Abstract Expressionism: Greenberg vs Rosenberg on Painting

Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) coined the term 'action painting' in his 1952 essay 'The American Action Painters,' defining it as the artist's subjective process of creation that transforms blank canvas into expression, emphasizing that action painting is inseparable from biography and represents a form of private myth-making that resists mass conformity and bureaucratic art criticism.

Art critic Harold Rosenberg developed an existential theory of action painting, articulated in his 1952 Art News article 'The American Action Painters.' Unlike Clement Greenberg's formalist approach, Rosenberg framed Abstract Expressionism as a form of existential expression where the artist acts upon an empty canvas as an arena. He described the artist as an outlaw going against conventional norms, expressing existential angst through physical engagement with paint. This perspective made abstract paintings seem like 'a belch from the unconscious,' emphasizing the psychological and performative aspects of the creative process over purely visual analysis.

Art critic Harold Rosenberg described what New York painters had in common: 'The canvas is an arena in which to act rather than a space in which to reproduce or redesign what's going on in the canvas. What happens in the canvas is not a picture but an event.' This theory positioned the painting as a dynamic space for action rather than passive reproduction, fundamentally changing how abstract expressionist works were understood. Rosenberg's criticism helped establish the conceptual framework for understanding action painting and gestural abstraction.

By 1947, Pollock had evolved his technique to spreading canvases on the floor, applying paint through pouring, dripping, scattering, and using unconventional tools like sticks, trowels, and pallet knives alongside strings, sand, and nails. Narrative content disappeared entirely, leaving only splatters and skeins of paint. Titles were abandoned in favor of numbering paintings like musical compositions. Despite claims of chaos, Pollock maintained precise control over paint flow and color distribution, understanding exactly what motions and materials produced desired effects. This radical departure faced harsh criticism—described as 'a child's contour map' and compared to bodily spillage—but gained champions at MoMA and critic Clement Greenberg, who saw it as the culmination of modernist advancement toward pure sensation. Art critic Harold Rosenberg coined 'action painting,' viewing the canvas as 'an arena in which to act.' The term 'abstract expressionism' emerged to describe artists pursuing abstraction to convey emotion, marking a post-WWII shift where painters worked from within rather than external subjects.

Benedetto Croce's aesthetic theory holds that art conveys the creative process. For action painters, creation is a struggle—painful, hard, filled with anxiety and riddles, not joyful creation like Picasso's view. Harold Rosenberg defined action painting as 'painting is an arena,' emphasizing that art is struggle, war, and fight. The artist is making a fight when creating. This connects to the broader theme that art is about confrontation and conflict, both in its creation and its purpose.

Minimalism emerged as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism's metaphysical pretensions, rejecting its theory and painting as a genre. Minimalists initially confused with Pop artists rejected the gravity and seriousness of Abstract Expressionism, viewing it as elitist. Unlike Pop Art, minimalists never abandoned tradition, positioning themselves as the last vanguard in high culture. The term 'minimal' became associated with the movement, favoring its reception as a cure for Abstract Expressionism's excesses. Clement Greenberg's theory held that art's aesthetic purpose lies in its own essence, with abstraction being the most advanced expression of modern painting. Barnett Newman's 1948 'Onement' inaugurated large abstract, practically monochrome canvases traversed by horizontal color lines (zips), seeking the sublime rather than European beauty. Greenberg understood planitude as painting's essence - the only sufficient condition for painting's existence.

Pop Art and Minimalism emerged in the 1960s as reactions to Abstract Expressionism, with Pop Art artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol embracing mass-produced imagery (comic books, soup cans) to reflect modern commodified life, while Minimalists like Frank Stella rejected meaning entirely, focusing on the physical properties of art itself; these movements represented a shift toward post-modernism's pluralistic and eclectic approach to art.

Beginning in the late 1950s, protests against Greenberg's artistic authority emerged from Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Johns, championed by Greenberg as father of Abstract Expressionism, created works like 'Flag' that directly challenged Greenberg's principles by reproducing existing images. Warhol's pop art, which lifted images from advertisements, comic books, and consumer products and presented them as high art, represented a direct attack on Greenberg's distinction between high and low culture. In 1990, MoMA's 'High and Low' exhibition formally declared Greenberg's theories obsolete, marking the definitive collapse of his critical orthodoxy and the triumph of postmodern approaches that embraced commercial imagery and popular culture as legitimate artistic subject matter.

Both Greenberg and Fried demonstrated limited capacity for anticipating what was happening in the 1960s art world. They were unable to establish adequate critical lines toward Pop Art, minimalism, and conceptual art, which they rejected with insufficient argumentation. Greenberg spent years announcing painting's limit, believing reduction to minimum elements would never be transcended. However, he began suspecting catastrophe was approaching. The Greenbergian criterion of autocriticism was radicalized by minimalism and conceptual art, representing an art of the literal that went beyond even the limits Greenberg had established. Thomas Lawson's 'Last Exit Painting' (1981) analyzed the 'painting wars' and emergence of Pictures, arguing minimalists subverted modern theory by taking it literally to the extreme. Lawson described this as 'absurd extremism' that dramatized the situation while recovering critical distance. However, this raises questions about whether critical discourse was truly absent from the New York School, as Harold Rosenberg had provided an alternative reading emphasizing event and action over formal qualities.

