Angels,Demons, and Savages. Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet

At the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Those who read these blog posts with any regularity have known me to write on several occasions about my dismay with the conformity of American museums and their universal policy of presenting only the same 37 modern artists and only the iconic image for which each of those artists is “famous”. It is as if the 50,000 annual MFA graduates of Institutions of higher learning do not exist. Rarely in fact do they even give space to local artists of some renown: The Philadelphia Museum does have a nice Thomas Eakins collection on view, as does the Boston Museum with John Singleton Copley, and Kansas City’s Nelson Atkins’s has  the nice Thomas Hart Benton galleries. But as a rule one American art museum is much like any of the others and it can truly be said that if you‘ve seen one you’ve seen them all. So when I read that an exhibition relating the works of Dubuffet, Ossorio and Pollack was to be presented it can safely be assumed that I would make an effort to see it.

My primary interest was in discovering why someone whose name I do not know, Ossorio’s, is being featured alongside two better known names. My questions being: how does his work compare to what is usually shown, how similar or dissimilar is it, and is there anything about the work that makes me think it is a good solution to the problems of contemporary painting that should be better known or is it justifiably better left unseen.

My secondary interest was in seeing more work by Jackson Pollock that is other than his “famous” drip paintings, which I know he made only during a brief period and then moved on, but which the American art establishment would be happy to have us think is all he ever did. There’s a sort of snobbery exhibited by some museums; those who have examples of the drip paintings are, of course, museums of the first rank, and those who have only his earlier of later works are merely confessing that they are second tier institutions.

Finally, I would not have been motivated in seeing an exhibition of Dubuffet’s work alone: the Hirschhorn has a large gallery, perhaps two, of his works and for the most part I find them to be without interest. When I see one or two of his representative iconic works in other museums they all seem to me to be only more of the same. (If he is not in company with the standard 37 modern artist always shown, he is at least in the standard expanded list of 43.)

The focus of this exhibition is the four year period between 1948 and 1952 when, or so we are asked to believe, the work of these three artists shared a common ground. As he is the seminal player, it helps to know who this Mr. Ossorio was. Born into a wealthy Philippine family he was educated from a young age in American schools. Settled in New York and having an interest in art he took up painting and having disposable income he took up art collecting; we might think of him as a latter day Caillabotte. With these interests and living in New York City and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, he made himself known to the members of the New York School of painters and became friendly with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. In discussion with his friends the Pollock’s regarding the work of Dubuffet Jackson suggested that Ossorio go to Paris to meet him. And so he did.

Now Dubuffet was apparently delighted to meet Ossorio and eventually came to New York to meet the New York School and when a meeting between he and Pollock was set up on Long Island, Pollack was being famously difficult and failed to show up. As little direct exchange of ideas resulted during this period one might think that this is a tenuous thread on which to base an exhibition. Perhaps so, but there were intellectual concerns that have some bearing on the episode.

Of the inspirations for modern art two of them are presented here. One has to do with the influence of non-traditional art, as in the case of Picasso and Matisse with their interest in African art and, for Picasso, early Iberian art. From that influence both of those artists made the shift from perceptual art to conceptual art using the human figure as expressive form. From that influence there later occurred an interest in Jung’s collective unconscious which included Joseph Campbell’s work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This latter influence was especially important amongst members of the New York School …Jackson Pollock’s work Keepers of the Secret being a manifestation. In his Mellon Lectures, Paths to the Absolute, Phillip Golding expounded on this line of thinking. (Scroll down to see my review of his book, this blog 2012.)

By 1948, when Pollock had begun to make the drip paintings, but was still committed to figurative art, and likely impressed with deKooning’s new series, Woman, in which he combined figuration with abstraction, but which Pollock might not have wanted to emulate, Ossorio’s introduction of Dubuffet’s work, influenced as it was by art brut or outsider art rather than primitive art, might have seemed to Pollock a possible solution to this temporary crises/stasis.

Thus while there seems to have been a common dilemma (figuration vs. abstraction) there appears to me to have been little cross fertilization. Pollock’s solution was to create the sense of the human figure through poured compositions, black on white. Ossorio drew child like figures lost in a swirl of all over color abstraction, and Dubuffet created hard line expressive forms each shape within the format having a distinct non representational painterly surface.

The second common consideration was the presentation: how does one create an all over abstract composition that has the sense of a spontaneously made painting without making something that looks like the floor of one of the painting studios at the Art Student League. Alfred Barnes has written that all great paintings have in common a sense of “something”. What is that something and how does one achieve it without copying what has gone before?

One of the problems to be resolved in the making of a painting is the question of the decorative: because they hang on walls in well cared for spaces every painting has the inherent character of being a decorative object. Likely the origin of this was the requirement that a commissioned work be compatible with the home of the collector or patron, a person whose quarters were generally highly decorated spaces. Thus, in creating a harmony of expressive form, how far can one go without lapsing into the merely decorative? When Picasso and Braque first worked in analytical cubism one of the considerations for making a new art was the question of finish: it was mutually determined that the works would not be varnished. And indeed that eliminated a sense of fussiness and this further set them apart from what had gone before. For many years the art they created did in fact seem new and compelling. But now that we are many years beyond their creation much of it looks to us now as “decoration” and especially the work of Braque. But this might also have to do with the fact that Braque was first trained as a decorative painter and only later studied the academic tradition. On the other hand Picasso, who had been trained in the academic tradition, more successfully avoided the merely decorative and as a result created far more complex and interesting works than did Braque: little that Braque created has the depth and intrigue of The Three Musicians.

