TWO CRITICS: THOMAS B. HESS AND HAROLD ROSENBERG
These are the inhabitants of the country of the mind,
Or only the marching motion of the mind,
But still, this is what the mind gives the mind.
—Randall Jarrell
THEY WERE MEN OF pluralistic abilities speaking in the name of an exoteric conception of art. The one was a poet, art critic and philosopher, the other an editor, art critic and curator. Underlying the multiplicity of both was a common conception of culture—in Matthew Arnold’s distinction in Anarchy and Culture, as a social rather than scientific passion (or, if also scientific, then with a science in the name of the social). Criticism, for them, did not have its origin in simple curiosity about art, “in the sheer desire to see things as they are”—the things of art—but “in the love of perfection.” That is, criticism was the study of the possible perfection of art—of its human as well as artistic aspiration, of its effort to make a social as well as esthetic point. Rosenberg and Hess were not moved primarily by “the scientific passion for pure knowledge” of art, but by the ambition to articulate “the moral and social passion” implicated in it. They knew that inherent in even the most uncompromisingly abstract art was a moral sensibility. For them, the methods of art were as much a kind of metaphoric shorthand of what life had made the artist and what he meant to make of life, as they were the instruments for making an object.
From this it follows that Rosenberg and Hess were necessarily dialecticians: they always sought the relationship which disproved art’s autonomy, and they assumed this extraartistic relationship was immanent in the art. Without it, art would not be consequential; its narcissism could not redeem it for life experience. And to redeem it for experience in general meant to recognize and interpret—however hesitant and awkward and painfully incomplete such interpretation—art’s extraartistic relationships. For Rosenberg and Hess, these are as much a part of the virtuality of art as its formal character. It was almost an article of faith for them that, as Herbert Muller held in Science and Criticism, “multiple meaning is the very sign of imaginative creation, multivalence the very test of value.” Thus, as Hess wrote in his book Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (1951), “as soon as a painting is approached, interpretation begins: observation becomes translation.” There is a spontaneous effort to recover what Hess calls “a certain magnetic charge of reality, whether immediately apparent or mysteriously hidden,” that is “a basic characteristic of form.” One is reminded of Rosenberg’s quotation of de Kooning, whom Hess as well as Rosenberg admired: “Forms ought to have the emotion of a concrete experience.” Dialectical criticism is concerned with tracking down the magnetic charge of reality—not simply of things, but of the worlds in which they mean—that artistic form articulates. Dialectical criticism also aims to amplify until it seems self-evident the emotion aroused by the fact of form, an emotion transcending the form and reverberating with life meaning.
Thus it is characteristic of Hess to begin his account of an artist—his important, durable studies of de Kooning (1968) and Newman (1971) are cases in point—with an examination of his life, or at least those aspects of it which seem to have a traceable bearing on the emergence of his art. This seemingly quaint, antiquated method—which we find in significant new form in Robert Pincus-Witten’s so-called diaristic method of criticism—nonetheless makes an important if easily forgotten point: life educates art, and art in the last analysis is an education in life. Life leads art, or art follows life, in whatever devious ways; and clues to the way any given art comes into being and acquires its “bearing” can be found in the artist’s personal and social history. This seems obvious enough, but it is not easy to demonstrate concretely. Hess’ brilliance lies in the fact that he does so, not only showing the general dialectical intimacy of art and life, but showing the symbiotic intimacy of the most difficult abstract art and subtle emotional life.
Hess is dialectical, then, in a direct way, on a microcosmic as well as macrocosmic level. He describes in detail de Kooning’s “creative use of ambiguity, his will to work within the dialectical tensions of a syllogism without synthesis.” Newman’s “style,” Hess shows, “is based on contradictions he first formulated around 1948; they are so strong that you would think a man’s brain would explode before reconciling such a collision of sensations.” Hess understands Giacometti in terms of Valéry’s definition of “the European”: “a man who feels that the storm which has just passed is about to break and to whom all human situations exist in a state of terrible incertitude” (Art News, May 1958). Such incertitude—the sensation of contradiction, unremitting and hypostatized into an ultimate—is, as Hess acknowledges, the “main theme” of his criticism. It has a long, honorable history in the tradition of analysis of modern art, from Cézanne’s experience of “doubt” to Picasso’s interpretation of that doubt as “anxiety” to de Kooning’s “desperation” and “‘tremblings’ of nature and the ‘I’” (which themselves derive from, and soften or romanticize, more urgently existential experiences of Munch). What Hess adds to this tradition is the sense of dialectical contradiction or self-contradiction as a working method in art, not simply an emotion inspiring it. Dialectical irresolution itself becomes, in Alfred Adler’s phrase, the fictional finality—the resolution—it is meant to serve. As such, it becomes the only necessary framework for comprehending art—the comprehensive framework.