Clement Greenberg, a leading art critic who defined Modernism and championed Abstract Expressionism, became increasingly critical of the movement by the late 1960s, believing that the works of artists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock had suffered; he argued that the 1962 stock market crash marked the end of Abstract Expressionism's commercial success, paving the way for Pop Art's emergence as a reaction to what he saw as middlebrow culture's capture of vanguard art, representing a general decline in artistic taste and aesthetic standards.

Modernism was an early 20th-century art movement that defied traditional 19th-century ideas, encouraging artists to try new things and question everything. Examples include Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Joyce, and Proust. Postmodernism emerged mid-to-late 20th century as both an art and philosophical movement characterized by heavy cynicism and irony, emphasizing nihilism and subjective truth. It made parody and pastiche popular, with intertextuality being a key element where works reference other media.

The transition from Modernism to Postmodernism represents a fundamental philosophical shift in artistic approach. Modernism (late 19th century to 1939) emphasized concentration of nature and aesthetic pleasure. Postmodernism (post-1945 to present) rejected these principles, focusing instead on conceptual impact and emotional engagement. Picasso's definition that art's only purpose is to affect the viewer's feelings encapsulates this shift. The era of Postmodernism began after World War II's reconstruction of Europe and continues today. The Kuleshov Effect manifests across all visual arts through the assembly of existing images into new combinations. The Gestalt principle explains how new qualitative entities emerge from combining existing elements. This occurs because the postmodern era does not inspire artists in the same way the Industrial Revolution did, and increased preservation of art means images from the past 100-200 years are already familiar. Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 16th-century composite portraits anticipate postmodern recombination methods, demonstrating that artistic principles can remain dormant for extended periods before finding their appropriate historical context.

Around 1968, Western society shifted from modernism (which emphasized education, following rules, and believing this would save the world) to postmodernism. This transition occurred because people recognized that excessive education, religion, law, and knowledge had contributed to catastrophic events like the two World Wars and the Holocaust. The result was a move toward living with disorder rather than asserting absolute truths.

Modernist artists like Ad Reinhardt, Carl Andre, and Richard Serra pursued extreme reductionism, believing that painting had reached its final form with Reinhardt's black paintings and that further artistic development was impossible; this led to postmodernism's emergence as a reaction against minimalism, where artists like David Salle and Michael Kreber rejected the notion of autonomous art objects and instead embraced disorientation, conceptual ambiguity, and the blurring of boundaries between art and everyday objects.

Postmodernism emerged as a rejection of modernism's idealism and perfection, embracing skepticism and suspicion. The window metaphor illustrates this evolution: realism looks at the world through a window, modernism examines the window itself, and postmodernism examines everything including the window, frame, and act of looking. Intertextuality—the idea that nothing exists in isolation but as an assemblage—calls attention to artificial constructs. In Hoodwinked, this transforms a fairy tale into a 'who done it' that examines its own construction, demonstrating how postmodernism challenges traditional narrative structures.

Aristotle's mimetic theory (art as imitation) faces problems with non-representational art like Kandinsky's 'Yellow-Red-Blue.' If art imitates, what is being imitated in abstract art? The artist may not have a mental image to copy, and the pleasure from such art cannot be reduced to successful imitation of natural phenomena. Kant's formalism explains abstract art better - individual colors cannot be beautiful (only charming), but the relationships between colors in composition can be beautiful. This formalist approach accounts for aesthetic experience across all art forms, whether representational or abstract.

This comprehensive presentation demonstrates a systematic three-tier analytical framework for understanding art: (1) Formalism examines visual elements, structure, and technique without external meaning, revealing how artists create spatial and emotional experiences through composition, color, and form; (2) Iconography analyzes symbols, signs, and meanings within artwork, interpreting colors, shapes, and titles as carriers of philosophical, spiritual, and personal significance; (3) Contextual analysis situates artwork within historical, cultural, political, and biographical frameworks, connecting artistic creation to broader social movements and personal narratives. The presentation applies this framework to two contrasting movements: Minimal Art (Newman's 'Anas Light', 1968) representing 1960s American abstraction seeking pure spiritual experience, and Contemporary Art (Mantovani's 'Cakrawala Warna') reflecting Indonesian cultural identity through the dialogue between natural and geometric elements.

Art can be analyzed along two independent dimensions: formal and conceptual. The formal dimension refers to the physical characteristics of the artwork itself—how it looks, sounds, feels, its size, and technical execution. The conceptual dimension encompasses everything else: what the piece is trying to say, its significance within its artistic movement, its relevance to its art form, and why the artist chose to create it. These two dimensions are completely independent; something can be great formally but terrible conceptually, or vice versa. This framework helps explain why different artworks resonate with people in different ways.

Clement Greenberg, from the point of view of formalism, coincided art with the expression of its respective material and medial conditions. In contrast, conceptual art identifies art with its general concept. These represent two extreme versions of a teleological history of modern art, with their respective endpoints being perfectly complementary. Both approaches, from opposite directions, address what aesthetically cannot and should not be separated: form and content, materiality and meaning of the artwork. The artwork of conceptual artists oscillates between image and text, demonstrating that art can never coincide with the general concept of art. Conceptual art, as exemplified by Joseph Kosuth's work, does not signal an endpoint in art history but presents a highly specific work that places us in a situation of rethinking both our terms and the modes we use to interpret such work.

Contemporary abstract artists like Chellis Baird and Jim D'Amato employ minimalist formalism through restricted color palettes (primarily black, white, and red) combined with sculptural and textile-based techniques to create complex compositions that explore the relationship between flatness and three-dimensionality, often drawing inspiration from sources such as Meso-American art and personal backgrounds in fashion design.