Norman Bluhm, Siberian Chant, 1993, huile sur toile. 243x358cm ©Courtesy Ace Gallery, NewYork
Has anyone ever remarked on the fact that although Abstract Expressionism borrowed so fruitfully from Surrealism, the sexual component of Surrealism was more or less ignored ? When Surrealist practices such as automatism were transplanted from Paris to New York, their erotic properties were pruned back. (So were their political concerns, but that’s another story.) Amid the great flourishing of abstract painting in 1940s New York, it is only in the work of De Kooning (about which more in a moment) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, of Gorky that a willingness to engage with the sexual being of the body survives. With Surrealist desire edited out, one finds, chez Rothko, a quest not for sensuality but for out-of-body experiences ; and in the paintings of Franz Kline, a loud, colliding, urban destructuring that is more likely to pulverize the body than to caress it. Even in the paintings of Pollock, who made such choreographic use of his body in his art, the work aspires not to the realm of erotic but towards a visual universe of posthumous decomposition, in which the body is transformed into a net of nutrients and fibers. The “metaphysical secrets,” as Barnett Newman called them, that the Abstract Expressionists sought were not the sec.
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Raphaël Rubinstein - The Return of the Erotic (En)
Publications Tableau : Territoires Actuels Raphaël Rubinstein Publications Tableau : Territoires Actuels Raphaël Rubinstein