The Asian Origin of American Abstraction

In which I fulfill a dream of certain race-obsessed critics.

Since I’m careful to bar idiots from living rent-free in my head, I more or less stopped reading Hyperallergic in early 2020, when its anti-Semitic dog whistles grew into a veritable wind section. (I have made exceptions for its hilariously grandiose displays of self-unawareness, but fewer than you might think.) Nevertheless I have figured out how to satisfy a longstanding desire on behalf of some of its writers, notably John Yau, to establish an Asian origin for American abstract painting.

Why would such a thing matter? You’d have to ask Yau to be sure, but my understanding is that the art world’s progressive preponderance holds that we are all mere avatars of our race, sex, and whatnot, and have no shared humanity worth mentioning. Hence art history is a zero-sum game in which any glory of creative achievement that can be clawed away from white men and accrued to a more favorably regarded identity cohort is a victory for progress. For the record this is a mainstream project in the arts and humanities, as observed by Heather Mac Donald, Johnny Best, Alice Gribbin, Spencer Klavan, and quite a few others. Progressivism, as far as race is concerned, is the Aryanism of our time, a declamatory belief in an existential hierarchy based on racial pseudoscience. The National Socialists reified the body as a primordial source of political meaning, hence the “blood” of blut und boden. Racial progressives talk about the body in exactly the same terms. See, for instance, Ta-Nehesi Coates. One reviewer of Between the World and Me wearily noted that Coates “must speak of the ‘breaking’ of the black ‘body’ more than 100 times…. By page 12, I felt a bit like a broken man myself.”

This attitude leads progressives to the same conclusions that Aryanism led Europe. At the core of Yau’s complaint is, unsurprisingly, a Jew. Clement Greenberg wrote in an essay (1955, reworked 1958) that was collected in Art and Culture:

It was in 1945, or maybe even earlier, that Gorky painted black and white oils that were more than a tour de force. De Kooning followed suit about a year or two later. Pollock, after having produced isolated black and white pictures since 1947, did a whole show of them in 1951. But it was left to Franz Kline, a latecomer, to restrict himself to black and white consistently, in large canvases that were like monumental line drawings. Kline's apparent allusions to Chinese or Japanese calligraphy encouraged the cant, already started by Tobey's case, about a general Oriental influence on "abstract expressionism." This country's possession of a Pacific coast offered a handy received idea with which to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that Americans were at last producing a kind of art important enough to be influencing the French, not to mention the Italians, the British and the Germans.

Actually, not one of the original "abstract expressionists"—least of all Kline—has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West; what resemblances to Oriental modes may be found in it are an effect of convergence at the most, and of accident at the least. And the new emphasis on black and white has to do with something that is perhaps more crucial to Western painting than to any other kind. Value contrast, the opposition of the lightness and darkness of colors, has been Western pictorial art's chief means, far more important than perspective, to that convincing illusion of three-dimensionality which distinguishes it most from other traditions of pictorial art. The eye takes its first bearings from quantitative differences of illumination, and in their absence feels most a loss. Black and white offers the extreme statement of these differences. What is at stake in the new American emphasis on black and white is the preservation of something—a main pictorial resource—that is suspected of being near exhaustion; and the effort at preservation is undertaken, in this as in other cases, by isolating and exaggerating that which one wants to preserve.

Obviously that couldn’t be allowed to stand. Yau took the occasion of a 2019 exhibition of George Miyasaki to slam Greenberg and slake an eight-year old grudge against Wall Street Journal critic Lance Esplund:

Clement Greenberg made the extravagant claim that “not one of the original ‘abstract expressionists’ — least of all [Franz] Kline — has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West.” If you believe that this narrow, racially charged viewpoint is no longer given any credence, you are dead wrong.

Reviewing the 2011 show Helen Frankenthaler: East and Beyond at Knoedler & Co., for which I wrote the catalog essay, Lance Esplund, the critic for the Wall Street Journal, wrote:

At this point he quoted Esplund (Substack doesn’t allow nested blockquotes, alas):

Coming on the eve of New York’s Asia Week, it is a fine show if you ignore its premise and dubious catalog essay, written by the Chinese-American art critic and poet John Yau. Mr. Yau, citing the Asian-themed titles of Ms. Frankenthaler’s works, surmises — with little or no substantiation — that she is steeped in “Asian art and philosophy” and has had “a long engagement with Asian art.” This is news, if not revisionist fantasy, to anyone who knows the artist and her European Modernist-influenced works, whose ambiguous titles were generally arrived at through free-association.

Back to Yau:

Put aside for moment Esplund’s xenophobic need to racially profile me and consider his claim that the essay was written with “little or no substantiation.” As Esplund well knows, any catalogue essay on Helen Frankenthaler published by a reputable gallery that presented her with a concept for the exhibition would require — as a minimum standard — that the artist and her studio approved of the show’s format, title, and catalogue essay.

Thus designating happy clients as the arbiters of truth. He went on to blame Miyasaki’s vaunted neglect on “racial and cultural prejudices, as expressed by the first generation of American art critics — Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Irving Sandler — and carried on by Lance Esplund and many others in positions of power,” which is to say, the Jews.

