There is an unnerving surprise at the start of this show. It is Mark Rothko’s self-portrait. The artist of those numinous veils of colour, his aims (and his rhetoric) so transcendent, turns out to be a big lug in a brown jacket who can’t draw his painting hand and botches his mouth. He is wearing tinted spectacles.
Rothko, along with his colleagues Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, is responsible for the abiding utterance of abstract expressionism. “The subject is crucial, and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” This subject matter – painted big and painted simple, or so they claimed – was as much about the human condition as any figurative self-portrait. That some of their colleagues might be more interested in landscape, colour or – God forbid – naked women, is only one of the innumerable ways in which this statement fails to unite conceivably the most disparate of all art revolutions. And so it is with this show.
It is a colossal event, to be sure: our first major ab ex show in more than 50 years, with 163 works from across four decades, including sculptures, photographs and prints. The paintings get bigger with every room, from Jackson Pollock’s tiny, writhing friezes of the 1930s to voluminous late Rothko and a whole canyon of mountainous paintings by Clyfford Still, whose works are notoriously difficult to borrow.
The devastating black humps of Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings march onwards – their power undiminished, impressively, even when reprised as a print – feathery grief clattering through the funereal procession. Jackson Pollock’s magnificent Blue Poles (1952), shipped in from Australia, tilt away like masts in a manic sea of energy and colour. Willem de Kooning’s Dark Pond glitters with black secrets, and his luscious pink nudes sprawl seductively in the golden dusk. It is thrilling to set eyes on these works.
And it is marvellous, too, to go from the opening gallery of self-portraits straight into the dancing abstract biomorphs of Arshile Gorky next door. From the Metropolitan Museum in New York comes his glorious Water of the Flowery Mill, with its rustling depths and erotic liquidity. Around it, forms flying like leaves on the breeze, lines leaping among blossoming drifts of colour, is a group of paintings that allow one to contemplate the elusive source of joy in Gorky’s art, present even when the titles indicate darkness. De Kooning once said it was something beautiful in the atmosphere of his paintings, and so it mysteriously seems.
A De Kooning is subtly introduced among the Gorkys to indicate the Armenian’s influence on the Dutchman – so many of the New York School, as they were also known, were not American. When you come to the exquisite De Kooning gallery later on, you will recall Gorky’s beautiful lariat lines.
So far, so promising: a succession of condensed solo shows of great artists long stinted in British museums (some, such as Joan Mitchell and Ad Reinhardt, scarcely shown here at all). But this dream dissolves almost immediately. There are awkward themed rooms on gesture and colour in which paintings by artists with no natural affinities are displayed like slideshow examples. There are disastrous, not to say unkind groupings – Gottlieb, Reinhardt and Newman, lumped together by geometric composition, as if flat rectangles were their timeless subject – and sightlines that diminish the painters.
It is good, for instance, to see Franz Kline’s snow-and-thunder paintings, with their fierce black brushmarks; except that the open view to Motherwell makes Kline look like a weak disciple (which he wasn’t). Philip Guston’s hovering clouds of colour – surely abstract impressionism – are so lyrical and gentle they make an early Joan Mitchell look more of a squall, heavily scrubbed into the canvas.
This is redeemed much later on with a magnificent Mitchell frieze that holds the memory of summer in its golds, whites and greens: a euphoric balancing act in which foreground and background are held in equal tension. Are you looking at, or through, colour?
This is the advanced art of America in the 1940 and 50s – unbound, free of illusion, definition, the constraints of the canvas, the bonds of earth, even, if you listen to the esoteric utterances of Newman or Rothko. Rothko can take care of himself, and indeed gets a quasi-chapel of his own in the RA rotunda. But Newman is persistently hampered. His art asks you to look at paintings in new ways, literally in the case of a soaring monument such as Ulysses, rearing high on the wall above you with its oceanic colours and its fine, bright zip dividing light from darkness, or land from sea. Any sense of infinity is compromised by the paintings crowding around it. And there is Reinhardt on the opposite wall, his geometric abstracts nearly subliminal in their subtlety of tone, their surfaces so delicate and pensive. Art isn’t a contest; Reinhardt should not knock Newman off the wall.
The value of this show lies in the opportunity to see such wildly beautiful art quite possibly for the first time – the flicks, drips and pourings, the veils, stripes and zips, the glowing oblongs and hanging gardens, the sheer perpetuum mobile of brushmarks. Anyone prepared to make the effort can just about deduce this experience intermittently in the throng. But abstract paintings lose their force of personality when strung like washing on a line, each canvas deactivating the next, and this is what happens to Clyfford Still.
The paintings scale mountains, your eyes scale the paintings: immense cliffs of craggy paint, pierced by hairline cracks and lightning fissures. They ought to inspire and overwhelm. But so many close together and these paintings lose their awesome power of isolation.
You would hardly think the Pollock room could falter, but it does. There are a few works that carry light like phosphorescence in their ribboning skeins, but others feel like turgid repetitions. The inclusion of Lee Krasner’s The Eye Is the First Circle does her no favours at all. It is indubitably one of her more famous works, but this dung-coloured painting from 1960 looks like a very late reprise of Pollock, thus shoving her straight back into the Man and Wife show of 1949 where she was first “discovered” as Pollock’s wife.
There has never been – and never will be – any general consent about exactly who the abstract expressionists were and how they were connected. Cliche associates them, collectively, with alcohol, divorce, depression and suicide; with a fateful sense of mission, and heroic labour that doesn’t always equate with their lives as social beings, irascible and hammered in Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern.
This show certainly avoids all that boilerplate, and seeks to expand the standard circle. But any selection that includes a severe wooden construction by Louise Nevelson, parked like a bookcase against the wall, and one of Guston’s late, great cartoon-like tragicomedies is not just tendentious but counterintuitive, stretching in too many directions. Some might argue that it is good to see this wider period context, and many more of the lesser works too. But I can’t agree: I would have preferred the pure rush of exhilaration that comes with the greatest abstract expressionism.
• Abstract Expressionism is at the Royal Academy, London until 2 Jan