Rosenberg utilizes the dialectical method of self-conscious incertitude even more decisively than Hess, and he suffers the consequences more thoroughly. As de Kooning’s “action progresses, his originating gesture is blotted out in the accumulation of ‘events’ that take on body through the starts and stops of the brush” (1973). Dialectical uncertainty is generalized into artistic identity: “The art object persists without a secure identity, as what I have called an ‘anxious object’” (1964). For Rosenberg not only action painting but modern art as such—what is truly modern in modern art—is synonymous with unresolved and unresolvable dialectic. Dialectical uncertainty becomes defiant, a point of honor and a source of authenticity, a matter of conscience: “de Kooning’s art is a refusal to be either recruited or pushed aside” (1969). Dialectical uncertainty also permits Rosenberg to produce his own poetic brand of “creative absurdity,” as he characterized “the tradition of the new” (1959): “Is proof needed that the void of the Existentialists and the mystics is a historical phenomenon?” (“Themes,” 1939–71). Or again, in “Art as Thinking” (Artworks and Packages, 1969): “In post-First World War Europe, ‘chaos’ had a historical dimension.”
Rosenberg means to demonstrate the key dialectical idea that abstraction is immanent in history—that thinking is immanent in art and art is immanent in life—but he never follows the dialectical pendulum back to another key idea: that history determines abstraction, that art (in the generic sense) determines thinking, that life determines art. In Hegel’s distinction, Rosenberg rationalizes history (and art and life) but he does not “speculatively” return us to their concreteness, at least in a way that seems altogether adequate. He “negates” art by showing that it is thought, but he does not negate his negation and return us to the concrete fact of art. This leads to a strange compromise with his own moral and social passion. He can write that “the only true wrestle is with abstraction: the credo, the slogan, the symbol.” This justifies the power of his own intellect but it does not adequately—materially—come to grips with social experience. It is fully responsible to reason, but only indirectly responsible to reality: it articulates a truncated, manageable version of experience.
Rosenberg, then, seems more caught up in the civil war of modern consciousness than in the world war between consciousness (and one of its instruments, art) and the modern world. To confuse art with action—even an art which seems to imply enormous energy, ready to boil over into world historical action—is implicitly to acknowledge the alienation, subtle and unsubtle, of both art and art critic from the arenas of worldly action. A world-historical art is not the same as a world-historical action, and to speak of the one in the terms of the other exacerbates awareness of art’s existence on the periphery of serious world-historical action—hence the dubiousness with which the outside world accepts art’s power of determination. Rosenberg’s characteristic desire to regard art, and by extension art criticism, as a form of social action—to regard them both as making history, not simply art history—generates a marvelous intellectual fecundity—hyperbolic, even though well intentioned.
In the course of writing about art academies, Hess remarks that “art can be said to exist in a dialectical tension between the messy and the neat” (1967). For Rosenberg and Hess, Abstract Expressionism, to which both were unqualifiedly committed, seemed to supply that “margin of mess” which Roger Abrahams argues is necessary “both to define and to question the orders by which we live.” The existential hero of modern art, for Rosenberg and Hess, was de Kooning, just as for Sartre, Fidel Castro is modern society’s existential hero, both de Kooning and Castro making old revolutionary ideals workable once again. But de Kooning, presumably, regards the messy as more substantive than the neat and the orderly: “The idea of order can only come from above. Order, to me, is to be ordered about and that is a limitation.” Yet Rosenberg and Hess also see order in the Abstract Expressionist mess, or try to make order out of it. That they do testifies to the ultimate success of their dialectic. Thus, they resemble Coleridge in his criticism of Shakespeare, which, as Herbert Read wrote, inaugurated a “philosophical method of criticism . . . which put him head and shoulders above” the critics “of technique, of craftsmanship.” In Coleridge’s words,
The science of Criticism dates its restoration from the time when it was seen that an examination of and appreciation of the end was necessarily antecedent to the formation of the rules, supplying at once the principle of the rules themselves, and of their application to the given subject. From this time we have heard little (among intelligent persons, I mean) of the wildness and irregularity of our Shakespeare.
Similarly, nothing can be heard, from the time of Rosenberg and Hess, of the wildness and irregularity of de Kooning, and of gesturalism in general.
While this is true, the journalistic forum in which they communicated their ideas was not always conducive to deep analysis. They seem, at times, to have short-circuited the development of their thought for the sake of ready communication. Their criticism doesn’t always seem to carry quite far enough, not to the point of self-criticism. They did view Abstract Expressionism in terms of an unresolved dialectic, but the larger thrust of their thought quickly took an undialectical, judgmental shape, especially when it came to other kinds of art.