Yau claims that because Miyasaki, along with Nathan Olivera, helped Willem de Kooning print a lithograph in 1960, Asia somehow informed first-generation abstract expressionism after all. Yau snipes,

Am I wrong to suggest that Miyasaki might have been inspired by the Buddhist belief that “form is emptiness; emptiness is form” (from the Prajna Paramita Hrdaya or “Heart” sutra)? Or is Zen Buddhism only good for John Cage, Gary Snyder, and other white people?

Zen Buddhism is good for all sentient beings, I’m led to understand. The first problem is that Yau never established that Miyasaki was a Zen Buddhist or working under the philosophical influence of the Mahayana. (Which is not to say that he wasn’t, but - does this really need saying, to Yau? - not all Japanese people are Buddhists.)

The second is that Yau is asking us to accept the idea that Miyasaki, painting in a West-coast version of a style that de Kooning invented, subsequently influenced the older artist. That is not apparent, particularly in a manner that might be distinguishable from the hypothetical influence of Olivera. That the Heart Sutra therefore influenced de Kooning would be fanciful if the author weren’t so mean-spirited.

Third is that even if it were apparent, it wouldn’t counter Greenberg’s 1958 statement that none of the original AbExers had felt more than a cursory interest in Asian art. Point in fact, American abstract expressionism cranked along for two formative decades without such influence. It would not have been worse for it if it had been shaped by such interest. But it wasn’t, and that’s fine. The only people keeping score on this are the racial progressives, echoing their Aryanist forbearers. The estate of Miyasaki is represented by Ryan Lee, which baldly claims on the artist’s page,

Although primarily known for his adeptly and lushly colored Abstract Expressionist work, Miyasaki’s contributions to the movement were largely ignored during his lifetime due to his race. Until recently, many critics, including Clement Greenberg, denied the aesthetic and philosophic influence of East Asian calligraphy and Zen Buddhism on Abstract Expressionism, instead depicting it as the product of exclusively Western traditions.

Miyasaki was largely ignored along with every other latecomer to the Tenth Street Touch, and along with many other West coast artists, including far more interesting and original ones like David Park. Painterly abstraction as a whole fell into such disrepute that many are still denigrating it as macho and passé, and I’m curious what evidence anyone has that Miyasaki’s relative neglect was due to his race. It would be typical of art-world mendacity to dismiss a whole style as the product of swaggering white men, then re-admit it to the realm of cultural achievement solely for the purpose of recovering the work of a non-white artist from which it can’t be distinguished. Neither Yau nor Lee cares to edify us why Greenberg’s denial is incorrect, only that it is wrong to have made it. Is it?

If so, let them prove it. But as it happens, I have an idea as to how American abstraction might have an Asian origin after all.

In the process of researching my essay for The New Criterion on Hyman Bloom, I learned that he was regarded by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock as the first American abstractionist. The source for this is the magnificent painter Bernard Chaet, cited in Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom:

Bloom was the link between Boston Expressionism and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Thomas Hess in Abstract Painting, 1951, reproduced Bloom’s Archaeological Treasure in color and is clearly laudatory. This praise may have been due to the influence of Hess’s favorite painter, Willem de Kooning, who made it very clear to me in a conversation in 1954 that he and Jackson Pollock considered Bloom, whom they had discovered in [the exhibition] Americans 1942, “the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America.”

It would be nice if there were a second source for this proposition in addition to Chaet, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Bloom, we know from his writings, had a profound spiritual experience as a young, struggling artist. Again, from Modern Mystic:

Isolation and deep self-reflection seem to have pushed Bloom toward a new mystical awareness. In 1938, after finding a pamphlet on the street, Bloom had begun attending meetings of a mystical society, the Order of the Portal, founded by Aleta Baker. On Cape Cod the following summer, he read The Secret Doctrine by Helena P. Blavatsky, cofounder of the Theosophical Society. On returning to Boston, he again began attending meetings of the Order of the Portal, and also began to visit the Theosophical Society and the Vedanta Center, an organization devoted to the teachings of Vedanta as developed by the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna. At some point in this period, Bloom had a transcendental experience: “I had a conviction of immortality, of being part of something permanent and ever-changing, of metamorphosis as the nature of being. Everything was intensely beautiful, and I had a sense of love for life that was greater than I had ever had before.”

This was the period in which Bloom created the first mature paintings of his career, particularly the Christmas tree and chandelier paintings…. The central subject of both groups of paintings is light and the way that light becomes a metaphor for the spiritual world.

That timeline indicates that de Kooning and Pollock were inspired into abstraction by the example of Bloom in the early ‘40s. That in turn had been brought on by an epiphany that struck Bloom in 1938, under the influence of the Vedas. The Asian origin of American abstraction is Indian, by way of a Latvian Jew.

That likely won’t properly appease Yau and his ilk. But I doubt that I would have cared much for the original Aryanists, and I don’t much like the new ones either.