“Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976”

It’s always good fun to try to pinpoint the moment when a cultural phenomenon tilts from substance to style. With Abstract Expressionism, it may have happened somewhere around 1957, the year after Jackson Pollock died in a car crash, when the Today show featured a segment on Kokomo Jr., the chimpanzee action painter. Certainly by 1958 the art world was losing interest, with performance pioneer Allan Kaprow writing in ARTnews that the movement had become “dull and repetitious.” Yet even as Kaprow sounded AbEx’s death knell, there remained the fact that for the first time since Maxfield Parrish, artists had become household names.

“Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” the Jewish Museum’s smart, novel exhibition about the emergence and dominance of Abstract Expressionism, has ample documentation of the long, slip-sliding voyage into mass culture that followed. But its real focus is on how AbEx was shaped by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the era’s two leading art critics. Both were Jewish intellectuals who ran in the same cocktail circles, and their passionate rejection of each other’s interpretation of America’s “New Art” was so frosty and antagonistic, you can practically feel the temperature drop in the museum as they duke it out in various wall texts. What we have here, folks, is a good old-fashioned crit fight.

In Greenberg’s cool, formalist vision, American abstraction was the continuation of modernism’s long, strange trip from Renaissance representation to flat picture planes, proof positive that contemporary art’s baton had been passed from Paris to New York. Rosenberg, the humanist, saw the action of putting brush to canvas as the artist’s unpremeditated expression of the “disorder of the epoch”—meaning wartime atrocities and Cold War alienation. By and large, they admired and were friendly with the same artists, whose works are displayed here amid the textual dueling. (Good luck, by the way, to anyone who skips the wall panels—without them, the show’s cohesion, especially in the last few galleries, will seem questionable.)

All in all, it’s a genuine pleasure to be transported back to the days when art by Pollock, De Kooning and their milieu precipitated surprise, passion and dismay rather than reverence. There’s nothing that brings a bygone era back to life better than its petty slights and backbiting, and this show obliges by highlighting the barely veiled jabs the two ’Bergs took at each another in theory-heavy essays published in ARTnews, Partisan Review and other magazines. There is also correspondence with Rosenberg and Greenberg from Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, who alternately wax ecstatic and bellyache about the critics’ reviews.

But if revering is your preference, the exhibition offers a multitude of opportunities. There is a lot of spectacular art here. Pollock’s Convergence (1952) is a mammoth, golly-gee canvas in which fiery red-orange, blue and yellow drips splash over a black-and-white background, while De Kooning is represented by Woman (1949–50) and his jazzy Gotham News (1955), among other works. And that’s just the first gallery. Elsewhere are Helen Frankenthaler’s iconic Mountains and Sea (1952), Arshile Gorky’s The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944) and Morris Louis’s lovely Iris (1954), with its gentle vertical bands of color crosscut by striations that recall shafts of late-afternoon light.

The show fumbles somewhat in pointing out the critics’ so-called blind spots—women and minorities. The work itself isn’t the problem; there’s a pair of pretty paintings by Grace Hartigan, a small canvas by African-American artist Norman Lewis and two pieces by Lee Krasner, including one from her “Little Image” series and the glorious Blue and Black (1951–53), whose chalky blue blocks and thick filigrees suggest a moody interior scene by way of Matisse. But it’s a meager selection that amounts to damning with faint praise.

Speaking of faint praise, both Greenberg and Rosenberg were left cold by Pop Art and Minimalism, but Rosenberg’s gig as the New Yorker’s chief art critic compelled him to come to terms with the art world’s fragmented march forward. “Action/Abstraction” includes a chaotic but interesting smattering of works by 1960s and 1970s artists that Rosenberg championed—Claes Oldenburg, Lee Bonticou, Philip Guston, Peter Saul and New Yorker colleague Saul Steinberg. It’s funny, however, that Rosenberg, who said that for artists “there is no point in an act if you already know what it contains,” never took interest in Kaprow’s chancy Happenings. Perhaps that was stretching the canvas a bit too far.