Dore Ashton, Twentieth-Century Artists on Art. Part Two

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Dore Ashton
Twentieth-Century Artists on Art

New York, Pantheon Books, 1985, 302 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part Two 

Fig. 24) The Chinese version of the anthology Twentieth-century artists on Art by Dore Ashton, published in Shanghai in 1989.

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The art literature in the United States of America between 1940 and 1985

We are continuing to analyse the Twentieth-Century Artists on Art anthology by Dore Ashton (1928-2017) [44]. For reasons of space we will concentrate, as regards the art after 1940, only on the texts included in the section on the art of the United States. This section embraced 56 artists in about seventy pages (for the same considerations on the extension of our review, we will take into consideration here only 45 of them).

In the American section, Ms Ashton discussed the authors and themes on which she wrote the most. Still today, she is above all celebrated for her monographs on the exponents of the New York School (just think of her monographs on Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi and Mark Rothko). In reality, the US section of the anthology contained statements and writings of artists from every orientation, and therefore not only of the abstract expressionists of New York, but also of figurative artists, of minimalists and conceptualists, of pop and performance artists (and Ms Ashton, as we shall see, also published essays on non-abstract artists, such as Richard Lindner).

It must also be said that, using a criterion for defining very broad nationality, she encompassed in the US section many artists who - although not citizens of the United States – were operating both there as well as in the rest of the world. Many of them could be considered real cosmopolitans.

Fig. 25) Dore Ashton's essay on Modern American Sculpture, published by Abrams in 1968

The section also offers us a vision of how the authoress - one of the main popularisers of contemporary art in her days – selected the written texts of the artists of her time wrote about art. The authoress' preference obviously went to document the plurality of voices. It is interesting to note the space she reserved for sculptors, generally neglected in other anthologies (sculpture was also a passion confirmed by her 1968 essay on Modern American Sculpture). She mostly selected messages of immediate impact (only a few texts exceeded one page). In the vast majority of cases the citations were taken from exhibition catalogues or from interviews published in specialized magazines (and, in some cases, from university conferences; sporadically, radio transcripts were also reported). Texts taken from essays or articles by the artists were to the contrary almost entirely absent.

It must be said, to explain choices of this kind, that, in many cases, systematic collections of the writings of the artists of the post-war American world thirty-five years ago were not yet available. In short, reading the section also made it visible how difficult it may have been for a critic operating in the 1980s to write a history of contemporary art. Art literature requires time, sedimentation of ideas, publication of writings, examination of archives, and analysis of texts.

However, it was not only an absence of sources which motivated Ashton to privilege given media (like interviews and catalogues) which were aimed above all at feeding the readers’ thirst for information rather than stimulating a more systematic reflection. In the case of Rothko, for example, did she used excerpts that she had already included in her own monographs on the artists. To the contrary, she did not behave in this way when dealing with Guston, Lindner, Motherwell and Noguchi, on which she had already written.

Twentieth-Century Artists on Art, therefore, intentionally gave visibility to the communication activity of the artists in the age of a fast and perhaps ephemeral communication. And perhaps the anthology was also a reflection of the way in which the artists of that era worked, favouring immediacy (think of the techniques of dripping, action art, happening). Just like art, even the expression of thought was entrusted to instinct and immediacy.

Over the last few decades the gap of overall works, which would document the American art literature of the second half of the last century, has however been filled. The presence on the English language book market (and in some cases also in other languages) of volumes of writings by artists has greatly increased, mostly thanks to art critics. A fundamental role has been played by some university publishing houses, such as the the MIT Press and the the University of California Press, and by other publishers such as Poligrafa (in this case publishing the texts in parallel in English, French and Spanish). These publishing houses have made available to readers several collections of writings by contemporary artists.

The result is today's availability of a very large body of writings, which confirms the American hegemony after the Second World War also in the field of art. The role of the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution was also crucial to this end (https://www.aaa.si.edu/). In many cases, moreover, the foundations dedicated to individual artists have collected publications and unpublished papers and offered to the public bibliographic reviews.

