Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical Experience

Author(s): Edward M. Levine

Source: Art Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 22-25
Published by: College Art Association
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Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical

Experience
Edward M. Levine
The growth of Conceptual Art in the sixties has
been interpreted along with Pop Art as a further reaction
against the personalization of art that marked Abstract
Expressionism. The gesture, drip, and splatter of Action
Painting were seen as marks of the hand and consequently of the personality of the artist. Harold Rosenberg's justly famous article, "American Action Painters,"
was used as the central starting point for any definition
of this complex movement, applying an existential viewpoint to the relationship between artist and canvas.' I
have already suggested in a previous article that there
was an alternative way of viewing the works of Guston,
Pollock, and the other Action Painters.2 Now that Minimal Art has taken its place in the forefront of the art
world it seems a proper time to look again at the Action
Painters and review just what their position was in relationship to the development of art in this century, both
to previous and subsequent art.
Previously, I attempted to show that the image of
man against the world, which is part of the existential
view of Abstract Expressionism, was belied both by the
experience and intent of Pollock's painting. Rather than
the imposition of self over the transient sensations of the
world, much of Action Painting can be viewed as a surrender of the self and individuality. It is precisely this
concept that places the American movement within a
strong current of Twentieth Century painting.3 The element of depersonalization is most strongly seen in the
work of Mondrian with its attempt to reconcile art to science, the discipline which attempts to eradicate all aspects of subjectivity and hence personality. Mondrian reduced his canvas to the opposition of horizontals and verticals in order to eliminate all forms that evoke individual
feelings or ideas. Having conceived of the essence of art
as universal, he felt that only through the most unexpressive and objective elements could art induce the feeling
of the universal and the fundamental laws of reality. Instead of decrying modern technology with its massed produced objects, Mondrian viewed it as an evolutionary development in the realization of the spiritual in life, just
as he viewed his own art as a similar evolution of a Hegelian Absolute. The work becomes, for him, a plastic ob-

EDWARD M. LEVINE,
formerly at Temple Buell College in
Denver, is now an Associate Professor of Art at Stanislaus
State College, Turlock, California. He studied at Yale and
is currently working on his dissertation at New York UniM
versity.
22

ject which manifests in visual terms the invisible, objective laws of the universe much as a mathematical equation does in science. It is through intuition that the artist
achieves an insight into the universal and thus a unification with the universe. To achieve this insight he must
supress his personality in order to allow the intuition to
function on the universal level. Thus the work of the
new artists must be abstract, that is, objective and spiritual:
That which distinguishes him (the non-figurative artist) from the figurative is the fact that in his creations
he frees himself from particular impressions which he
receives from outside and he breaks loose from the
domination of the individual inclination within him.4
The work of art becomes, then, a supra-personal object
reflecting a universal order, a microcosm of the universe. Ultimately, the Dutch artist's aesthetic conceptions
can be related to a mystical, theosophical view of the universe. The juxtaposition of the technological, scientific,
and the aesthetic with the mystical marks a new turning
point in Twentieth Century artistic thinking whose manifestations can be seen in much of today's art.
The work of Kandinsky seems to stand at the opposite pole from that of Mondrian. The term expressionism
seems to be apposite for his art which indeed strives for
the creation of an emotional reaction in the observer just
as it stems from an inner emotion of the artist. But this
inner necessity that Kandinsky speaks of has three elements: that of personality, that of the spirit of the age,
and the third element, that of the pure and eternal art
which is the objective element. Abstract art manifests, as
in Mondrian, the spiritual laws of the universe, but these
are derived through an exploration of the personality in
which exists this spiritual, objective element. Throughout
Kandinsky's theories we can find elements of the theosophical and the mystical as we found in Mondrian's art,
except that the emphasis is placed on the expressive elements of the work. But like the Dutch artist, it is not form
but what lies behind the form, the spiritual, which is the
proper subject of art. To arrive at this content the artist
must go a step beyond the individual personality, to a
supracosmic self; in order to achieve this step the artist
must become a sort of medium through which the spirit
operates.
I could not think up forms, and it repels me when I see
such forms. All the forms which I ever use came "from
themselves," they presented themselves complete before
my eyes, and it only remained to me to copy them, or
they created themselves while I was working, often surprising me.5
Both Mondrian and Kandinsky stand closer to each other
than to Picasso whose art represents the extreme effort to
stamp his personality on life and art as we witness in his
transformation of the old masters such as Velazquez,
Courbet, and Delacroix. In these transformations we see

