Clement Greenberg’s adoration of the early work of Jackson Pollock was predicated on the artist’s willingness to dispense with pristine images. In his 1945 review of Pollock’s second one-man show at the Art of This Century, in which he praised the artist “as the strongest painter of his generation,” Greenberg noted that Pollock was “not afraid to look ugly—all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”69 Having criticized Picasso’s later works in which the artist failed to transcend the boundaries of Cubist form by eliminating any moment of spontaneity, Greenberg celebrated Pollock’s success in moving beyond Cubism with his famous “drip” paintings of the late 1940s. In a series of canvases, including Full Fathom Five, Lavender Mist, and Autumn Rhythm, Pollock pointed the way to the “formal essence” of painting by asserting the “ambiguous flatness” of the canvas, thereby allowing him to “control the oscillation between an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion of depth beneath it.”70 The optical impact of Pollock’s style, with its subtle undulations, controlled chaos, vacillating layers of texture, and all-over composition, offered an aesthetic experience that freed the viewer from the heavy-handedness and didacticism of most art. Of course, Pollock’s own understanding of his art, predicated, as we will see, on “romantic modernist” ideas of spontaneity and release, had little in common with Greenberg’s formalism. But Greenberg’s success in promoting his particular reading of Pollock’s art demonstrated the success of high modernism overall.
Blending together the beautiful and the sublime and offering a form of experience in which the sensuous remained untrammeled, the high modernist artwork was seen as the privileged site for cultural rejuvenation. Ever more difficult and ever more hermetic, such works were reminders of the lost realm of the sensuous—those affections and inclinations that had been brushed aside by the impersonal, means-ends rationality of science—not by the mystical or sentimental examples of the Romantics but by merely maintaining a contradictory position in society.71 In part, then, high modernists hoped that the aesthetic experience might teach the viewer to respect the transient and the ephemeral in and of itself without reference to abstractions. Clement Greenberg, reacting to the apparent cultural vacuum in America, expressed this sentiment most clearly: “I think a poor life is lived by any one who doesn’t regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from that which is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.”72 Although each critic promoted slightly different modernist practitioners (Adorno favoring Arnold Schoenberg and Samuel Beckett, Clement Greenberg favoring Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse, Lionel Trilling favoring Henry James and John Keats, and Cleanth Brooks favoring William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot), all argued that such art needed to figure within public life as prominently as science did. The distinctiveness of the modernist work—its formal autonomy and its unique assembly of materials—testified to the possibility or at least the illusion that the world might be different. Continuing the Fugitive critique of science, Cleanth Brooks argued that the tempering hand of modern art might serve as a fundamental corrective: “A diet of straight science, because science is power-knowledge, may contribute to hubris; whereas poetry … constantly reminds man that the thing described lies outside man’s control, and thus rebukes hubris.”73 The problem, as Brooks realized, was finding adequate avenues in which the language of modernism might be translated. As federal funds flowed into universities for military research and scientists became national celebrities, high modernists waged a campaign within universities, publishing houses, and art galleries to defend the humanities as an antidote to modern science.
The Institutionalization of High Modernism
In January 1962 the Saturday Evening Post ran a front-page cover painted by Norman Rockwell, the popular commercial illustrator and artist. The image featured a wealthy-looking art collector, umbrella and hat in hand, intently pondering a large abstract canvas, unaware that Rockwell had made him the focus of attention. The editors of the magazine joined Rockwell in his playful joke, asking whether the man was “about to reach for his checkbook to buy a prize-winning work titled ‘The Insubstance of Infinity’” or whether he was “imagining his teen-age daughter calling it ‘Strictly from Blobsville.’”74 Rockwell continued the joke in describing his experimentation with the Pollockesque-style canvas on the cover. According to Rockwell, he had recently attended a class in modern art techniques where he “learned a lot and loved it,” although he did eventually tire of “waving a dripping brush” and had to invite the man painting the windows in his studio to help finish it. Sarcasm aside, Rockwell’s commentary reflected the astounding success high modernism achieved in the 1940s and 1950s. Several legendary moments marked the ascendancy of high modernism. In 1944 director Alfred Barr facilitated the acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s She-Wolf by the Museum of Modern Art, giving institutional recognition to the abstract expressionist movement and paving the way for the escalating “Pollock market” after the painter’s untimely death.75 The “picture boom,” as Art News described, that followed the favorable economic climate after the war also advanced the cause of modern art.76 In 1949, William Faulkner, praised for his insights into the psychological landscape of the human mind, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, helping to advance the reputation of the aging modernist writer. Similarly, despite considerable debate because of his political leanings, Ezra Pound won the Bollingen Prize in poetry that same year. In 1956 T. S. Eliot, whom Delmore Schwartz acknowledged as having his own “literary dictatorship,” famously lectured to a crowd in Minneapolis, equaling, according to one account, “that of three hockey games.”77 Finally, in the most public moment of recognition, poet Robert Frost and abstract artist Mark Rothko were invited to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1960, standing beside politicians, celebrities, and sports figures as representatives of American culture.
Despite such public exposure, appearing in photographs on the pages of countless mass-circulation magazines, high modernists recognized that their true cultural project rested elsewhere. The problem of modernism in the postwar era, as David Hollinger has argued, was neither a problem of authorship nor even of critical attention but a problem of readership.78 Although experimental literary works were still in production and abstract paintings were filling gallery walls, the task in the 1940s was to promote modernism by gaining new financial support for artists and writers after the end of New Deal–sponsored federal subsidies, developing an educational curriculum to consolidate reading practices, and carving out avenues to translate modernist forms to an educated public. In 1946 Clement Greenberg, for instance, was troubled that “there exists in this country no self-assured, self-intelligible class of connoisseurs and amateurs of art with defined and independent tastes.”79 Culture required cultivation, literary education required educators, abstract painting needed gallery space and promotional support, and poetic production depended upon publishers and sales. Therefore, despite the seemingly ever-present elitism of high modernist rhetoric, many critics made deliberate efforts to carve out an intellectual milieu for modernist works. In his contribution to the 1952 Partisan Review symposium “Our Country and Our Culture,” Lionel Trilling, for instance, encouraged the growth of a “new intellectual class” to counter the erosion of public tastes, and he asked his fellow men of letters to help “in the continuation