Compared to these more recent developments, Ashton's anthology documented a successful but still initial attempt to witness contemporary American art literature.

The Abstract Expressionists

In the anthology the texts were mentioned - as already mentioned - in the alphabetical order of the authors, without any grouping according to schools. In my review I have instead ordered the artists in chronological order of birth. Among the abstract expressionists in the volume I would like to mention Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Reuben Nakian (1897-1986), Jack Tworkov (1900-1982), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Clyfford Still (1904-1980), Barnett Newman (1905-1970), David Smith (1906-1965), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), William Baziotes (1912-1963), Philip Guston (1913-1980) and, finally, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991). These artists were therefore born between 1880 and 1915.

Fig. 26) On the left: Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real, published by Addison Gallery of American Art in 1948. On the right: William C. Seitz, Hans Hofmann With Selected Writings by the Artist Museum of Modern Art, 1963.

During his lifetime, Hans Hofmann wrote both in German and in English. His career began even before the First World War as founder and managing director of an abstract art school in Munich. Hofman was the author of books on artistic creation published in German and English ("Form und Farbe in der Gestalung" and "Creation in Form and Color, a Textbook for Instruction in Art", respectively completed in 1915 and 1931). Since the Munich time, he had increasingly devoted himself to the training of American artists travelling to Europe. When the Nazis came to power, Hofmann transferred his teaching activity to the United States, discovering then himself as an abstract painter in the 1940s.

Fig. 27) The Turin edition of Hans Hofman's writings, published in 1964 by Fratelli Pozzo Art Editions.

In addition to the 1948 essay The Search for Real, Hofmann wrote several typewritten didactic texts, which the critic William C. Seitz (1914-1974) collected in a miscellany in 1963, on the occasion of an exhibition at the MoMA. A year later, the publishing house Edizioni d’arte fratelli Pozzo di Torino published (in a precious Italian edition) five of his German and Italian essays, along with an introductory essay (in English) by the American scholar Sam Hunter (1923 – 2014), who had devoted to him a monograph a few years before. In 1965 Seitz’s collection was published in German. In 1967 MIT Press, on the occasion of the reprinting of The Search for Real, added "other essays". Then the interest in Hofmann's writings seemed to vanish, until the recent publication of several of them in the web page dedicated to him [45].

Fig. 28) Katharine Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, published by Harper and Row in 1962.

Hofmann's passage quoted by Dore Ashton was taken from the collection of interviews "The artist's voice" by the art historian and curator Katherine Kuh (1904-1994) in 1960: “There is definitely (…) an abstract art. Not everything that sails under the name ‘abstract’ is actually abstract. (…) What goes in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles. As times went on, in figurative painting the aesthetic basis of creation was almost completely lost. It is in our time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation. But let’s go further. Art is not only the eye; it is not the result of intellectual considerations. Art is strictly bound to inherent laws dictated by the medium in which it comes to expression. In other words, painting is painting, sculpture is sculpture, architecture is architecture. All these arts have their own intrinsic qualities” [46]. It is here obvious that the young Hofman must have been under the influence of the pure visibility theories, which he had absorbed from the reading of the writings of Konrad Fiedler (1841–1895) and Adolf von Hildebrand (1847-1921), and which he then transported to the United States in a new context.

Fig. 29) The interview with twelve artists organized by ARTnews in 1958 on the relationship between contemporary art and art of the past.

For his acquaintances with New York artists of abstract school, the sculptor Reuben Nakian was often associated with the New York School, although his subjects were still figurative (and often inspired by Greek-Roman mythology). In 1958, Nakian gave an interview to ARTnews, in the framework of a survey by the New York magazine on the subject "Is today’s artist with or against the past?" His love for the art of the past was clear. “Art is born out of art. Cézanne said he’d hoped to be able to add a link to the chain. Cézanne was a true oracle – not ambiguous like the Delphian. Art should be aristocratic, elegant, with gardens and beautiful costumes, and horses and people speaking a clear and cultivated language. Like Goya and Frans Hals – aristocrats to their fingertips” [47]. The webpage of Nakian's heirs [48] does not present collections of declarations and texts of the artist nor did I find any evidence of a published collection of his writings.

