The Posture of Walking a Tight Rope

'"The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground.  It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along."

'If there is a certain grim, the-chips-are-down atmosphere in these remarks, there is also that same tension of belief which informs the best New York abstract painting, and distinguishes it from European production comparable in style.' 

                                               -- Sam Hunter writing about Philip Guston who is quoted at the start of this citation. 

I am reading a collection of Philip Guston writings, lectures and conversations that is edited by Clark Coolidge, and printed by the University of California Press in 2011, from which the citation above is taken.  I am quite struck by what Hunter wrote regarding the "best New York abstract painting" as it has occurred to me, while visiting the collections of the Musée de l'art moderne de la Ville de Paris at the Palais de Tokyo, as well as the collections of provincial museums here in France, that there is a fundamental divide between the posture of New York Ab-Ex painters and that of the Parisian Post-war (often) lyrical abstractions (notably Zao Wou-Ki, and even Philippe Soulages).

The go-for-broke posture of New York abstractionism of the 40's and 50's, this "grim, the-chips-are-down" attitude that Hunter describes, is in my opinion quite the contrary to its European counterpart, and by one distinctive quality -- earnestness and its shadow, doubt.  I often wonder whether the whole project of American modernism, this first phase of it, isn't somehow all within the family of, if not rooted in,  the same spirit of simple faith and transcendentalism that swept through the New World in the 19th century, with such "home-grown" manifestations as the Great Awakening of American Protestant denominations and the hermetic edenic mysticism of its Luminists.

Philip Guston, "For M.," 1955, Oil on Canvas, 193.99 cm x 183.52 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The first generation of abstract painters threw themselves wholesale into "Existence" and whole-heartedly embraced the posture of action and its automatisms, of "pure" process and its side-effect, an inalienable sense of futility.  This walking on a tight rope over the abyss of existence, no matter how close to the ground, no doubt informed the very best of their work and 60 years after the fact, one can still see this tension, a readily palpable mixture of despair and doubt and a good dose of child-like belief in the beauty of primal untrained gestures.

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Zao Wou-Ki, "Six Janvier 1968," 1968, 260 x 200 cm, Oil on Canvas, Musée de l'art moderne de la ville de Paris.

When one encounters the work of French lyrical abstraction, one sees first of all CRAFT.  Yes, the same love for the flair of handiwork that informs the ateliers that produce the accessories of Hermès informs the spirit of French painters.  Zao Wou-Ki may seem to be an exotic outlier in a discussion of post-war painting in France, as he had firm roots in his native China, but his lyricism is not at all marginal to the landscape of French abstract painting just as Hans Hoffman and Willem de Kooning, despite their European origins, were not marginal figures to American post-war painting. One may even venture to say that the age old imperial culture of China is not a such a distant relative to the long history of absolute monarchy in France.

In the paintings of Zao Wou-Ki, one sees above all an immense craft, an understanding of material, and absolute mastery of brush, air, timing and rhythm.  In using the same "automatism and action" that was so dear to the Surrealists and subsequently the New York School, Zao Wou-Ki's abstraction, despite its appearance, betrays no hazard, no unwanted accident; everything is perfectly executed and each centimeter of the canvas is perfectly resolved.  No, there is no doubt, no despair, and certainly no untrained nor unwanted gesture.

Pierre Soulages, "Peinture 30 avril 1972," 1972, Oil on Canvas, Musée Fabre, Montpellier 

The same can be said of the paintings of Soulages.  In front of his work, from the early shifting forms of color worked over the field of the very large canvases to his more recent panels of black bituminous surfaces that reflect light in the most mannerist fashion, one sees that very French "maîtrise" so dear to its long tradition of perfect craftsmanship--the craft and the know-how, that informs all acts of creation that is worthy of any monarch.  Soulages' automatisms and action are born under the star of an absolute control, and it could serve in any palace, be it for Louis XIV or Charles de Gaulle.  Here, there is no need "search," nor "discovery," nor "process," nor "chance" as nothing is left to chance, not really.  One is confronted with a pure demonstration of control--the control of gesture, the control of process, and the control of chance.

In fact, French post-war abstraction proposes something quite the opposite of what Guston was talking about when he spoke of walking on a tight rope, not high above the ground, but just above it. Where Guston's work entertains failure at every step, Soulages and Zao Wou-ki produce abstractions that have no doubt of their own perfection.

The earnestness of the New York School of painting was rooted in the opposite sensibility of what transpired here in Paris.  One may call it provincial naiveté. but the first generation Ab-Ex artists had a posture that put everything on the line and the proof perhaps is that most of them paid dearly for it (substance abuse, suicide, depression).  In contrast to the sordid soap opera lives of the majority of that first generation of New York modernism, Zao Wou-ki lived well into his 90's and Soulages, born in 1919, will easily surpass that age and will certainly live to be over a hundred years old.

The definite distance that separates these French painters from the all-in blind leap-of-faith that defined the first generation of Abstract painters from New York is evident in the canvases where their actions and automatisms were lived.  One only has to look at one of Guston's "lyrical" paintings to see the distance of oceans that separate his process from that of his French counterparts.

Philip Guston, "To BWT," 1952, Oil on canvas 123.2 x 130.8 cm, Jane Lang Davis Collection, Medina, Washington.

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As a side note, the earnestness of Americans may very well translate into the ways and sensibilities of subsequent generations.  The earnestness of American "conceptual" artists, for example, (from the repetitive futility of Jonathan Borofsky's counting numbers ad nauseum to the astringent spectacle of Bruce Nauman and their conceptual grand-children denouncing the Art Market by embracing its cynical mechanisms)  becomes evident when their acts are compared to the smirking non-chalance of their French, albeit naturalized American, predecessor, Marcel Duchamp.  Where Duchamp chuckles and winks like a sparkling fountain, in all his dead-pan dandy insouciance, Americans tend to preach and throw the kitchen sink and toilet bowl in spectacular acts of all-on bravado.  It is perhaps the difference between Marie Antoinette's "Give them Brioche" and Bernie Sanders' fiery denunciations of Wall Street and the excesses of our form of democracy that was conceived for the gentry and has had trouble evolving beyond the preservation of privilege for the wealthy.