manifested the desire to take what is traditional art and

impose a totally new vision on it, as if to say to the
viewer, "see how I can deform even the most sacred
through my creativity, through my individuality." No effort is made to postulate art in the higher, metaphysical
realm but only to proclaim Picasso's own existential genius. It is crucial in these pictures that art is held up to
art rather than holding art up to nature; the truth that
exists for Picasso is the truth he makes and not the creation of some metaphysical absolute. For Picasso, and
many of the Cubists, we are presented with the reality
which is created by the mind of the artist and imposed on
the world through his existential choices.
In an extremely interesting article, "The Abstract
Sublime," Robert Rosenblum elucidates the formal connections and the aesthetic experiences of some of the
work of the Abstract Expressionists and the romantic
painters of the previous century. He centers his argument
around the concept of the sublime and the boundlessness
of aesthetic experiences in the works of the Romantics
and the moderns such as Still, Pollock, and Newman.
Further, he sees the Abstract Expressionists as denying
the Cubist revolution for more than just aesthetic reasons:
Yet it should not be overlooked that this denial of the
Cubist tradition is not only determined by formal
needs, but also by emotional ones that, in the anxieties
of the atomic age, suddenly seem to correspond with a
Romantic tradition of the irrational and the awesome
as well as with a romantic vocabulary of boundless energies and limitless spaces.6
Rosenblum's insight is important to an understanding of
Abstract Expressionism for two reasons; first, because he
sees it as a continuation of tradition which marks a crisis
in man's relationship with the universe and secondly, because he notes the break with the Cubist aesthetic. Many
critics have pointed out this formal break but they failed
to note that Action Painting is more in tune with a metaphysical view of the universe rather than with an existential outlook which is so close to the art of Picasso. But
what Rosenblum fails to note is that this relationship to
the sublime not only pertains to a sense of nature's limitlessness but to a cosmic consciousness and a conflict revolving around the concept of the self.
Robert Motherwell's writings only partially confirm
this romantic view of the post-1945 movement because
he also sees his art and that of his contemporaries as ". . .
one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union."7 Rather than seeking a development
of genius and the glorification of this concept which
marked some of earlier romantic thinking, Motherwell
views his art and the artistic creativity as having a different function from the existentialist view of self and creativity which is a constant effort through choice to define
oneself and one's personality. Art is not, for him, the ex-

pression of Angst nor an existential nausea but a transcendence of this condition and a reunification with the
cosmos through a reunification of the ego. It is only when
this reunification takes place that the sublime is
achieved.
Painting becomes sublime when the artist transcends
his personal anguish, when he projects in the midst of
a shrieking world an expression of living and its end
that is silent and ordered. That is exposed to expressionism.8
The American artist states very lucidly the difference between his art and that of the earlier German movement.
This difference is crucial to an understanding of the ultimately religious nature of the art following the war,
which is not a psychological exploration of the unconscious conflicts such as one finds in Munch or Kirchner,
but an effort to transcend the personal towards the suprapersonal. Here Surrealism played a large part in the development of Motherwell's art as with the other Action
Painters, but the Americans have gone beyond Surrealism; in the exploration of the unconscious, in their concern with the formal elements and in their attempt to
annihilate the personality. Motherwell's series, as in Elegy
to the Spanish Republic, 54, with its conflict between
the ovals and the rectangular bars, between the organic and the inorganic and between enclosure and openness can be interpreted as a metaphor not only of the artist's personal reactions to a political event but for the cosmic drama of the self and its relationship to the universe,
"between life and death, and their interrelationship."
If we define Expressionism in its historic sense, then
the personalization of emotion and expression are the
foundations of its aesthetic and the movement can
properly be viewed as existentialist; but the tenets of Abstract Expressionism have very slight connections to this
interpretation. Pollock's historic statement about the relationship of painter to canvas, as I have previously
shown, does not speak in terms of personal expression but
of collaboration which is precisely the way in which
Motherwell talks of his own interactions with the
painting:
A picture is a collaboration between artist and canvas.
"Bad" painting is when the artist enforces his will
without regard for the sensibilities of the canvas... .9
From this it is easy to ascertain why Motherwell viewed
his art as opposed to Expressionism and ultimately, why
for almost all the Action Painters, the word Expressionism becomes a misnomer. A review of the writings of
Worringer, one of the theoreticians of the original Expressionist movement, will show that he viewed abstraction as an escape from the world of flux and the entrance
into a world of permanence represented by the work of
art. Although he interpreted abstraction as a kind of ro23