Fig. 30) The collection of writings by Jack Tworkov, published by Yale University Press in 2005, edited by Mira Schor.

Jack Tworkov was one of the founders of the New York School, and among them one of the most engaged in teaching. In 1973 he recalled the years after the Second World War: “Post-World War II painting in New York moved against two repressive experiences - the rhetoric of social realism, preached especially by the artists and ideologues on the art projects of the thirties, and the hegemony of Paris in modern art. The response was an art that stood against all formula, an art in which impulse, instinct, and the automatic, as guides to interior reality, were to usurp all forms of intellectualizing. I cannot remember any period in my life that so went to my head as 1949. It marked the foundation of the Artist’s Club in New York and heralded a decade of painting as fruitful and revolutionary as the Impressionism of 1870” [49]. A collection of writings by Jack Tworkov was edited by the artist and art critic Mira Schor (1950,-) for the Yale University Press in 2005. The heirs’ web page [50] does not contain writings, but offers rich documentation on Tworkov’s archives, accessible at the Smithsonian [51].

As to Adolph Gottlieb, Dore Ashton chose a step in a 1967 radio interview with the art critic Dorothy Seckler (1910-1994), in which the painter agreed to run through his career, focusing on the various phases of his artistic production [52]. In particular, a decisive moment in his life was represented by the 1940s, in which Gottlieb adopted a new pictorial writing determined by pure pictorial intuition: “I would start by having an arbitrary division of the canvas into rough rectangular areas, and with the process of free association I would put various images and symbols within these compartments. And it was irrational. There was no logical or rational design in the placing of these. It was purely following an impulse, which was irrational, trying to use the method of free association. And then when all of these images and symbols were combined, they could not be read like a rebus. There was no direct connection one to the other. And, however, by the strange juxtapositions that occurred, a new kind of significance stemmed from this juxtaposion” [53].

Fig. 31) Dore Ashton's essay About Rothko, published by Oxford University Press in 1983 (left) and in reprints of 1996 (center) and 2003 (right). The 1999 version is not present here.

Mark Rothko was a great personal friend of the anthologist (they met regularly for at least twenty years). The artist was included in the anthology with texts taken from the monograph About Rothko, which Ms Ashton herself had dedicated to him in 1983 on the occasion of the eighty years from his birth and thirteen years after his death (there were three successive reprints up to 2003). The excerpts were dated 1943, 1945, 1947 and 1954. The first one, in reality (Ashton did not write it in the anthology), was the first version of a four-handed letter written in 1943 by Rothko together with the aforementioned Adolph Gottlieb and addressed to the director of the New York Times art section, Edward Alden Jewell (1888-1947) [54]. I can't say what the origin of the other writings is.

Fig. 32) The first editions of Rothko's collection of writings edited by his son Christopher, released for the first time in English and French (2004), then in German and Spanish (2005) and finally in Italian (2007).

People - Rothko wrote in his letter to Jewell - are still interested in all the questions and problems of the ancient classical era, and yet artists can now represent ancient myths in forms of absolute freedom, which can omit figuration. “Today the artist – it was an excerpt dated 1943 – is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man’s experience is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of describing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man’s experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea. (…) Our presentation of these myths, however, must be in our own terms which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves – more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the ideas rather than their graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our own experience” [55].

Fig. 33) The first editions of Mark Rothko's collection of writings by Miguel López Remiro, released in French and English (2005), in Spanish (2007) and German (2008).

Today, on the book market, two collections of Rothko's writings are available: "Mark Rothko. The artist's reality: philosophies of art" by his son Christopher in 2004 and “Mark Rothko. Writings on art” by Miguel López Remiro. The two works were released practically simultaneously, competing with each other. The first collection appeared in English and French in 2004, in German and Spanish in 2005, and finally in Italian in 2007 (and has since been periodically reprinted in various languages). The second collection came out in English and French (2005), Italian (2007), Spanish (2008) and German (2009) markets. Recently an edition by Alessandra Salvini was published in Italy by the publishing house Abscondita together with a writing by the novelist, poet and art critic Michel Butor. Despite the editorial success, today there are still obvious documentation problems. The existing internet pages dedicated to Rothko [56] are not attributable to the foundation, which was dissolved after serious financial irregularities, nor to the heirs. Compared to other artists, the Smithsonian Institution archives are also limited [57].

