'A Unique Loneliness': The Existential Impulse in Art of the Forties

Author(s): Christopher Lyon

Source: MoMA , Winter, 1991, No. 6 (Winter, 1991), pp. 3-7+20
Published by: The Museum of Modern Art

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4381137

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 THE EXISTENTIAL IMPULSE IN ART OF THE FORTIES

BY CHRISTOPHER LYON

Joe, the poet and "Dream Detective"
in Hans Richter's 1947 avant-garde
feature Dreams That Money Can Buy,
is the protagonist, and voiceover nar-
rator, of the film's final episode,
"Narcissus." In the previous ones he
has encountered clients whose dreams
were concocted by Richter's five col-
laborators, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger,
Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and
Alexander Calder. Now, as the detec-
tive steps out of his office he sees him-
self sitting across the waiting room.
He is disoriented: "I suddenly realized
I had lost my way in my time . . .
Familiar objects seemed strange and
unfriendly . . . I always crossed with
Feelings of alienation and estrange- Americans began to hear of Exis-
ment were the experience of a genera- tentialism in the months after the war
tion-"strange" was a favorite word ended. William Barrett, whose Irra-
of young artists in the late forties- tional Man (1958), still in print,
and also a subject for satire: Joe remains a popular introduction to the
becomes alienated from his card-play-
ing cronies when he inexplicably
turns blue; the existential dilemma
becomes clear to him when he finds
himself on a ladder whose rungs dis-
appear beneath him as he climbs.
An aim of the exhibition Art of the
Forties is to provide the opportunity to
II S I
S

the lights, but now the lights are out."

reevaluate the art of that critical

decade. One tempting project is to
look again at the impact on art of the
Henri Cartier-Bresson. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE. 1946.
period's intellectual movements.
Gelatin-silver print, 15 I/s x 10 1/8".
Much recent critical art history has
Gift of the photographer.
dealt with Marxist thought in the late
thirties and its effect on subsequent movement, describes the situation in
writing about art, but the more 1945: "Naturally, our expectant eyes
evanescent currents of postwar turned toward France and Paris. Our
Existentialism have been relatively generation had been brought up on
neglected. Richter's film gives us a the remembrance of the 1920s as the
glimpse of the 1940s as a creative great golden age of the avant-garde,
melange in which Freudian psycholo- whose focal point had been Paris. We
gy, Surrealism, and Existentialism expected history to repeat itself: as it
flowed together with various streams had been after the First, so it would be
of popular culture. The film, a send- after the Second World War. And it
up of Freudian analysis set within a seemed for the moment almost as if
parody
jean Dubuffet. LEAUTAUD, REDSKIN SORCERER of film noir, suggests that thehistory were not going to disappoint
existential
(LAUTAUD, SORCIER PEAU-ROUGE) from the More impulse had begun to chan- us: there was indeed 'hot news' from
nel1946.
Beautiful Than They Think: Portraits series. these
Oilstreams into a distinctive Paris of a new movement-Existent-
on canvas with pebbles and gravel, 361/4 postwar sensibility.
x 28 3/4". ialism-whose spokesman was a
William H. Weintraub Fund. young Frenchman, Jean-Paul Sartre."

