BOOKS
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writing his book an excellent mix of intellectual and sensible checks
and balances that enabled him to live through the tumultuous and
intrinsically anarchic formative years of abstract expressionism.
It is surprising that until its current publication, Seitz's
Abstract
Expressionist Painting in America
circulated as a Ph.D. thesis written in
1955 while he was at Princeton. The book is actually a form of oral
history, relying heavily on interviews and other primary evidence to
capture the style of abstract expressionism through this chorus of liv–
ing voices that , though seemingly united, is made up of individual ,
even divergent ideas . Featured are de Kooning, Gorky, Hoffmann,
Motherwell, Rothko, and Tobey. That Pollock is the only major
figure of the first wave not intensively questioned underscores the
fact that the movement was very much under way as Seitz was
gathering evidence of its presence . The advantage of this approach,
however, was that Seitz had to examine this testimony rigorously if
he was to prove to skeptical academicians that abstract expres–
sionism was making art history, not just newsworthy storms. Seitz
was obliged to supply the cultural context for this emerging style
and, moreover, a critique of the movement more candid than many
histories since.
Abstract expressionism produced few sculptors, so those like
Herbert Ferber who, if cautious, did attempt to wrest malleable , live
form from intractable matter, are acknowledged members of the
movement. The direct carving that in the 1930s inaugurated his
sculptural career continued to shape Ferber's approach to the
gestural metal sculpture for which he has since become known. "The
metaphor was not to be that of a body and its parts, but the in–
terdependence of solids and emptiness," says Goossen, in his
homage to Ferber. When in the late 1940s, working through the im–
plications of Moore and Picasso, Ferber realized this, he came into
his own as a sculptor, using his sense of craft to realize his ideas.
Abstract lead-and-brass gestures over which ride spiky and lacy
elements show a
tentati~e
approach to geometry, although in the
1950s, in such works as
Calligraph with Sloping Roof,
gestures become
taut under the implied pressure of planes bearing down on them.
Sculpture environmental in scale soon led Ferber to sculpture en–
vironmental by dint of sheer size. Goossen faithfully chronicles this
development, discussing the well-known space cages and large brazed
brass gestures meant to be seen , in Ferber's words, "against the wall
of the sky," before passing on to Ferber's hall-sized gestures that sur–
round a viewer, so that, reversing roles, the viewer becomes an ob-