Fig. 34) The Italian editions of Mark Rothko's writings by Miguel López Remiro (2006 and 2007) and Antonio Salvini (2017)

One of the first exponents of the New York School who considered writing as a privileged instrument of communication during his short life was Arshile Gorky, an artist of Armenian origin to whom, this year, the first Italian retrospective has been dedicated in Venice, in Ca’ Pesaro, within the Biennale. The painter had behind him the tragedy of his people in Turkey devastated by the First World War and a history of depression and emotional instability even in the American years, after 1920. To writing he assigned the desperate attempt to escape the collapse of his entire universe of affections, which would eventually lead to his suicide. Dore Ashton chose excerpts from some letters he sent to his sister between 1939 and 1947, contained in a biography of the painter edited by his niece Karlen Mooradian. The letters were originally in Armenian. From the pieces chosen by Ashton, it becomes clear the image of a cultured artist, who had been in contact with surrealism and cubism in Paris, and had never denied his love for classical art: “I like the heat, the tenderness, the edible, the lusciousness, the song of a single person, the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water. I like Uccello, Grünewald, Ingres, the drawings and the sketches for painting of Seraut, and that man Pablo Picasso” [58]. On the contrary, he repudiated surrealism because he considered it a not very serious form of fatuous aestheticism: “Surrealism is academic art under disguise and anti-aestehic and suspicious of excellence and largely in opposition to modern art. Its claim of liberation is really restrictive because of its narrow rigidity. To its adherents the tradition of art and its quality mean little. They are drunk with psychiatric spontaneity and inexplicable dreams. These Surrealists. These people are haltingly entertaining. We do not think alike since their views on life differ so vastly from mine and we are naturally of opposite backgrounds. Their ideas are quite strange and somewhat flippant, almost playful. Really, they are not as earnest about painting as I should like artists to be. Art must always remain earnest. Perhaps it is because I am an Armenian and they are not. Art must be serious, no sarcasm, comedy. One does not laugh at a loved one” [59].

Fig. 35) Three editions of writings by Arshile Gorky, edited by Matthew Spender (left and center) and by Robert Mattison (right)

What Ashton could not know is that those letters, although written in such a heartfelt way, had probably been retouched and may even have been invented from scratch by the niece [60]. The body of writings of Gorky has however been the subject of systematic studies and publications in recent years. Matthew Spender published Arshile Gorky, Goats on the Roof: A Life in Letters and Documents in 2010 and Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents in 2018 (based on new texts). Instead, Robert Mattison edited Arshile Gorky: Works, Writings, Interviews in 2010. The Arshile Gorky Foundation also published a list of available sources online, including references to the Smithsonian Institution [61].

Fig. 36) The MoMa file in New York with the speeches by Morris, de Kooning, Glarner, Motherwell and Davis at the conference on What abstract art means to me, held in February 1951.

One of the noble fathers of abstract expressionism, Willem de Kooning, cited a famous speech given in February 1951 at the What Abstract Art Means to Me conference at the MoMA in New York. The museum published shortly afterwards the conference proceedings, which also featured the participation of George LK Morris (1905-1975), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Fritz Glarner (1899-1972), Robert Motherwell and Stuart Davis (1892-1964).

Fig. 37) Two collections of writings by de Kooning (1988 and 1951) and his posthumous autobiographical account (2000)

Compared to Ms Ashton’s habits, the quotation was unusually long, even if it did not include the full text (the complete lecture [62] is however available on the Willem de Kooning Foundation’s website, which also hosts statements [63] and sources [64]). After evoking the different concepts of abstraction of the past (Kandinsky, futurism, constructivism), the painter explained his own, and revealed in reality a total lack of certainties and a perennial anxiety: “Spiritually, I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future. I have no nostalgia, however. If I am confronted with one of those small Mesopotamian figures, I have no nostalgia for it but, instead, I may get into a state of anxiety. Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think of inside or outside – or art in general – as a situation of comfort” [65].

