from
memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth. Instead of making
cathedrals out of Christ, man or life, we make it out of ourselves, out
of our own feelings. The image we produce is understood by anyone
who looks at it without nostalgic glasses of history.^4972 Chapter 36 EUROPE AND AMERICA AFTER 194536-5Jackson Pollock,Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas,
7 3 9 10 . National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund).
Pollock’s paintings emphasize the creative process. His mural-size canvases consist of rhythmic drips, splatters,
and dribbles of paint that envelop viewers, drawing them into a lacy spider web.1 ft.36-5AGORKY,
Garden in
Sochi,ca. 1943.