Word: surrealisme
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By 1948 he broke his truce between surrealism and abstraction. Preoccupied with "tragic and timeless" subject matter, Rothko wanted to invest the entire surface of the painting with a sense of awe, a ritualistic presence; and in groping toward this he produced some of the least satisfactory paintings of his...
As the first "grand" American style, mature abstract expressionism (painted from about 1950 onward) has been studied and shown almost to exhaustion. Shaped into an institution by the growing system of critics, dealers, curators and Government cultural agencies, the once fragile and isolated-looking works of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning...
It should give the coup de grâce to the lingering idea that abstract expressionism was a "native" movement. On the contrary: it was unimaginable without its source, surrealism. Indeed, it was the last great efflorescence of romantic imagery in art. The New York painters were very selective about...
But tragic and timeless subjects were not to be found on the street. The American artists wanted to locate their discourse beyond events, in a field not bound by historical time, that went back to preliterate, "primitive" tribal antiquity. The notion of ritual occupied the same place in their work...
It was not a matter of getting into primitive fancy dress: all the painters involved were 20th century city dwellers, they had read Freud and Jung, some of them (notably Pollock) had been in analysis, and they were well aware that the "savage mind" cannot be mimicked by an act...