Fig. 38) Collections of writings by de Kooning in French (1992), German (1998), Italian (2003)

The appearance on the publishing market of collections of de Kooning's writings chronologically followed Ms Ashton’s anthology: the Collected writings of 1988, edited by George Scrivani, also contained the text just quoted of the 1951 conference; that contribution was however no longer present in a new 2007 collection published by Polígrafa, entitled Willem de Kooning: works, writings and interviews, curated by Sally Yard (also released in French and Spanish). Willem de Kooning: reflections in the studio was published posthumously, as an autobiographical account based on conversations collected by Edvard Lieber in 2000. There are also several versions of collections of writings in other languages than English.

Fig. 39) Collections of writings by Barnett Newman in English (1990), German (1996), French (2011), Japanese (2012) and Spanish (2006).

Barnett Newman was one of the artists who most relied on the word to explain his work. He was much influenced by concepts of the nineteenth century aesthetic philosophy (first of all the idea of sublime). The collection of his writings and interviews - edited by the Barnet Newman Foundation - exists today in English (from 1990), German (1996), French (from 2011), Japanese (from 2012) and Spanish (2006). The foundation of the same name holds diaries and correspondence [66].

Fig. 40) The essay The sublime now by Barnett Newman, translated by Viviana Birolli and combined with a writing by the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard

The text inserted by Dore Ashton in his anthology was from 1944 and was taken from a catalogue of the London Tate Gallery in 1972. It was a critical evaluation of the theoretical merits of impressionism. Newman wrote that, with Impressionism, for the first time the concern of each individual artist (the renewal of technical-formal problems) was transformed into a mission entrusted to a whole group of them. Impressionism left this element of modernity to each subsequent movement, even when artists pursued the objective (like Surrealists did) of rediscovering ancient Greek sculpture. And yet,  Newman added: “The artist today has more feeling and consequently more understanding for a Marquesas Island fetish than for the Greek figure. This is a curious paradox when we consider that we, as the products of Western European culture, have been brought up within the framework of Greek aesthetic standards – the tradition of the Greek style – and have had no intimate contact with the primitive way of life. All we concretely know of the primitive life are its art objects” [67].

Fig. 41) On the left: The statement Who is the artist? How does he act? by David Smith, published in Everyday Art Quarterly (Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4090741?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents). At the centre: Two French editions of the writings of 2007 and 2008. On the left: The American collection of 2018.

The sculptor David Smith is the artist to whom Ashton granted the longest quotation ever in the anthology. Smith's passage was taken from the Everyday Art Quarterly magazine, published in Minneapolis in 1952. Curiously, in the magazine Smith's thought took the form of a sequence of verses like a poem, even if in reality it was the (agreed) re-written text of a conference held at the Walker Art Center of the same city. However, Ashton preferred to display the piece (which still retained a strongly symbolic content) to its original prose structure. Smith's analysis focused in particular on the difficulties of understanding between the artist and the public: “The artist has been the element of nature, and the arbiter of nature; he who has sat on a cloud and viewed it from afar, but at the same time has identified himself as one of nature’s part. The true artist views nature from his own time. The conflict with the audience is often one of time-nature regard rather than art. (…) I believe only artists truly understand art, because art is best understood by following the visionary path of the creator who produces it” [68]. A collection of writings by David Smith appeared first in French in 2007 (reprinted in 2008) by Susan J. Cooke; recently the same curator published the work in English in 2018 (University of California Press). A series of statements is available online at the website the David Smith Foundation [69].

