In 1919, Der Sturm, a German magazine focused on art and literature of the times and often publishing articles on surrealism, cubism and DADA, included a term in a specific article about abstraction as an “expression” by German artists rendering portraits and landscapes. Ten years later, American art critic Alfred Barr borrowed the term “abstract expressionism” to describe the work of the ex-pat Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky who was living in France. His struggle to paint imagery void of any recognizable person or landscape instead painted a “composition,” using marks and shapes expanding ideas of his fellow Russian painter, Kazimir Malevich.
A decade after that, Germany invaded Poland and the world would be consumed over the next several years united against the spread of fascist authoritarian political regimes. After the war and through the 1940s, several of these artists, primarily from the East Coast or newly exiled, began forging their own investigation of abstraction, void of early 20th Century American Realism, European Surrealism, and European Cubism. They consciously chose to abandon the surrealist ideas of depiction and favor a more spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. These artists studied ideas plumbed by exile-surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, a theorist who fostered notions of viewer-dependent space. The New Yorker Magazine art critic Robert Coates saw this trend developing with both native and exiled artists around New York City and again used the exact term “abstract expressionism” in a 1946 article to describe works by, notably, Adolf Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
These old and new Americans took hold of their philosophies on this direction in painting much like jazz musicians of the Big Band, making it wholly their own. Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery showcased their work, but exhibitions included both American and European artists of the day, distracting attention from their new language. The gallery’s six-season run ended in 1947, forcing the New York abstract painters to band together in a loose association that included renting their own exhibition space. Not long after, Betty Parsons Gallery filled the void and began to show their work.
Two exhibitions in 1951, the landmark group exhibition “Ninth Street Show,” curated by Leo Castelli, and the one-person show of Jackson Pollock at Betty Parsons Gallery, arguably cemented the move of the international art scene from Paris to New York City. That fuel drove their acceptance, along with Betty Parsons Gallery publishing a widely distributed catalogue of Pollock's one-man show. The paintings on display were produced without ever touching a brush to the canvas. Painted on the floor of his studio, the artist created “action paintings” by dancing around the canvas, flinging, dripping and splashing paint on the surface of the work. The paintings were exciting, an out of control free expression illustrating the open-minded viewer-dependent acceptance that Paalen had once theorized.
Critical acclaim from this painting style often related the work to an “expression of freedom,” created in democracies void of censorship or restriction. The work became a “political” self-expression that could only occur in a free society. The McCarthy political climate of the day stung any residual Soviet sympathy following WWII by denouncing communism as the new enemy of freedom. The Communists themselves had vociferously rejected abstract expressionism as decadent, degenerate and debased. Even some American anti-Communists, as a rule, were no fan of the new movement in art. It was considered an intellectual left-leaning art form.
In retrospect, it is a mischaracterization to propose that Abstract Expressionism is a globalist capitalist conspiracy. Artists do not often share the political leanings of their patrons, nor do artists create their artworks as a tool to be used by the economic elite to advance their political agendas. Instead, Abstract Expressionism was a sometimes uncomfortable while ironic coincidence of interests. The hegemony of Abstract Expressionism was more the fruition of a half century of European aesthetic and philosophical development that had ultimately been forced to find a home in New York City, parallel to the rise of the American economic empire after the war. It seems inevitable years later that these two phenomena would be co-branded, in essence, and share a kind of guilt by association.
It was in 1949 that Emerson Woelffer was introduced to and became friendly with this group of artists whose primary concern of the preceding few years was the analytical and philosophical disconnection to the Surrealist and American Social Realist notions of painting. Time spent on the East Coast allowed Woelffer’s work to move seamlessly into this form as his work had always passed through a non-objective visual vocabulary, while still allowing his own intellectual discoveries to take shape. He maintained his own brand of individualism within this wider circle of abstract painters. A well informed artist on the periphery of his new peers in AbEx New York, he instead spent the next decade painting his own path from his native Chicago while embracing this new aesthetic. During the 1950s he lived in the Midwest, Chicago, Colorado Springs, and finally, a two-year sojourn to Italy before moving permanently to the West Coast in late 1959, all the while painting his unique voice within this larger context of Abstract Expressionism.
Los Angeles does, as with most artists who find their home in Southern California, change the way they see light, space and color. Woelffer, true to his love for painting, continued to render abstract forms unique to his own hand, now plied with a sense of place. He was not the only practitioner outside New York. Clifford Still, Sam Francis and Richard Diebenkorn also lived with Woelffer on the West Coast forging their own abstract language associated with their New York peers. They all had New York gallery representation coupled with collector interest in their works and the larger East Coast audience, finding great respect from their New York counterparts.
True non-objective abstract painting found its roots after World War II, and expanded for two decades splintering into many forms and directions encompassing “color field” and “geometric abstraction,” the precursor to “minimalism.” Although some artists of the 1960s pushed back on abstraction choosing instead to once again render images from nature or popular culture, even exploring conceptual ideas-as-art, abstract painting continues to be a cognitive force still explored to this day, its language always relevant to a new generation challenged by a viewer-dependent space.
Woelffer, for his part, never really departed from abstraction, and for five decades moved in and around the notions and philosophical manifesto declared through abstract painting. He distinguished himself during his final two decades embracing the economical spareness of abstract space exclusively, bringing his reverent, unique voice to his carefully constructed persona.
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