“it’s a beautiful spring day,” my professor said as he sat down behind the podium at the front of the room. i looked up at him, and then back down at my crossword puzzle, waiting for him to finish the banter and start the lecture. 2 down was HORDES.
he went on. “i woke up early this morning and went outside to check on the roses in my backyard.” (oh. TAKEN.) “as i walked around and looked at the flowers i felt very grateful, because i could do that knowing that i was not going to be a victim of an air raid.” i looked up. the small light on the podium reflected off his glasses. i couldn’t see his eyes. “i was not going to have to hide underground. none of my friends or family members were going to be killed unexpectedly in their homes or on their way to work. this,” he said, “is a perfect day to talk about abstract expressionism. it’s a perfect day to talk about artists who rose out of the depression only to be faced with the horrors of the holocaust.” i listened to the rest of what he said, and at the time i thought he made a good point and did it quite eloquently, but now i can’t remember what he said. AGITATE. i think he mentioned a few individual artists, but i’m not sure. after he finished talking about that, i went back to the crossword puzzle, taking sporadic notes while the slide projector clicked and hummed through willem dekooning, whom i don’t like. 34 across was FOOTNOTE. but i thought about it later. my professor always says that the abstract expressionists suffered from a so-called “crisis of subject matter.” with thousands of years of religious imagery, portraiture, still life, and landscape behind them, the abstract expressionists worried that they were left with nothing new or innovative to do. even the surrealists used the same old classical technique, presenting merely new things to be seen rather than a new way of seeing. i’ve never really felt like i got abstract expressionism. you can take two still lifes or portraits or landscapes, put them next to each other, and be able to tell which one is better: which painter has been able to represent the subject more accurately, which work has the better use of color, which one catches the light in just the right way. surrealism, as stated above, utilizes classical technique; to be successful, surrealism must depict the “new thing to be seen” so hyperrealistically that the viewer will believe that it’s raining men, that the “young virgin” really is being “auto-sodomized by her own chastity.” but when my professor clicks through slide shows during class and tells me that he thinks barnett newman is one of the greatest, most underrated abstract expressionists, that jackson pollock’s work went downhill later in his life, that lee krasner’s painting improved drastically after her husband’s death, i can never, ever understand why he thinks that. if you put two abstract paintings next to each other, i could certainly tell you which one i preferred, but i couldn’t tell you which one was supposed to be better or why. to me, most abstract expressionist paintings i’ve seen are like wallpaper: the colors and shapes and textures are appealing to me, but they never make me feel anything. bear with me now, because i think we’re going to get somewhere soon. i’ve made a handy illustration of what some noted abstract expressionists came up with between 1941 and 1945:




