With the exception of a handful of cloying portraitists of Boston’s high society, an “artist” in the America of a hundred years ago was considered little more than a laborer and little less than a chronic alcoholic. The comparison between Jean-Léon Gerôme and Thomas Eakins that Leo Steinberg presented in Other criteria it remains as memorable as it is merciless.
But then things started to change quite quickly.
If the detonator was not the Armory Show exhibition, which fell too soon (1913) and in sensational ways so as not to go much beyond the mere success of a scandal, there was another one, held in old Europe, destined to deplore the avant-garde – it is naturally theEnter Kunst of Munich, 1937 – which paradoxically succeeded in the opposite result, that is, to convince the Americans to defend, among other things, the primacy of a pure art, not compromised by regime causes, satisfied with its own free formal autonomy rather than reduced, according to Clement Greenberg, to “vessels of communication” and that is to say propaganda.
And therefore, while in Europe works by Nolde and Klee, Barlach and Beckmann were sold in Switzerland when things went well to finance the war industry and when things went badly they were destroyed in auto-da-fés, in the United States the avant-garde was collected, taught and we studied. Upon returning from Europe, many artists, photographers and filmmakers were able to take advantage of the benefits of the GI Bill to complete studies that had been left interrupted or to undertake new ones. Painters and sculptors earned degrees from the School of Fine Arts, and quite a few of them earned degrees in the Humanities. It was the first generation to reach this level of education and social consideration. It is therefore only partly true, or in any case in a rather different way compared to the specious title, that New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris, as stated in the seminal monograph by Serge Guilbaut (duly reviewed by an artist, Thomas Lawson, on an «Artforum» from forty years ago).
Here, then, it is not surprising to observe the very authoritative Erwin Panofsky, the most admired and respected German art historian of the twentieth century, sheltered in Princeton since 1933, the Oppenheimer of the iconological method, at a certain point getting stuck in a controversy with the American painter Barnett Newman.
The pretext was indeed such (the alleged incorrect spelling of the Latin term sublime) and the resolution is not without pedantic aspects and today easily classified for what they were – sterile academic controversies. Except that there was much more at stake than the mastery of a language, as Pietro Conte explains in the booklet that collects the materials of this story (The abstract sublime2024).
Far beyond the childish tones, Newman’s confidence in the dispute with Panofsky is striking: his argument wanting to place himself on an equal footing, without awe, fortified not only by an unshakable confidence in his own work but also by that status of social acceptance of the art of the avant-garde, and in particular abstract art, unthinkable without the cultural mediation conducted twenty years earlier by critics (Greenberg), collectors (Guggenheim) and art historians (Alfred Barr). All people who had followed the opposite journey compared to that of Panofsky: from their native America to old Europe, to then bring these experiences back within the mediation structures (museums, universities, galleries) made formidable by the economic primacy of an industrial and military superpower: and never mind if you stumbled upon the Latinorum.
For the old Panofsky it was actually, quite simply, a poorly concealed incompatibility with the languages of modern painting. Not only the abstract resolution (an idiosyncrasy shared by a large part of the Warburg circle, led by Gombrich) which ultimately weakened the very foundation of the iconological method; as much as the will and desire, mistaken for sterile presumption, to trace one’s roots as modern artists, and in those ways, in the very heart of the glorious European aesthetic development.
The sublime promulgated by Barnett Newman since a 1948 article (The Sublime is now) was not just the attempt to break away from that mechanization of the world described by Lewis Mumford. It was also the reclamation of the legacy of a history of European artists and liquidation of their burden: a hypothesis of renewal of pure plasticity in the face of the inability to reach the sublime «due to its blind desire to exist within sensitive reality » – that is, of the objective world of the figuration of things, however distorted by the sensibilities of the avant-garde.
It will take time to translate intentions into images, but that is what happened in the following fifteen years in the work of Newman, of Rothko, of Clyfford Still. And when it was possible to see all of these works, a young American art historian, Robert Rosenblum, appeared and wanted to think about them a little, bringing out this category of “sublime abstract”.
It was ultimately a way to establish a possible connection with some great experiences of European romanticism, from Turner to Friederich, whose comparison with the extensive diaphanous color fields of the Americans was made plausible, even if through the intermediary of many cautions (“it turns out to be similar”, “they seem to be fruit”, “they seem to hide”, “nothing else can be done”, “substantially the same”).
Cautions that disappeared in the programmatic volume with which in 1975 Rosenblum told this story with a title that has become memorable (Modern Painting And The Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko) and immediately criticized by some haughty Parisian critics for the hasty formula that reminded them of an intercontinental flight: which is true. But it was a journey that had to be made, a bit like that other journey, from Manet to Pollock, with which Greenberg had opened the history of American modernism.
But since in conclusion it is always good to go beyond the controversies, even those conducted with Panofsky, it is also true that shortly thereafter, in October 1962, the exhibition The New Realist at the Sidney Janis gallery he oriented the path of American art towards what everyone calls pop art. Everything was changing, once again.
In the face of those new vulgarians painters what then remained of the rarefied atmosphere of the sublime? What of Newman’s exciting spacious colorful partitions?
The answer is clear: it is the eternal foundation of the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. To realize this, at that point, it was necessary to exit the tunnels and reach the earthworks disseminated by the youngest artists across American soil.