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 The new philosophy was met by a
public already familiar from American
films and crime fiction with its mood
of pessimism and existential themes.
Film noir, a term coined by a French
critic in 1946, is the cycle of mostly
American films made between 1940
and 1960 whose stories of crime and
corruption are often set in a world of
dark, rain-slicked streets; the term also
refers to the style, still popular, of
those films. Film noir is characteristic
of 1940s art generally in its amalgama-
tion of European and American
sources-the gangster film and the
hard-boiled novel inflected by
Alexander Calder. CONSTELLATION WITH RED OBJECT. 1943. Painted wood
and steel wire construction, 24 1/2 x 15 1/4 X 9 1/2".
James Thrall Soby Fund.
German Expressionism and French
poetic realism. John Huston's The
Maltese Falcon (1941) helped establish
the characteristic themes and style of
film noir and influential early exam-
ples include Edward Dmytryk's
Farewell, My Lovely (1944), Otto
Preminger's Laura (1944), and Billy
Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944).
In a pioneering 1976 article in Sight
and Sound, Robert Porfirio identified
a number of the principal existential
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motifs seen in films noirs: the non- concerns treated by Existentialism arise
heroic hero, alienation and loneliness, in ancient philosophy and its modern
the moment of existential choice, the beginnings are often traced to the
certainty of death, the meaningless- works of Soren Kierkegaard and
ness or absurdity of man's existence, Friedrich Nietzsche. Hannah Arendt, a
and the depiction of a world of chaos student of Jaspers, provided the
and violence from which the protago- American intellectual public with an
nist seeks to find a sanctuary. introduction to "Existenz Philosophy"
Orson Welles's Lady from Shanghai in the winter 1946 issue of Partisan
(1948) isn't entirely typical of film noir Review. She explained that Husserl
but does use many of its visual and (who died in 1938) sought to establish
narrative devices and displays the exis- the ancient relation between Being and
tential themes of 1940s filmmaking Thought, which had guaranteed man a
with Wellesian brio. (The Lady from "home" in this world. He attempted
Shanghai and Laura are screened in this by a "detour through the inten-
April as part of Art of the Forties.) tional structure of consciousness," a
Welles, as the Irish way around the vexing question of real-
sailor Michael O'Hara, is an ity: "Since every act of consciousness
unusually romantic example has by its very nature an object, I can at
of the non-heroic "home- least be certain of one thing, namely
less" protagonist of existen- that I 'have' the object of my conscious-
tial film and literature. He ness.' The seen tree, she explained, "the
joins Elsa Bannister (Rita tree as object of my consciousness,
Hayworth), the obligatory need not be the 'real' tree . . ."
feemme fatale, and her cor- Arendt then treated one of the
rupt lawyer husband on a principal themes of Existentialism,
sea voyage, which O'Hara "homelessness," employing the evi-
describes as "all very rich dence of modern art and literature.
and rare and strange." The It's striking that those who sought to
San Francisco aquarium, the explain Existentialism to the public,
setting of a famous scene in including Sartre, the theologian Paul
the film, is a metaphor of Tillich, and William Barrett, consis-
the film's world: Elsa and the tently turned to visual art as a prima-
others are "like sharks," ry source of "testimony" to the rele-
O'Hara says, "mad with vance of Existentialist ideas for con-
their own blood, chewin' temporary man. Arendt wrote:
away at their own selves."
The modern feeling of homelessness
The film's spectacular con-
in the world has always ended up with
clusion is a shootout in a
things torn out of theirfunctional con-
funhouse hall of mirrors
text. A proof of this, scarcely to be over-
where the illusory identities
looked, is modern literature and a good
of Elsa and her husband are
part of modern painting. However one
shattered. We see her at the
may interpret this homelessness socio-
end, dying, as O'Hara pauses in the
logically or psychologically, its philo-
one-way exit of the funhouse. "No,"
sophical basis lies in thefact that though
she says, "we can't win. Give my love
the functional context of the world, in
to the sunrise."
which also I myself am involved, can
always justify and explain that there
are, for example, tables and chairs gen-
The tenets of Existentialism were estab-
erally, nevertheless it can never make
lished in the late 1920s by the German
me grasp conceptually that this table is.