Lawrence Alloway once wrote in these pages (January 1975): “The problem of getting artists out of their friends’ hands”—in this case de Kooning out of the hands of Rosenberg and Hess—”is one that has occurred before in 20th-century criticism.” The artist wants fame, artists in general seeming not to have heard that, in Milton’s words, fame is the “last infirmity of noble mind,” and if his friends are in a position to give it to him (or to give him the next best thing, celebrity) he has no reason to take leave of their loving hands. The bravura context of journalism, with its showcase “phenomena,” is where fame is won, if only the fame of making a guest appearance in history. Rosenberg and Hess try not to abuse journalistic power: they balance their sense of what is topical with analytic acumen, and their reporting is as investigatory as it is celebratory. But a lot of their writing does reduce to editorializing, particularly in the case of Rosenberg, whose theories tend to create a climate of opinion in which a certain art, and no other, can breathe. For Rosenberg, art after Abstract Expressionism reduces almost entirely to a cultural symptom. The new art tends to “de-define” art, as he puts it—meaning that it dethrones his definition of art. Rosenberg’s system of analysis had hardened to the point where it no longer conducted fresh thought. He fed too exclusively on one kind of art, unconsciously encouraged by popular advocacy as well as by real intellectual enthusiasms. That inevitably become partisan, as it was inevitably clear only about one thing.
Writing about Baudelaire, “a founder of the tradition of the new” and obvious role model, Rosenberg says:
Judging paintings by their “poetic” correspondences in the modern world, Baudelaire did not escape damage as a critic. In the opinion of succeeding generations he lost most of his critical bets; he tied his modernism too tightly to Delacroix and withheld it from Courbet and Manet, missed poetic qualities in Ingres, praised painters no longer remembered and dramatized Guys as the artist of the age. To these errors, Baudelaire could have had only one reply: “A critic does not cease to be a man . . . so there is never a moment when criticism is not in contact with metaphysics”—a statement which is less a justification than a defiance.
Baudelaire did not adequately attend to Courbet, Manet, and Ingres for what I mean by journalistic reasons. He chose Guys in part because Guys was more popular, and as such ready to be made exemplary—the sensation of the age. And there was probably another, not unconnected reason. “Bad criticism,” T. S. Eliot once said, “is emotional”—the emotion aroused by the attempt to satisfy “a suppressed creative wish.” With Hess, and especially with Rosenberg—and also with Baudelaire—criticism is in part the expression of such a wish. It becomes a kind of popular poetry—certainly more popularizing than any poetry any of them, including Baudelaire, ever wrote. And Guys lends himself more readily to such poetry than Courbet, Manet or Ingres: their kind of poetry is more difficult to popularize. In general, art journalism, for all its information, encourages a kind of emotionalism, releasing the suppressed emotionalism on which it is partly premised in its attempt to popularize its subject. This is its kind of creativity.
Rosenberg once described himself, in the title of an article published in Art News (October 1960) when Hess was its editor, as a “critic within the act.” The article is accompanied by photographs of student rioting in Japan juxtaposed with images of Abstract Expressionist paintings. These illustrations are accompanied by the assertion, excerpted from the article, that a work of art is “a quantity of energy released into the whole configuration or arena of a contending world.” The article is a response to criticism of the concept of action painting, particularly Mary McCarthy’s review of The Tradition of the New in Partisan Review. It amounts to one last apologia for Abstract Expressionism. One might say that when art no longer seemed to add its contending energy to that of the world Hess and Rosenberg became relatively uninterested in it. For Rosenberg, when it no longer contended openly it no longer seemed to be art—to be properly messy.
And yet it is sufficient that Rosenberg and Hess contended with art that meant to be contentious, wrestling its abstraction to the ground. Let us hope that the energy they brought to their task is remembered as much as their ideas. Let us hope that, in Rosenberg’s language, in his “Parable of American Painting,” they are remembered not as redcoats but as true rough and ready pioneers—as guerrillas of understanding. Their energy reminds us that, in Rosenberg’s words, “even the ‘quiet’ paintings of the past (are) more and more being precipitated into motion and compelled to catch up with contemporary requirements.” This is the critic’s message to all of us: the past is waiting to be precipitated into motion, and only if it is can it be comprehended and renewed. Hess sets an example with his book on abstraction, which reminds us that all art is abstract. So, too, Rosenberg’s sense of criticism in general remains binding. It is perhaps his greatest legacy:
In other words, in regard to creation there are two ironies in operation, not just one: the mortal irony that changes a living event into a “picture on the wall,” and the tragic and comic irony that causes a masquerade to expose itself, to the surprise of those who have been taken in by appearances. To criticize art and events in the course of their development requires finding a footing in both these ironies. If criticism, under the illusion that only one irony is at work, waits for esthetics and “structure” to reassert themselves, it avoids the adventure of playing a part in events and gives credence to the superstition that intelligence kills or deals only with the dead.
—Donald B. Kuspit
