KENWORTH MOFFETT
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real modernism. Here is the contemporary equivalent of impres–
sionism and postimpressionism.
It
has been called American-type
painting, postwar abstraction, and post-Pollock abstraction . I call it
the new abstraction. These terms all register the great change that
took place right after World War II. Taking advantage of the disloca–
tion caused by the war, the so-called abstract expressionists seized
the leadership of the international avant-garde. Their most impor–
tant contributions to abstraction were a bold, new scale and the
investment in dramatically unorthodox ways of working. They
pushed beyond the point of no return the centuries-old traditions of
easel painting, oil painting, and monolithic sculpture. The achieve–
ment of this first generation of the new abstraction was a significant
one both for the development of modern art and for the history of
American art. With them, abstract and American art came of age
together.
They were a large group, too. We can name at least eleven
major figures, each of whom has something important to say:
Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann,
Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell,
Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Whatever we
determine were the enabling circumstances, their appearance in the
1940s will always be seen as a great bursting of creative energy in
American art. Stylistically, these painters have always been seen as
forming two groups: those who wanted dramatic movement and a
broader kind of drawing (Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock), and
those who aimed at romantic suggestiveness through warm color
and large simplified designs (Still, Rothko, and Newman). The
work of the others-Gottlieb, Motherwell, and Hofmann-falls
somewhere in between and shares features of both groups . The first
group, especially Pollock, was radically experimental with the
medium and freed painting of assumptions that had lasted for
hundreds of years. The second group evolved the basic idea of the
color-dominant abstract picture (even if it didn't come close to
exploiting it).
As for sculpture, David Smith was the first great energetic
talent to devote his entire career to the new constructed sculpture
invented by Picasso and Gonzalez. There were other talented
contemporaries-Seymour Lipton and Herbert Ferber-but no one
was even close to Smith in the number and power of his ideas or in
the way he expanded this new tradition. Almost alone Smith
brought abstract constructed metal sculpture to fruition.
Looking back on the "first generation" from the point of view
