Not Just America

A postwar generation of art lovers more or less assumed that if a painting was big, colourful, unruly and above all, abstract, then it was American. However, a visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s exhibition “Intensely Dutch”—a big, colourful, unruly and abstract would not only put paid to this notion, but would raise questions about how the American contingent could have so successfully hogged the art-world limelight from the late 1940s through to the 1960s.

Another observation which might follow close on its heels is that many of the best-known of the Australian abstractionists, some of them European arrivals before and after the war, clearly drew sustenance from their European cousins for the works they exhibited through the late 1950s and 1960s in Australia.

How did American postwar painting become so closely associated with modernity—indeed its key disseminator—when America had only received it courtesy of those who spent time on the continent during the great explosion of “isms”? The answer lies with the postwar realignment of Europe.

Modernism as a viable ongoing element of the visual arts in Western culture was hamstrung on two fronts. First, the Nazi regime had discredited the modernists, hounding them, burning their works, and exhibiting them in an orchestrated propaganda exercise called “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) in Munich in 1937. Artists such as Emile Nolde, Ernst Barlach, Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckman and Otto Dix might have found themselves out in the cold where the official art establishment was concerned, but behind the scenes there were many who recognised their importance, and a great swell of buying and selling went on behind the scenes. Germany’s murderous regime was attempting to identify itself with a chimeric classical past, and we have plenty of reminders of the saccharine and stylised results in architectural building programs even beyond Germany’s borders. They also identified with some phantom untainted bucolic world where simplicity and certainty reigned and “cosmopolitanism” and its heady infusions were snubbed.

Second, when the Soviets found themselves in control of a vast portion of middle Europe and half of Germany, there was more of the same, and an equivalent paranoia about the new and the daring, which were seen, quite rightly, to be independent of prevailing authority. It seemed for a while that even countries like Greece, Italy and France would be consumed by communist regimes, and for this reason the one Western power whose resources were not exhausted made a strategic decision to promote its own culture and democratic way of life. This battle for hearts and minds took on a new urgency as all parties, the West, Germany and Russia strove to prove the other, not themselves, were the real barbarians.

These postwar developments were examined by Frances Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, published in the USA in 2000 and the previous year in England, where the publisher Granta got straight to the point, titling the book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. The more spontaneous manifestations of American culture before and after 1945—its big-band music, its fashions, its speech patterns and mannerisms—had percolated effortlessly, to the delight of the young and the mystification of an older generation, but what the organisational juggernaut of the USA had in mind was a wholesale but discreet export of the finest elements of American culture and a resuscitation of the remnants of European excellence.

As Saunders put it, the Russians had something similar in mind:

As early as 1945, “when the stench of human bodies still hung about the ruins”, the Russians staged a brilliant opening for the State Opera with a performance of Gluck’s Orpheus, in the beautifully lit, red plush Admiralspalast. Stocky, pomaded Russian colonels grinned smugly at American military personae as they listened together to performances of Eugene Onegin … the music punctuated by the tinkle of medals.

 When in 1947 they opened a “House of Culture” on the Unter den Linden, the Americans returned cultural fire by opening the Amerika-Häuser. These were warmly heated institutes where the reading rooms were comfortably furnished, and which hosted film screenings, musical recitals, lectures and art exhibitions—all heavily freighted with American content. Saunders again:

Thanks largely to Russian propaganda America was widely regarded as culturally barren, a nation of gum-chewing, Chevy-driving, Dupont-sheathed philistines, and the Amerika-Häuser did much to reverse this negative stereotype.

As the cultural cold war warmed up—so to speak—American shipped some of its proudest achievements to Europe. Talented opera graduates from the Juilliard School, the Curtis, the Eastman and the Peabody made their appearance. American academics, playwrights and directors were consulted about a theatre program and the result was an ambitious project which exposed European audiences to plays by Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams and John Steinbeck—to name a few. Many American composers such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin owed the first appearance of their works in Europe to American government sponsorship.

No doubt keeping in mind Benjamin Disraeli’s observation that “a book may be as great a thing as a battle”, a book program was established, which enhanced the reputations of American writers like William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Louisa May Alcott, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, James Thurber and Edith Wharton. And as Saunders points out, a number of “European authors were … promoted as part of an explicitly ‘anti-Communist programme’”. Their works had to fill a specific criterion: namely to be “objective, convincingly written and timely”. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon fitted the bill perfectly, as did Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago.

America’s staggeringly well-funded mission was co-ordinated by the OPC (Office of Policy Co-ordination) with money funnelled through the Congress of Cultural Freedom. The OPC was independent of the State Department but was later subsumed into the CIA in 1952.

On the visual arts front, their success was palpable. Lovers of the visual arts were encouraged to identify the new, the colourful, the abstract—large in scale and audacious—with American values of freedom, spontaneity and originality. Although years later the German novelist Günther Grass remarked drily in his memoir Peeling the Onion, that: “The CIA had promoted the non-representational school … because of its harmless, decorative quality and because the concept of the modern was, and promised to remain, the property of the West.”

The wife of the artist László Moholy-Nagy spoke in front of German audiences about the work of her late husband, who had, in the 1920s, been an immensely influential lecturer at the Bauhaus in Weimar and ultimately found himself, at the invitation of an American corporation, in Chicago. In 1939 he founded the School of Design there—a “new Bauhaus”.

