Expressionism at the Royal Academy

I Don’t Know Much about Abstract Expressionism and I Don’t Know What I like

There are two related terms “Expressionism” and “Expressivism”. The former belongs to Art or Culture; the latter to philosophy.

Expressivism is a theory of ethics, or morality, that holds that our value judgments, for example, “lying is wrong”, do not, as the jargon has it, have “truth value”, in the manner of an empirical observation or a mathematical proof. There is no objective truth of the matter – only an expression of feeling. “Lying” bad grunt; “truth telling” (presumably scientific truth) good grunt. Or “Boo”; “Hooray”.

Expressivism's roots go back to David Hume in the C18. It was especially expressed during the dominance in the mid C20 of the Logical Positivists, who dismissed from philosophical enquiry everything apart from the empirical verifiable, and the analytical theorems of logic and maths.

(Expressivism still lives on today, in more sophisticated philosophical guises. For example, some suppose that there is, as it were, a deep grammar of feelings in human psychology (perhaps Ur-grunts) from which can be spun a language in which there can be rationally agreed basic true propositions of morality. Hence, among other things, a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

Although this postage stamp summary is a bit of a digression, perhaps the visitor to the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy should have been an adherent of Expressivism, at least for the duration of their visit. For AE, as a genre, doesn’t allow one much in the way of “objective” criteria for judging its products. The whole point was to use paint as a medium for “pure” feeling – good grunts and bad grunts, as it were.

That is, of course, unfair. There is distinction between grunts that merely produce grunts, and grunts that produce art of imaginative power and skill. (Or is there?)

The point is this: when one looks at a Jackson Pollock or a Rothko, what critical apparatus does one bring to bear? If any?

When I first went to a Rothko exhibition, some years ago at the Tate, I found his purply-dark canvasses

unstimulating and boring – and thought that was ironically appropriate that they were commissioned for a restaurant’s walls. Rothko -“Boo”. But at the RA, I tended to Rothko “Hooray”- of which more below. So why?

In the 15 December 2016 London Review of Books, Peter de Bolla is very perceptive:

The paintings… are not any more or les “expressive” than others in the Western tradition’s vast repertoire, but they are more `’abstract”, if by this we mean that they are a-semiotic, without the support of marks that can be more or less easily be taken to be either a deformation of something in the world (as in Cubism) or a visual language or code that by convention represents or intervenes in the world (Surrealism, German Expressionism).

It was no longer possible to ask what this particular depiction looks like, since depiction- less painting looks like itself.

Therefore the wrong response is to try to “explain”, or find metaphors for, these paintings. Such as (all heard at the Royal Academy):That Pollock is like.. a tapestry; no a thicket of trees. Nor is the phrase “quite nice” quite appropriate.

The painters themselves are suitably banal in their self-appreciations.

Here’s Pollock:

“Energy and motion made visible…memories arrested in space”

Here’s Rothko:

“Tragedy, ecstasy, doom”

I think the key to boo/hooray is, mostly, SIZE. On the whole, the bigger the more overwhelming – one is beaten into submission. (One wonders where the massive canvasses were supposed to hang when first painted – but the RA rooms were capaciously right.)

Pollock’s work, especially the central Mural, is indeed very big and very coherently swirling – if one is being AE snobbish, a bit too regular? 

The painters who really push or explode the envelope include Francis and Stills. These huge works are stupendously meaningless and bombard with vast cascades of colour. Hooray.

Rothko – here at the RA were luminous canvasses, suggesting (vile word) those optician’s tests where you have to differentiate the clarity of different coloured fields. These paintings engage in a way the dense dark works do not, for me.

There is one interpretative response not to be resisted: a Rothko in the colours of the Spanish Flag. No paseran, at least not to a definitive understanding.

(One must counter this flippancy by noting that one of the painters exhibited, Robert Motherwell, was indeed inspired, or mournfully influenced, by the Spanish Civil War. He produced many dark works radiating sadness and dread.)

Jan 2017