philosophers Martin Heidegger and
And it is the existence of this table,
Karl Jaspers who built on the phe-
independent of tables in general, which
nomenological investigations of
evokes the philosophical shock.
Edmund Husserl. The fundamental
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I -
Rita Hayworth
The potential importance for artists better questions about what making
and art critics of 'existential phe-
nomenology'-the omnibus term
employed by Arturo Fallico, the first
to attempt an existential aesthetic-
may already be evident in this brief
passage from Arendt's essay. The
emphasis on consciousness and its
objects, in opposition to a dependence unnatural clarity, as though one had
on a reality outside of the artist, con-never seen it before.
firmed the predisposition toward the
psychological of advanced American
artists in the mid-forties. In addition Partisan Review's spring 1946 issue,
to the work of those already men-
tioned, the phenomenological investi- virtually an introduction to French
gations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, his Existentialism. It included a major
attention to optical phenomena and
the mental processes of vision, sug-
gested the possibility of a new kind of
relationship between the artist and his
subjects in the world. Merleau-Ponty's
thought is especially significant for an
understanding of Alberto Giacometti's
1940s sculpture.
In comparison with other philo-
sophical movements current in the
postwar period, Existentialism, and
the phenomenological outlook gener-
ally, may be espe- Existentialism, since he insisted on the
cially pertinent to actual, essential qualities of the art
visual art. They object, but it is evident from his writ-
seem to address ings that he responded to the existen-
both the individualtial spirit of the forties. In a July 1946
creative act and the article in The Nation, Greenberg saw
viewer s experienceJean Dubuffet as a prime exponent in
of art "from the art of the new movement.
inside." Marxism, "It is easy," he wrote, "to perceive
and movements the affinities between Dubuffet's
originating in the painting-which attacks the human
social sciences or form with graffiti modeled on chil-
anthropology, look dren's drawings and with linear
at art from the schemes in the manner of Klee . . . and
outside, seeing it the world-hating attitudes revealed by
not from an indi- French Existentialism in such works as
vidual's perspec- Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausee."
tive, but as a mode Greenberg notes, perceptively, that t
of production or a war contributed to but was not the
symptom of social origin of these attitudes.
conditions. One
Dubuffet's devalorization of the
might suggest that
human image, the hatred he concen-
Existentialism,
trates on public faces in public places
being concerned
would appear to have been motivated
with objects of an
by events in France
and under the Vichy
Orson
individual's con-
regime. And the same events are popu-
sciousness, asks
larly made responsible for the vogue of
Existentialism among French intellectu-
and experiencing art mean. Sartre par-
als. But Sartre adopted his philosophy
ticularly emphasized the absolute exis-
before the war, and it seems to me that
tence of the object of consciousness,
it would have attained a certain popu-
almost as if the artist's task were to
larity even without the disasters of the
induce in the viewer a simulated expe-
war, while I am sure that Dubuffet's
rience of jamais vu, that is, seeing a
pessimism derives from an experience
familiar object with a sudden burst of
antedating and underlying that of the
most recent history. Such nihilism,
embodied as cogently and as successfully
as it is in paint, could not have been
improvised on the moment's notice of
war that lasted five years. The very
devoted to new French literature, was
quality of Dubuffet's art makes it plain
that it rests on the experience of a life-
time and on a deep-seated and constant
essay by Sartre, fiction by Jean Genet,
view of the world.
a review by Barrett of Sartre's Being
and Nothingness and The Age of Greenberg considered Existential-
Reason, and a review by Delmore ism a necessary consequence of the
Schwartz of Camus's The Myth of "shrinking possibilities of bourgeois
Sisyphus, two chapters of which were society in Western Europe, the
excerpted. Clement Greenberg also hypocrisies it requires in order to keep
contributed a review. it stable . . .":
The intellectual stance of Greenberg,
Pessimism has become appropriate
a former editor of the magazine and its
since 1918, and it only remained for the
principal writer on art, would ordinar-
late 1930s to replace the exuberant and,
ily be considered the antithesis of

