How Jackson Pollock and the Americans Came to Europe:
Eduard Beaucamp Recalls the New York School's Advance
When Jackson Pollock’s paintings were first shown in Germany, the critic
Eduard Beaucamp was still a young student interested in art. Now, in an
exclusive interview with db-artmag, the godfather of German cultural
journalism talks about what he remembers most from the time, both at the
documenta in Kassel and other important European exhibitions.
In 1957, people just starting out studying art history had a harder time
getting an overview of the contemporary art scene than today. We weren’t
nearly as mobile as students are nowadays. The first thing we worked at
was acquiring a clear picture of how Modernism and its classics evolved.
The German museums were still in the process of being rebuilt and were
primarily full of national works:
The Bridge and
Blue Rider predominated, while
Surrealism and
Constructivism were still awaiting their rediscovery. The exhibition
business, however, was booming even back then. But to see
Picasso,
Braque, or
Léger in any significant way on a museum wall, you had to travel to
Amsterdam and above all to Basel. At the universities, modernism was
pretty much taboo as an object of research and teaching. In the galleries
and private collections, we were surrounded by the paintings of
Willi Baumeister and
Ernst Wilhelm Nay, the painters of the
École de Paris, and the
German Art Informel movement.
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Ernst Wilhelm Nay: Rhytmische
Wiederkehr, 1955, Sammlung Deutsche Bank
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Willi Baumeister: Weißer Diskus,
1954, Sammlung Deutsche Bank
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The art of America seemed very far away indeed. Europe was
still nurturing a prejudice that while the US might be all-powerful and
unparalleled in the entertainment industry, it nonetheless remained
inferior in the fine arts. At the first
documenta of 1955, the continental Europeans kept to themselves. Even the
English were relegated to the fringe with a mere eight participants (among
58 Germans, 43 French, and 28 Italians). The US was represented by the
emigrants
Naum Gabo and
Josef Albers as well as the
Calder mobiles, which had already begun conquering German living rooms,
and a painter named Roesch, who has since become forgotten. This reserve
is difficult to understand today, because the exhibition’s directors and
working committees really should have known the American scene much better.
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Ernst Wilhelm Nay: Uhrturm II, 1946,
Sammlung Deutsche Bank
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As early as 1951, an exhibition tour titled New York in
Europe with works by
Jackson Pollock,
Robert Motherwell,
Mark Tobey, and
Mark Rothko made a stopover at the Berlin and Munich "Festwochen". One
year previously, the
Museo Correr in Venice had shown a one-man exhibition of Pollock’s works
in the context of the Biennale. In 1953/54, another guest appearance
called Twelve American Painters and Sculptors, again including
Pollock, crossed the continent, stopping over in Helsinki, Oslo, Paris,
and Düsseldorf. And two years later, in 1955/56, the
MoMA sent an anthology of American art from their own collection on tour
through London, Barcelona, Vienna, and Belgrade, stopping over in
Frankfurt am Main. The show featured Pollock,
Willem de Kooning,
Franz Kline,
Clifford Still, and Rothko.
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Back then, the London
Times asked: "Aren’t they the vanguard of an American invasion in
painting?" This type of resentment was widespread, and Paris fought a
bitter battle of defense. In light of all this, one could interpret the
reserve towards the Americans manifested at the first documenta as a form
of self-protection.
Bernhard Schultze: Rhythmus Weiß Gelb Schwarz, 1952,
Sammlung Deutsche Bank
Yet the suspicion felt
by the Times was anything but imaginary. The regularity and methodical
planning of the tours demonstrated that "free" Europe – as well as a
neutral country like Finland and, interestingly enough, even Yugoslavia,
which had cut itself off from the Soviet Bloc – was being systematically
besieged. Today, the archives have largely been made available, and so we
know, partly through the painstaking study by
Frances Stonor Saunders (The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World
of Arts and Letters, published by New Press in 2000), much about the
CIA’s cultural strategies and how American policy, by means of its secret
service, exerted a massive influence on the European cultural
establishment through its promotion of supposedly anti-Communist art – and
especially the freedom fighters of abstraction. The funding flowed through
American foundations and cover organizations, guaranteeing the purely
cultural nature of the exhibitions and publications.
Founder of the Documenta, Arnold Bode, 1959 in front of a painting by Jackson
Pollock,
Foto: Documenta-Archiv
Even
in the fine arts, America pursued its hegemony and gradually fortified it.
The culture of the Eastern Bloc was to be made ridiculous, the previously
unchallenged authority of the European cultural capital of Paris jarred.
It was a race that wasn’t primarily about the level and quality of the
art, but about politics: the Americans considered Parisian culture to be
infiltrated by communists. And indeed, exceptional artists and influential
intellectuals, above all Picasso and Léger, were party members. Yet it
goes without saying that the political exploitation didn’t mar the
aesthetic integrity or achievement of the New York artists.
Presentation of a painting by Ernst Wilhelm Nay in front of the Museum
Fridericianum in Kassel,
Foto: Documenta-Archiv
When did a student of the nineteen-fifties encounter his first Pollock
paintings? He could have seen the works at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, for instance:
Peggy Guggenheim had already donated two paintings from her collection to
the museum in 1950. But to be honest, I didn’t notice them back then, and
I didn’t remember them. In 1958, I visited the World’s Fair in Brussels.
This was the first experience with global modernism. 50 Years of Modern
Art was the name of the accompanying art exhibition where the
contemporary Americans made their splash appearance with Pollock,
Arshile Gorky, Tobey,
Sam Francis, and de Kooning.
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