As to why I object to the decorative I see it as defined by Corbusier, and you have read this here before as well; decoration is the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. If we like to think of modern art as a new way of seeing, seeing the old in a pleasant new arrangement is hardly new and hardly “art”.

E.H. Gombrich described the impetus in painting as being of two states of mind: matching and making. For many with a desire to paint an academic training and working within that discipline is an acceptable process: one has the certainty that what he was doing was sanctioned by others of a like mind, and that in order to produce good work one had only to observe the conventions. Work of this kind progresses with the stately pomp of religion. Other artists have stood back from the work, they have seen that what they are doing has been done before, and they have asked: “What else can I do, where can I go with this …in order to make what I want to express more readily felt and apparent.” Often the clues to that progression are found in the work of the immediately preceding generation: Cezanne was the inspiration for cubism …The dominance of cubism as the gateway to modernism was the inspiration for Jackson Pollock to find another opening.

Overall Dubuffet’s work reads as the exercise of a technique. As one example in a museum gallery of modern art works, it is fine, but in larger installations, such as at the Hirschhorn Museum it fails to sustain the interest. Dubuffet searched for his technique, his “style” outside the confines of the western tradition, but in attempting to emulate art brut, outsider art, the non-academic, he conformed nonetheless to a different aesthetic. In the end it is still matching but to a different tune. Lacking a heartfelt passion, expressive form, ultimately it became the repetition of a decorative technique. This is augmented by his wonderful color sense, his unique palette, and his ability to create harmonies of tonal balances. In addition his work has real charm.

As a rule I am unimpressed by art that references a foreign, to the artist, culture without, as Picasso did, making it one’s own. In Tacoma I once saw the work of a glass maker who had made tromp l’oeil objects that looked just like the objects from a northwestern Indian tribe. Some people seem not to understand the difference between the tribal collective unconscious and the archetype. Images from the tribal collective unconscious relate specifically to that particular tribe, to which none of the others of us can relate except as to foreign cultural objects whereas archetypes subsume the cultural.

I don’t see much in the Pollock works here that would indicate that had he lived longer he might have experienced another break through. This all looks to me like a person who was suffering writer’s block and who was biding his time hoping to be surprised by the joy of a communication from his unconscious, something with the magnanimity of Autumn Rhythm rather than the also ran character of Lavender Mist. And each of the works presented here have a strong sense of “finish”. I have the sense that his end of life unhappiness was in part because he wanted to make something other than that.

In every clutch of modern painters there are legions of followers whose work is ultimately nondescript. The problem with Ossorio’s work is that I feel that I have seen it in many other venues under the name of many other artists. This is not to say that his work does not display intelligence, commitment, and a high degree of professionalism. If I have any criticism of it it would be that it is too intellectual. This is one of my common complaints about modern art and because of that I find that modern art is too often exclusionary, it is only a dialogue among the initiates. This continues my recent insights which are contained in my post on the Menil Collection, see below. Then there are several examples of his shaped canvases…which always read to me as a too self conscious attempt at modernism, despite my belief that a contemporary artist is entitled to rebel against the tyranny of the rectangle.

And whereas Dubuffet’s color is always so pleasant Ossorio’s is too acrid …too primitive, as if the palette had been borrowed from ritual preparations in a tribal village. Several years ago I became aware that in the art of primitive people the color palette is always high chroma with a strong liking for orange and black, yellow, red and green, white, red, and black. I don’t know from this exhibition, and there is no discussion of color in the catalogue, whether Ossorio used the colors he did in reference to Dubuffet’s philosophy or whether that color choice was inherently his because of his early exposure to ethnic Philippine art.

All three of the artists show a concern for the dual perception created by a painting: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. But that concern and the work it required feels unrelated to the primary interest in figuration; the figure is either fore or aft but rarely, if ever, dancing on the surface, rarely if ever the actual subject …whereas with Picasso one is never in doubt as to where his interest lies…the beautiful Marie Therese sleeping is always the beautiful Marie Therese sleeping regardless of the artist’s style of the day.

It’s a nice exhibition and much larger than I would have imagined it would be. I like exhibitions like this that are other than blockbuster money makers of the big names. But in the end it all seemed so long ago and far away. Later that same day I passed in front of a late Dubuffet at the National Gallery, wherein a number of colorful, primary colors colorful, drawings on paper had been pasted to a large canvas. Like Ossorio’s self consciously shaped canvases it looked as if many years after this meeting of the minds he was still looking for somewhere to go, something to do. I prefer that to the work of those who have given up and just repeat a commercially successful formula. But it emphasized why I was not more favorably impressed by this exhibition …it is an interesting little byway but it was not the beginning of something big.

I saw as well at the NGA an early Marsden Hartley painting, Maine Woods, 1908, in which he captured the chaos of a wooded landscape with a masterful all-over surface from which after some contemplation one begins to sort out the elements of the natural order. (Sorry, there is no photograph of this painting on their web site.) Immediately I understood it to be a statement of his comprehension of the late Cezanne works. Further, it seemed to me that he had achieved what Pollack, Dubuffet and Ossorio had attempted to do here. Shortly after having made that painting and a number of others similar to it, Hartley went to Germany and devoted his time to understanding the modern painting he saw there. It was as if he had admitted that the all-over technique had a limited shelf life. I agree with that and that too might have something to do with my response to this same kind of painting that I recognize as having come along fifty years after the fact.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/2013-02-09-exhibition-pollock-ossorio-dubuffet.aspx