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 in a sense, frivolous, hedonistic pessimism
of dada and surrealism ... with the radi-
cal and logically responsible pessimism of
Existentialism.... Whatever the affecta-
tions and philosophical sketchiness of
Existentialism, it is aesthetically appro-
priate to our age, and may make up in
artfor what it lacks as a complete
philosophy."_
Americans'
perception of Exis-
tentialism at this early moment, and
Greenberg's intellectual framework,
are illuminated here. The deep pes-
simism he perceives is in part a reflec-
tion of his own outlook-Dubuffet
later insisted, "My position is exclu-
sively that of celebration, and whoever
has thought to detect in it intentions
of humor or satire, of bitterness or
invective, has misunderstood it" -and
this article shows how effortlessly
Greenberg combines that viewpoint
with a Marxist-derived historicism.
In January and February 1948,
Alberto Giacometti was seen in his
first postwar New York exhibition, at
the Pierre Matisse Gallery. It caught
Giacometti in mid-stride, so to speak,
like one of his own impossibly elon-
gated walking figures, in a period,
1946-52, of unusual creative produc-
tion. An essay by Sartre in the cata-
logue established Giacometti as the
prototype of the Existential artist,
asserting that he had effected a
"Copernican revolution" in sculpture:
Before him the effort was to sculpt
being, and that absolute melted away
in an infinity of appearances. He has
chosen to sculpt the situated appear-
ance, and he has shown that in this way
the absolute may be attained.... Each
one of [his figures] reveals man as one
sees him to be, as he isfor other men, as
he appears in an intersubjective
world ... each shows us that man is not
there first and to be seen afterwards,
but that he is the being whose essence is
to existfor others.
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Alberto Giacometti. MAN POINTING. 1947.
Bronze, 701/2 x 403/4 x 16 3/", at base 12 x 13 1/4". Nevertheless, "it had no significant
Gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd.
Giacometti had met Sartre in 1939
and their friendship was renewed after were looking for America to assert its
the war. The artist did not define him-
self as an Existentialist, but it is certain
that Phenomenology and Existential-
ism played important roles in the
development of his art. His preoccu-
pation with problems of perception
had led him to become interested in
Phenomenology, and he was close to
Merleau-Ponty after the war. Valerie
Fletcher, who organized a recent
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Giacometti retrospective exhibition,
noted the consequences of his close
involvement with Existentialism:
"Unfortunately, the thoroughness
and ease with which his art was sub-
sumed into the postwar vogue of
Existentialist angst proved detrimen-
tal and later triggered a reaction by
formalist critics who tended to ignore
such connotations as unimportant or
even embarrassingly emotional.
Giacometti's canonization as an
'Existentialist saint' falsely cast his
tremendously varied output in an
overly simplistic framework."
Among American artists, Sartre sin-
gled out Alexander Calder, whose
mobiles he considered to have a "pro-
found, metaphysical meaning," evi-
dently as objects having no fixed form,
which the viewer experiences in terms
of their moment-to-moment exis-
tence. But Calder could not be imag-
ined in the role of existential hero, and
his art has escaped being thought of in
existential terms.
The impact of the movement on
American intellectuals and artists is
not easy to assess, but, as in the case of
Greenberg, it seems likely to have
affected their attitudes more than their
thinking. It encountered an ingrained
Marxism among leftist intellectuals,
and the ascendancy of Positivism in
the American academy. "To be sure,"
Barrett writes, "the tags and phrases
got about publicly, more than with
most philosophies nowadays."
effect upon the trend of the dominant
academic philosophy." It was also a
French import at a time when many
own cultural identity as the newly
dominant world power.
The movement's effect on the
thinking of the New York School
artists appears to have been greater,
though how much is open to question.
Willem de Kooning told Irving
Sandler in 1959, "We weren't influ-
enced directly by Existentialism, but it
was in the air, and we felt it without
 knowing too much about it. We were shapes in the pictures are the perform- in parks only through coincidence, and,
in touch with the mood." They were ers. They have been created from the with its companions, form a tableau
interested enough that Elaine de need for a group of actors who are vivant of human incommunicability.
Kooning arranged in the late winterable of to move dramatically without I do not believe that there ever was a
1949-50 for Barrett to give a lectureembarrassment
at and execute gestures question of being abstract or representa-
the Club, the loft space on Eighth without shame. Neither the action nor tional. It really is a matter of ending this
Street founded in the fall of 1949 by athe actors can be anticipated, or silence and solitude, of breathing and
number of the Abstract Expressionists.described in advance. They begin as stretching one's arms again.
Barrett and Hannah Arendt were an unknown adventure in an
among the first to be invited to lectureunknown space." In effect, Rothko is Irving Sandler believes that in the
and, Barrett remembered, "I don't asking for the canvas itself to become a later 1940s French Existential think-
think I've ever spoken to a more atten-surrogate existential situation, where ing "had replaced Jungian and
tive audience, yet I wasn't sure they the transcendent act will be possible, Freudian dogmas as an intellectual
heard what I said. That is, they lis-
tened to my words, but I'm not sure
they heard their meaning."
Awareness of Existentialism occur-
red earlier. In the winter 1947-48 issue
of Possibilities, the sole number of a
magazine edited by Harold Rosenberg,
Robert Motherwell, Pierre Chareau,
and John Cage, a contribution by
Mark Rothko shows more than a pass-
ing acquaintance with Existential-
ism's characteristic concerns and jar-
gon. "The Romantics were prompted,"
he begins, "to seek exotic subjects and
to travel to far off places. They failed

