Harold Rosenberg(1906-1978) is still primarilyknownby a single essay, “The American Action Painters,”which was published inARTnewsin 1952.When thepieceappeared in the December issue, the responsewas phenomenal. Not only did it galvanize a still unnamed community of vanguard artists–laterknown as the New York School– butactionbecame a trope for midcentury art that lastedwellintothe early 1960s. Therein lay a certain irony: Rosenberg was never professionally identified as an art critic until a decade later when hewas offered astaff positionattheNew Yorker.Prior to this time, he was recognized as a poet and literary commentator whohadmatured during the Great Depressionwritingfor publications such as thePartisan Review,and later,CommentaryandDissent.
As the first American correspondent for Les Temps modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal that was launched in the wake of the Liberation of Paris in 1944, Rosenberg became associated with the international dimensions of existentialist thinking, bringing a particularly American spin to its emphasis on subjectivity. Part of his project involved rejection of the New Criticism, particularly its formalist offspring deployed to interpret art. When confronted with the formalism of his arch rival, Clement Greenberg, and Greenberg’s close reading of painting as a self-referential object, Rosenberg would counter that modernist originality could be construed only by elaboration of the social forces that weighed on art-making during the Cold War, a period of increased cultural conformity.
After Paris was occupied by the Third Reich in 1940, Rosenberg deemed that “the laboratory of the twentieth century had been shut down.” That is, modernism’s capital witnessed the end of its authority.Rosenberg knew that history thereafter could no longer be explained as a progressive unspooling of events or ongoing continuum.If anything, he thought, the German Occupation signaled that the narrative of civilization had become ruptured and fragmented. When he eventually penned “The American Action Painters,” just as Manhattan replaced Paris as an international cultural center, he was acutely aware that art never abided by an interrelated pictorial schema.
This lecture, which draws from my recent intellectual biography, Harold Rosenberg, A Critic’s Life, focuses on Rosenberg’s construction of action and how its meanings and themes foreshadowed the waning of the modern period.
Debra Bricker Balkenis an independentscholar andcurator whoworks onsubjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Her award-winning books includePhilip Guston’sPoor Richard(2001) andAbstract Expressionism: Movements in Modern Art(2005), as well as exhibition catalogues such asArthur Dove, A Retrospective(1997),The Park Avenue Cubists(2003),Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence(2009),After Many Springs: Regionalism, Modernism and the Midwest(2009),John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist(2010),John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury(2011)andMark Tobey, Threading Light(2017).
Recipient of an Inaugural Clark Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute, a Senior Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, she has just completedHarold Rosenberg, A Critic’s Lifefor the University of Chicago Press withadditionalgrants from the Getty Research Institute and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts. She has taught atBrown University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2005, she served as the Sterling and Francine Clark Visiting Professor in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
She recentlybrought outArthur Dove,ACatalogue Raisonnéof Painting and ThingswithYale University Press.
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (91Ӱ) and Dr Tom Day (91Ӱ)