Fig. 42) The Evergreen Review of 1958 with an interview with Franz Kline

Franz Kline came into contact with the abstract expressionists in the 1950s, developing a very personal informal style. In a 1958 interview with the art critic and poet Frank O'Hara (1926 - 1966), Kline explained that his abstract style (on which he still had many doubts) would not prevent him from having a strong connection with art from the past (he cited Bonnard and Matisse in this regard).“Somebody will say I have a black-and-white style, or a calligraphic style, but I never started out with that being consciously a style or attitude about painting. Sometimes you do have a definite idea about what you’re doing – and at other times it all just seems to disappear. I don’t feel mine is the most modern, contemporary, beyond-the-pale, gone kind of painting. But then, I don’t have that kind of fuck-the-past attitude. I have very strong feelings about individual paintings and painters past and present” [70]. The text, published in the literary magazine Evergreen Review, is still today one of the few sources in which Kline presented his own ideas on the subject of art.

Fig. 43) The collection of writings of Louise Bourgeois entitled Destruction of the father. Reconstruction of the father, in the English (1998), French (2001), German (2001), Spanish (2002) and Italian (2009) versions.

Ms Ashton devoted little room to the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, although she had written extensively throughout her long career and her texts were often centred on the intertwining of artistic creation and psychology. For those who study art literature, Bourgeois appears today as one of the most important authors. Her writings, edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans Ulrich Obrist, were collected in the volume Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father. Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997, published by MIT Press in 1998. Immediately afterwards, they were translated into French (2001), German (2001), Spanish (2002) and Italian (2009). The anthology of 1985, instead, included only a few lines, in reality unconvincing and in any case aimed at associating her (despite its figurative approach) with abstract expressionism.

William Baziotes was one of the youngest artists of the first generation of the New York School; we note, for example, that he spoke of his fellow artists with some awe. A collection of his writings has never been published as a testimony of the work, nor is there any foundation preserving its memory. Since the 1940s, however, he participated in the New York art debate. In 1954 he spoke at a conference on the creative process, a theme that, in those years, attracted a great deal of interest. In particular, he recalled the aesthetic discussions between artists in the previous decade. His contribution was published in The Art Digest in January 1954: “Inspiration comes to me unexpectedly, never by virtue of deliberate stimulation, never by sitting in a chair: it always happens in front of the easel. (…) Contact with other artists has always been of great importance to me. When the artists I know best used to meet ten or twelve years ago, the talk was mostly of ideas in painting. There was an unconscious collaboration between artists. Whether you agreed or disagreed was of no consequence. It was exciting and you were compelled to paint over your head. You had to stay on a high level or drown” [71].

Fig. 44) From left to the right: Dore Ashton's monograph Yes, but ...: a critical study on Philip Guston, in the 1976  (Viking Press) and 1990 (University of California Press) editions, and the essay: Philip Gouston in Rome signed by Dore Ashton and Peter Millernel 2011 and published by Hatje Cantz

Philip Guston was remembered as a self-taught painter, but of great culture, also thanks to the studies in the history of art he performed in Rome in 1948-1949 (Piero della Francesca and Giorgio de Chirico remained among his references throughout his life). The text of his was taken from a 1978 conference at the University of Minnesota, in which the artist described his pictorial path, which had led him through different phases [72]. This passage would then be included in many subsequent monographs on the artist. “In my experience a painting is not made with colours and paint at all. I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere, a trifle, some detail observed, wondered about, and naturally from the previous painting. The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I suppose the same thing was true in the Renaissance” [73].

Fig. 45) Philip Gouston's collection of writings, curated by Clark Coolidge (2010)

The collection of writings, lectures and conversations of the artist (Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations) was published in 2010 by the poet Clark Coolidge (1939-) with a preface by Dore Ashton. The Gouston Foundation has a web page, which however is seemingly inactive.

Robert Motherwell was the youngest of the abstract expressionists considered in this review. At the same time, he was one of the contemporary artists who most devoted himself with preserving the memory of his colleagues' ideas. He began to write starting in the early 1940s (when he was still in his surrealist phase). Since 1943 he was the co-editor-in-chief of an editorial series of writings by contemporary artists (Documents of Modern Art) published by the New York MoMA [74]. In 1947 he launched the magazine Possibilities. Problems of contemporary art, of which only one issue came out. In 1951 he published directly in the above mentioned Moma series an anthology of writings, entitled Dada, then republished in 1989. In 1981 the artist founded the Dedalus Foundation with the task of propagating the understanding of modern art and modernism [75].