iti
to realize that, though the transcen-
dental must involve the strange and
unfamiliar, not everything strange or
unfamiliar is transcendental." Rothko
is pointing here to the characteristic ile deKoigfAtlG14.Eaeanoioncns 2/x 6/'.Prhs

"bracketing of reality" mentioned ear-

lier: the idea that consciousness is the
artist's true Tahiti. Not only that, but
society's hostility, which preoccupied Willem de Kooning. PAINTING. 1948. Enamel and oil on canvas, 42 5/n x 561'In". Purchase.
this generation of artists, can even play
a positive role in launching mental the act that will overcome modern frame of reference," and he describes
expatriation: man's isolation and inability to com- the gesture painters' response to the
municate. He concludes: new movement:
The unfriendliness of society to his
activity is difficult for the artist to For me the great achievements of the Because of its emphasis on choice, the
accept. Yet this very hostility can act as centuries in which the artist accepted the gesture painters found the Existentialist
a lever for true liberation. Freed from a probable and the familiar as his subjects conception offreedom more to their lik-
false sense of security and community, were the pictures of the single human ing than Surrealist automatism, which
the artist can abandon his plastic bank- figure-alone in a moment of utter seemed too permissive to them. Nor
book, just as he has abandoned other immobility. would they accept the notion that the
forms of security. Both the sense of com- But the solitary figure could not raise unconscious was a fixed realm contain-
munity and of security depend on the its limbs in a single gesture that might ing pre-existing (if illusive) images, and
familiar. Freed of them, transcendental indicate its concern with the fact of mor- that it was the function of the artist to
experiences become possible. tality and an insatiable appetite for reveal and illustrate them. Existential-
ubiquitous experience in face of this fact. ism was attractive because it denied the
Following immediately upon this
Nor could the solitude be overcome. It
passage is Rothko's famous statement
could gather on beaches and streets and
"I think of my pictures as dramas; the
continued on page 20

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 continuedfrom page 8

idea that man has a definable nature,
and because it emphasized his central
role in determining his own existence.
Hence, the existential-minded artist in
his art as in life avoided subjecting him-
self to fixed and habitual patterns, stan-
dards, or ideas. To partake authentically
in the human adventure, he had to live
in a mood of expectancy, to remain open
to change.
Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Gottlieb, cadences the now familiar existential
and Motherwell: motifs: "Isolation, or rather the alien-
ation that is its cause, is the truth-
Attached neither to a community nor isolation, alienation, naked and
to one another, these painters experi- revealed unto itself, is the condition
ence a unique loneliness of a depth that under which the true reality of our age
is reached perhaps nowhere else in the is experienced. And the experience of
world. From the four corners of their this true reality is indispensable to any
vast land they have come to plunge ambitious art."