mantic escapism from the flux and uncertainty of the natural world in order to find repose, he does not see abstraction as a projection of individual emotions but as a reflection of an overall psychic need which is precisely how
Motherwell defines the art of his time. Abstract art in its
final analysis is transcendental. Romanticism of the Nineteenth Century, Expressionism and the Action Painters
all spring from common sources, as Professor Rosenblum
pointed out, but they do not have common ends. If the
latter two movements are quests for personal identity, the
modern movement is a search for universal identity.
Whereas the Romantics, such as Rousseau, saw the self in
conflict with the world and attempted to deify the self in
order not to face the eradication of personality, the
American artists attempted to find a resolution of this
conflict through a unification with the universe. It is important, however, to distinguish between the two sides of
Romanticism, the escapist and the mystical-the latter
with a sense of the sublime that saw the resolution of this
conflict in terms of eternal union. It is from this side that
Motherwell's aesthetic can be linked to the landscape
painting of Friedrich rather than to the works of Delacroix or the stories of Poe.
The pantheism of the Romantic painters is, of
course, not present in Abstract Expressionism. Rosenblum compares this condition to the "paint-pantheism"
of the American artist in order to distinguish between
the two movements, but this contrast, although it has
merit, overlooks the profound connections between the
two in terms of the concepts of renunciation of the ego
and of the artist as mediator and collaborator in the creative act. Shelley renders the experience of this collaboration in Mont Blanc.
... and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

to muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind. Which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
The poet does not simply assume an active role in the
creation of the poem and the poetic images; the creative
act results from an interchange between himself and the
universe, just as for Pollock and Motherwell the painting is a result of a collaboration or interchange with the
canvas. For such Romantics as Wordsworth and Keats,
the imagination is not a personalized faculty but it has its
origins in a suprapersonal realm. This is especially true
for Keats who saw the imagination as an unconscious
force acting without the poet's choice or deliberation.
For the poet the imagination is an integrative force as
opposed to analytic reason and, if it is to be efficacious in
the creative act of poetry, the poet must suppress his own
personal emotion and, in fact, his whole personality. The
poet-artist must be without any identity or character; he
24

must become neutral, and thus he no longer expresses

anything, rather things are expressed through him. The
poem is created through an inner contact or sympathy
just as the painting is created by Pollock who talks of
making "contact." For the poet and the painters Motherwell and Pollock, a "bad" work results when there is a
loss of collaboration through the imposition of the personal emotion of volition onto the work. To experience a
work of Pollock's is to literally lose oneself in the
rhythms, to forget all sense of ego. He uses line not to create form but to obviate any experience of form and hence
an individualized entity.
Pollock's sense of surrender to the canvas may be
seen as a metaphor for the obliteration of the ego and its
release into a cosmic experience. It is just such an experience that Keats talks about in Ode to a Nightingale with
its dialectic between empirical reality and the release of
the self through poetry which is juxtaposed with the image of the nightingale and death; not the literal death
but the metaphorical death of the self with its consequent release into the cosmic eternity which is symbolized by the bird. It is empirical reality, the bell, which
brings him back to "my sole self" to the individual ego
and the personality which is mired in the transient world
of everyday reality.
An experience of a painting by Rothko, with its pulsating, high-keyed color speaks, perhaps, most directly of
what Rosenblum called the "Abstract Sublime." The total extinction of movement results in an experience of
quietude into which the observer can feel himself absorbed as the colors are absorbed into the canvas. All
sense of conflict or individualized emotions is lost in a
pervasive, contemplative experience of light. In contrast
to the effect of Turner's color, we sense no conflict or paroxysm of emotion but instead the kind of experience described by Keats in the Ode when he engages and immerses himself in the poetic experience. Paradoxically,
the rhythms of Pollock's line ultimately lead to a similar
sense of infinitude, a loss of personal orientation, as in
Rothko there is a sense of stasis resulting from his use of
color. One can read Pollock's paintings as either webs of
lines defining a finite space or, alternatively, as opening
up into an infinity of space which is suggested by the
bare canvas. Thus we have a paradox between the frontality of the image and the feeling moving into depth. As
Rosalind Krauss points out, assertion of frontality and
flatness are not in opposition but the one can, in fact, call
attention to the other.10 This happens in the work of
Kandinsky and Malevich both of whom stressed "transparent depth" as opposed to the Cubists who emphasized
the literal picture surface, especially in collage. In the
work of Rothko this feeling of transparency is suggested
by the atmospheric color and the floating rectangles
which at once exist in a frontal position while at the
same time they create the feeling of deep space. Hence
the visual experiences of both Rothko and Pollock relate

very strongly to the pictorial tradition which contemplates art from a mystical, transcendental point of view.
A world is thus created in the work of both artists in
which the individual loses himself either to color or
movement. This is the experience which is opposed to
the transience of the everyday world that had little meaning for Keats nor for the Abstract Expressionists. It led
them to search for a more permanent reality through the
loss of the self than is achieved either through "the viewless wings of poesy" or the activity of painting.
In Romanticism and in modern abstract art, then,
we are dealing with a type of mysticism.
One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's appearance is her nakedness, and art stripped bare. How
many rejections on the part of her artists! Whole
worlds-the world of objects, the world of power and
propaganda, the world of anecdotes, the world of fetishes and ancestor worship ....
What new kind of mystique is this, one might ask. For
make no mistake, abstract art is a form of mysticism.1"