Fig. 46) On the left: The only issue of the magazine Possibilities. Problems of contemporary art, directed by Robert Motherwell (1947). At the centre: The anthology of Dada art literature edited by Motherwell in 1951 and published by the MoMA in New York. On the right: The second edition of the 1989 Dada anthology.

The quotations of Motherwell were presented in very curious forms: in fact they were displayed as separate pieces between 1951 and 1963, but they were actually all taken from the catalogue of a traveling exhibition held in 1976 at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm and at the 20th Century Museum in Vienna. The selected passages confirmed the artist's ability to look at the phenomena of the present with the eyes of an art historian. “I believe that the New York School of what is called modern art, has a part of its background of thought those fragments of felt thought which, taken as a whole, we call the ‘symbolist’ aesthetic, in modern French poetry – whose formulation began with Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire and reached its climax in France during the decade 1885-1895, though its influence has extended into our own time, in the persons of a number of poets, of many Occidental countries, Valéry, Yeats, Joyce, Rilke, Lorca, Apollinaire, Eliot, and Cummings, among others. The influence of the symbolic aesthetic is a proposition that is perhaps impossible to demonstrate, and, if it represents a truth, represents a truth of which, I am sure, many members of the New York School are unaware. (…) My emphasis here is that modern art, of which the New York School is a part, has a history” [76].

Fig. 47) Collections of writings by Robert Motherwell in the 1994, 1997 and 2007 versions. Left and center, two versions (1994 and 1997) of the collection edited by Stephanie Terenzio. On the right: The collection curated by Dore Ashton and Joan Banach (2007).

In the section on Motherwell the anthology also included a few short further excerpts on the creative process, the influence of Chinese art and the use of colour. Two collections of writings by Motherwell are currently available on the market: The first edited by Stephanie Terenzio and the second by Dore Ashton herself (in cooperation with Joan Banach). The Dedalus Foundation offers, thanks to the web page [77], all the archive materials of the painter directly available.

End of Part Two
Go to Part Three 

NOTES

[44] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art, New York, Pantheon Books, 1985, 302 pages. The book can be consulted at the address: https://archive.org/details/twentiethcentury0000asht.

[45] See http://www.hanshofmann.org/writings-by-the-artist

[46] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.217

[47] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.237

[48] See: https://www.nakian.org/

[49] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), pp.259-260

[50] See: https://jacktworkov.org/

[51] See:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c0c6eb55b409b8fba2a5a6d/t/5c9bf54d53450a09d09c4749/1553724750958/AAA.tworjack2.pdf

[52] See 

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-adolph-gottlieb-12369

[53] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.209

[54] For the final version, see: 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1557346?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

[55] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.247

[56] See: http://www.markrothko.org e https://www.rothkocenter.com/en.

[57] See: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/mark-rothko-papers-7321

[58] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.208

[59] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), pp.208-209

[60] See: 

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-man-who-was-gorky-1193548.html.

[61] See:

https://arshilegorkyfoundation.org/research-resources/primary-documents.

[62] See: 

https://www.dekooning.org/documentation/words/what-abstract-art-means-to-me.

[63] See: 

https://www.dekooning.org/documentation/words.

[64] See: 

https://www.dekooning.org/the-artist/bibliography/writings-and-interviews.

[65] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), pp.198-199

[66] See: http://www.barnettnewman.org/archives/archival-files

[67] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.239

[68] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), pp.250-251

[69] See: http://www.davidsmithestate.org/statements.html

[70] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.226

[71] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.190

[72] The text, with the title "Philip Gouston talking" is available at the web address 

https://users.wfu.edu/~laugh/painting2/guston.pdf.

[73] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.211

[74] See: https://fontsinuse.com/uses/5084/documents-of-modern-art-series

[75] See: https://www.dedalusfoundation.org/

[76] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), pp.234-235

[77] See: https://www.dedalusfoundation.org/archives