Sandler cites Barrett's discussion of

A new myth of the artist was being
Existentialism's focus on alienation
spun in the late forties, one with ori-
and estrangement, the threat of
gins as venerable as those of the prole-
Nothingness, and the solitary condi-
tarian ideal of the thirties. In only a
tion of the individual, and continues,
few years the myth itself became a car-
"But it must also be remembered that
icature, fed by popular notions of the
a man, no matter how vulnerable and
~ ~ -N alienated, self-destructive individual
anxious, who makes himself is some-
artist, personified by Jackson Pollock,
thing of a hero, even if a pathetic one.
and tales of the rough camaraderie of
It was this dual awareness that shaped
the Cedar Bar. In 1954, Ad Reinhardt
the sensibility of the gesture painters'"
lampooned the artist who inhabited
The existential view of art in
this myth as "the cafe-and-club primi-
America found its most effective pro-
tive and neo-Zen-bohemian, the
ponent in Harold Rosenberg who, in 'h~~~~~~14
Vogue-magazine-cold-water-flat-fauve
the late 1940s, began to set before the
and Harpers-Bazaar-bum, the Eighth-
public the new painting in recogniz-
street-existentialist and Easthampton-
ably Existentialist terms. In the fall of
aesthete, the Modern-Museum-pau-
1949, Rosenberg and Samuel Kootz
per and international-set-sufferer, the
organized a group exhibition called
abstract-'Hesspressionist' and
"The Intrasubjectives" that included
Kootzenjammer-Kid-Jungian, the
Baziotes, De Kooning, Gorky,
Romantic-ham-'action' -actor."
Gottlieb, Graves, Hofmann, Mother-
Though disillusionment with exis-
well, Pollock, Reinhardt, Rothko,
tential posturing set in early, our image
Tobey, and Tomlin. The term, taken
of the artist, and notions about the
from an essay by the philosopher Jose
Otto Aicher. EXISTENZIALISMUS. 1949. artist's relation to the culture at large,
Ortega y Gasset, referred to 'the con-
Lithograph, 31 x 16". Gift of the Designer. may have been permanently changed
tent of consciousness.' It echoes
by Existentialism. The heroic stature
Sartre's phrase "intersubjective world"
themselves into the anonymity of Newthat the artist attained in postwar cul-
in his introduction to Giacometti, and
York, annihilation of their past being ture, so different from the artist's
appears to have been an early example
not the least compelling project of these image in America before that time, and
of existential art jargon.
aesthetic Legionnaires. Is not the defini- the moral dimensions we now see in
"Intra-subjective" didn't catch on,
tion of true loneliness, that one is lonely the creative act, are aspects of this
and Rosenberg did not coin the defini-
not only in relation to people but in change. Many artists who emerged in
tive "existential" description of gestu-
relation to things as well? Estrangementthe 1980s, who were affected by the
ral New York School painting-
from American objects here reaches therevolution of consciousness achieved
"action painting"-until the end of
level of pathos. It accounts for certain by feminism and other forms of politi-
1952 when his article "The American
harsh tonalities, spareness of composi- cal and social awareness, have insisted
Action Painters" appeared in Art
tion, aggressiveness of statement. on an art rooted in the psychological
News. But he had been thinking about
and social experience of an individual
American painters in such terms for a
Greenberg also emphasized the artist or viewer. We may see in this a
number of years, and had presented
American artists' alienation, and its survival and renewal of the humanism
them this way to the French in 1947,
importance for their art. In an impor- and ethical commitment that accom-
in the introduction to a catalogue of a
tant 1948 essay, "The Situation at the panied the Existential impulse.
Paris show of six Americans, including
Moment," he expressed in biblical

20

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