The first appearance in Europe of what would become the New York School of painters was an exhibition of “Non-Objective Paintings” from the Guggenheim Museum in New York—accompanied by lectures on the possibilities of abstraction on canvas. This offering, too, had been government-sponsored.

Did any of this reach Australia’s postwar shores? It did, but by a kind of osmosis. Some European artists had arrived here between the two world wars, and others arrived in the wake of the Second. They brought with them their traditional European training, but many were alert to new developments through imported journals, magazines and books, even if these made no concentrated appearance here until the mid-1950s.

And here we return to Holland, whose lively developments were clearly overshadowed by the American gift for promoting its own, but who we now recognise, courtesy of this remarkable exhibition, to have generated something not only uniquely theirs, but something that a postwar generation of artists—and some critics—were quietly well aware of. We can see this when we compare their work with a number of prominent Australian painters of the 1950s and 1960s.

It is not difficult to discern the lineaments of American Abstract Expressionism. Artists who travelled there from Europe, such as Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst, provided a sturdy bridge between European surrealism and automatism and the new American expansiveness.

Australians had an opportunity to see how this unfolded when in 1964 the American novelist James A. Michener’s collection of forty contemporary American paintings did the rounds of Sydney, Newcastle and the Adelaide Arts Festival. Abstract Expressionists and post-painterly abstractionists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Kenneth Noland, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Larry Rivers and Morris Louis were all present, but, according to art critic and painter Elwyn Lynn, the exhibition was presided over by a single loan from the Guggenheim: Pollock’s Ocean Greyness, which had been insured for $80,000. Lynn suggested that the show provided a lot of evidence to support Clement Greenberg’s avowal that the new American painting developed through Cubism rather than through central European expressionism, but here he was wrong.

Greenberg himself, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, visited Australia in 1968. He had been for some time the most powerful contemporary art-world arbiter in America. He championed the abstract expressionists and then the colour-field painters, who he saw as their natural successors. Greenberg divided opinions sharply wherever he went with his rigorous and exclusive views on the aesthetic experience and the primacy of the “eye”—especially his own. He mesmerised a generation of artists, students and collectors and acquired camp followers and detractors in equal measure.

According to Claudia Roth Pierpont, writing in the New Yorker, during the war years Greenberg had upended the Nazi view that Jewish art and art criticism had spearheaded decadent abstraction, claiming that the new art blossoming in New York City “was fully representative of the principles that had to win the war: positive in spirit, heroic in scale, free, imaginative and unquestionably American”. Some believed that he fomented a campaign which was responsible for the eclipse of Paris as the natural centre of the art; in other words, a New York-hatched conspiracy. Was it drawing a long bow to assume that Greenberg’s views meshed with America’s foreign policy? Perhaps. But clearly what emerged from America eclipsed contemporaneous activities in Europe. And here we return again to the Dutch exhibition.

Many of the artists in “Intensely Dutch” have biographical material which returns us viscerally to the upheavals of the Second World War. Indeed there is a shrill rawness about some of these paintings which speaks directly of intense feelings, anxiety and great suffering suppressed—something their American cousins experienced mostly from the couches of their therapists. The catalogue points out that Corneille weighed just forty kilograms at the war’s end. Yet the vivid, even riotous colour, bold forms and restless organic accretions also suggest a swell of optimism and defiance—a kind of joy.

Key artists in the exhibition, Corneille, Constant, Karel Appel and Lucebert were members of a wild and unconventional group of practitioners, centred in Holland but with followers and practitioners in Denmark, Belgium and Germany, calling themselves CoBrA. This movement flared like a Roman candle in 1949 and was still showering sparks beyond 1951.

Although Australia might have seemed a long way away, Greenberg observed:"I thought some paintings by John Olsen very interesting, though he seems rather indebted to Corneille.” Perceptive critics like Robert Hughes was the first here to notice the influence of both Europe and America on a budding group of local abstractionists and how his fellow critics responded to local work:

A vocabulary, a frame of reference, has evolved to suit these circumstances … we are given a natty game of spot-the-influence. A wriggly line means Corneille, an agitated paste, Dubuffet, a monumental one, Tàpies, a dissolving figure, Bacon. Upward’s big black signs are unthinkingly linked with Kline …

Visitors to “Intensely Dutch”, seeing the canvases of Jaap Nanninga, would be rightly reminded of early works by local artists Frank Hodgkinson, Leonard Hessing, John Coburn and John Olsen. The monochromatic abstracts of Bram van Velde would put some in mind of the palette of Joy Hester, and the exuberant canvases of Jaap Wagemaker would bring to mind the crusted surfaces of Elwyn Lynn and Alan Peascod—and the dark circles and rods of Stanislaus Rapotec.

The inclusion of Jan Riske, Dutch by birth and living in Australia, is one of the most remarkable elements in the exhibition. His sensibility remains entirely European and his works of the 1980s—microscopic accretions of pure pigment in rhythmic layer upon layer—demand careful scrutiny. Hendrik Kolenberg, the curator of prints and drawings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, who assembled this fine exhibition, has given the art-going public a fine gift indeed.