Mary Gabriel provides a distinctive history of abstract expressionism as a distinctively American movement, focusing on 5 women and also many of the men who played major roles in their lives. The 5 women artists had men as friends, as lovers, husbands, gallery owners and art dealers. Furthermore, the male artists got more attention and led the movement, so it is not possible to understand the movement without understanding the men. So Gabriel gives a lot of discussion of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Archile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and critic Clement Greenberg, to name a few.

Gabriel’s account is long at 944 pages. But the story goes fast, spanning from the 1920s to the 1960s, with then a brief survey of what happened after. The geographical focus is Manhattan and the Hamptons in Long Island, with occasional detours to Europe. She proceeds chronologically. The book makes a strong case that abstract expressionism was centered in New York and was the first major American art movement. Gabriel details the lives of the artists and their interactions, starting with Krasner. It also included women more than subsequent movements of the 60s.

There is plenty of drama which makes the story gripping. Most of the main protagonists started out poor, or from middle class families, and ended up wealthy. As working artists, they lived and worked in unheated apartments They drank, argued, did drugs, argued, had sex, listened to jazz, fought, and painted. Gabriel has done an enormous amount of research. The book provides a fascinating history of the movement and the role of the 5 women. 

However, a major problem with the book is that Gabriel’s terms of explanation totally buy into a romantic conception of life and art with almost no critical distance on the ideas she is using. She assumes that there are strong distinctions between artists and non-artists. A true artist has a special status, and really only artists can understand other artists. Artists are not bound by the same rules as other people. Artists have genius. Furthermore, their essence is to be an artist. After a fallow period, artists are reborn. Gabriel says very little about how this group of artists inherited this way of thinking. Presumably they were influenced by European traditions, adopted by the earlier generation, such as Picasso and Matisse. Exactly when this romantic notion of the artist started is a matter of artistic history, but it must go back at least to the early 19th century with figures such as the poets Byron, Wordsworth and Coleridge. 

This conceptual approach is apparently how the abstract expressionists thought of themselves, so it is appropriate to bring it in. But given that the twentieth century also questioned the idea of the artist as well as what counts as art, it seems simplistic to stick to this approach. Further, this romantic status of the artist is frankly highly implausible, and ironically it is Gabriel’s account hints as to why. The social and artistic conditions are largely what give rise to an artistic movement like abstract expressionism — it was reacting to the European avant garde art, and to the horrors of the first world war and the resulting economic depression. Gabriel talks a lot about these factors, but does not do enough to connect them with the genesis of the art. The group she is discussing formed a close-knit set and they talked with each other and followed each other’s art. Then there is the reception of sponsorship, sales, critics, galleries and museums. The understanding of their art is not just a matter of seeing the genius of their work: the reception is created by people with power. There are fads and fashions about who is in and who is out. 

The challenge to abstract art and indeed a good deal of modern art is to justify its value. Simply saying that it is the work of a genius artist does not get very far, and resorts to an obscurantism. It is notable that the artists she discussed resisted explaining their art, and resisted any theories that allowed people to assess the quality of art. There was a lot of reference to self-expression and emotions but very little explanation of how their art did that.

One of the main issues raised by Gabriel’s account is to what extent the artists should be held responsible for their terrible behavior. Jackson Pollock is the central example here. Gabriel says that he was two people: the sober and the drunk. The sober Pollock was charming and creative. The drunk Pollock was angry and destructive. Presumably she is not serious about some kind of multiple personality diagnosis. Pollock was an alcoholic who behaved terribly, especially to Lee Krasner, his wife. Gabriel makes out Krasner to be a long suffering saint who was forever committed to getting the world to recognize the genius of Jackson. Other accounts are rather less flattering towards Krasner. 

Gabriel does several times say that Pollock had a disease with the implication that he was not to blame for his behavior. In the background is the idea that it was his status as an artist that is what means he should not be held to the same standards as others. It’s generally true for all the abstract expressionists that she is very keen to praise their work as artists and is her hesitant to condemn their actions as human beings, and that is especially true with Pollock. 

Krasner left for a trip to Europe largely as a result of Pollock’s affair with Ruth Kligman. Gabriel has no sympathy for Kligman, and depicts her entirely as scheming and pathological, but completely out of her depth in her encounters with the world of abstract expressionists. Not long after Krasner left, Pollock got drunk in eastern Long Island and raced his car with his two passengers, Kligman and Edith Metzger, both in their twenties. They were terrified and Metzger begged him to stop. He fed off their terror, as he had done in similar episodes with other passengers. He crashed the car, killing himself and Metzger. (Notoriously, Kligman survived and went on to have an affair with Willem de Kooning.)

In retrospect, we might wonder whether Pollock’s only psychiatric diagnosis is substance dependence. He was seen by several doctors. A couple diagnosed him with manic depression, but Gabriel never mentions this. What Gabriel does argue is that at least under the influence of alcohol, Pollock was jealous, vindictive, sadistic, a liar, manipulative, and violent. Gabriel says that no matter how he made life hard for others, his self-hate was greater, but she doesn’t provide evidence for that. The behavior she describes gives the impression that Pollock was very invested in hurting others. 

Krasner returned from Europe and started organizing the funeral for her husband. She asked art critic Clem Greenberg to give the eulogy for Pollock. Greenberg refused, saying he could not talk about Pollock without also talking about the woman he had killed, Edith Metzger. But at a wake for Pollock in a Manhattan bar a few days later, artists were drunk and dancing in honor of the artist. Within weeks, Krasner had decided to raise the price of Pollock’s paintings by four-fold, and museums started paying what she demanded for them. Gabriel recounts these events with little comment, and is apparently happy to go along with the stereotype of the tortured artist. 

Pollock was by no means the only of these artists to behave badly. Willem de Kooning was certainly also prone to hurting people, and judging from Gabriel’s account, despite “falling in love” with his baby when he became a father, he also placed his child in danger and had no interest in fulfilling the obligations of fatherhood. Few marriages in the group lasted long, and generally the artists prioritized their art over their children. They also seemed to be lacking in much insight into their own behavior, even when they were in psychoanalysis. 

The picture Gabriel paints is of a group of self-obsessed people who were not just focused on art and breaking the rules of society, but seemed to lack much understanding of morality or human relationships. While Gabriel takes pains to contextualize race issues facing the USA in the 1950s, she gives very little indication that the artists paid any attention to them, aside from enjoying jazz. 

Gabriel’s admiration and enthusiasm for the people and their lives suggests that everything is justified by art, whatever other flaws they had. But her account highlights the question of why that should be. These days we are very attuned to the ways that celebrities and those in the entertainment industry have used their power to abuse others and get away with it, and there seems to be some parallel between that and the “myth of the artist” that suffuses her understanding of this innovative movement. Maybe this approach has got something deeply wrong with it. Maybe we shouldn’t just value the work of these “great artists” independently of how they treated other people. 

Christian Perring regularly teaches philosophy of art. 

Categories: ArtAndPhotography, Memoir, Biography

Keywords: abstract expressionism, female artists, biography