It is here we see Action Painting joined to the philosophic current of which Mondrian and Kandinsky contributed so much and of which Romanticism is the ultimate source in modern art history. Romanticism is at the
beginnings of the cult of individuality but also it includes, as we have seen, the idea that the creation of art
results when the ego is suppressed; a cult of the faceless
creator, where individuality gives way to the universiality, where the artist becomes medium or interpreter and
the cosmic laws are made manifest in the work of art,
where union is achieved between man and his universe.
Through the artistic activity, the abstract art of the Action Painters with its concern for myth and mythic consciousness can now be seen to fit into a long tradition in
Western art as a new attempt to define man and his relationships to his world and the concern for self becomes
an entirely different concept than that expressed by
Rousseau, lying closer to Keats and the earlier abstractionists:
This concept of the self is not a new cult of personality. It is not the nervous energy or motor activity of the
artist which counts. Art isn't therapy. The hand that
falters because the artist is depressed or slashes because
the artist feels anger is not necessarily making a work
of art.....
We need to admit here a basic dogma of
religion-that the true self is selfless-for without this
guiding concept Action Painting is a sport and contemplative painting a form of onanism.12
If Action Painters have disregarded the existential world,
it is because they searched for a higher ontological meaning and if they partially accepted a Sartrian view of life
they did not accept his metaphysic of nothingness and
the isolation or glorification of the self. They turned to-

ward a more primitive concept of art and consciousness

in order to oppose the valuelessness they felt around
them. Their art was ethical as much as aesthetic and
their mysticism, although far from the Platonism of Shelley or the Hegelianism of Mondrian, represents a significant attempt to redefine these earlier religious impulses.
If we now look at Minimal Art from the above viewpoint, the impersonality of the literalists can be seen as
an extention of the impulses within Abstract Expressionism but stripped of any metaphysical tendency. The Conceptual Artists' insistence on the phenomenological basis
of art and perception, their deprecation of the "myth of
depth" and humanistic values can now be clearly seen as
a final acceptance of the Sartrian sense of life and the ultimate valuelessness of the universe. The conceptualism
of today's art is not a renunciation of the self, but paradoxically a new glorification of the mind and cult of personality in which the work is less important than the artist himself and the intricacies of his creativity. Significantly, many of these artists have read Wittgenstein who
perhaps most succinctly expressed their contemporary
view of life:
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In
the world everything is as it is and happens as it happens. In it there is not value-and if there were, it
would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of no value, it must lie outside all happenings and being so. For all happening
and being so is accidental.13
Nothing could be further from the metaphysic of Abstract Expressionism with its passionate search for value
and meaning in the universe and its desire to find
mystic
unification.
1 Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News,
December,
1951, pp. 22-23.
2 "Mythic Overtones in the Work of Jackson Pollock," Art
Journal, Summer,
1967.
3Peter Fingesten, in "Spirituality,
and
Mysticism
Non-Objective Art," ART
Fall, 1961, links Pollock to the mystical tradition of Mondrian and
JOURNAL,
Kandinsky and non-objective art.
4Piet Mondrian, "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art," Modern
Artists on
Art, ed. by Robert Herbert (New Jersey, 1964), p. 130.
j Wassily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences," Modern Artists on Art, p. 32.
Robert Rosenblum, "The Abstract Sublime," reprinted
by Henry Geldzahler, in New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (New York, 1969)
p. 358, Originally in Art News, February, 1961.
7 Robert Motherwell,
Catalogue to the exhibition of his zworksat the Museum
of Modern Art, 1965, p. 45.
8 Robert Motherwell,
p. 40.
9 Robert Motherw7ell, 54.
p.
10Rosalind E. Krauss, "On Frontality," Art Forum,
May, 1958.
1 Robert Motherwell,
p. 45.
12 John Ferren,
"Epitaph for the Avant-Garde," Arts, November, 1958. In
his article, Harold Rosenberg also felt that Action
Painting was an "essentially religious movement" but that the painter's "conversation was secular
toward self-recognition. Rosenberg felt that the movement looked to move
away from any concept of value except the self and its definition and emphasized the deification of the act of painting-what
Rosenbluim defined as
"paint-theism." Neither of them emphasized the importance of content
which was an important element for artists such as Rothko and Gottlieb
nor did these writers sense, as Ferren did, the metaphysical nature
of the

mlovement.
13 Ludwig TWittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus

183.

(London, 1922), p.

25