I recently watched 'Painters Painting', a 1972 documentary by Emile De Antonio about the New York School of artists working in the city after 1940.

There is no narration, and the film doesn’t actually feature any painters painting. Rather it is comprised of the leading artists of the day (and a handful of dealers, collectors and critics) talking about their work. 

We meet Willem de Kooning with thick-rimmed spectacles, zip up jacket and Dutch accent. There’s Barnett Newman in a bow tie, somewhat breathless. Here’s Frank Stella sitting on the floor in his sneakers, and Robert Rauschenberg on top of a stepladder, addressing us in a soft Texan drawl. Helen Frankenthaler wears a smart cream skirt-suit and sits by the radiator. Jasper Johns prefers a round table, a drink and a cigarette. Andy Warhol positions himself opposite a large mirror and offers evasion and aphorism.

‘Everybody’s influenced by everybody.’

Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically American art movement, and it put New York at the center of the Western art world. After it came Pop Art and Color Field painting, and more besides. The documentary provides a fascinating insight into how some revolutionary creative minds worked, and a real treasure trove of innovative approaches and techniques.

Let’s consider some of the lessons to be learned.

1. Follow the Light

Willem De Kooning grew up in Rotterdam, but in 1926, at the age of 22, he travelled to the United States as a stowaway. He explains how the New World appealed to artists in contrast to the tradition-bound life he left behind.

‘I felt a certain depression over there. I felt caught… The American movies always being the paramount movies, it seemed to be a very light place… They seemed to be very light and bright and happy. I always felt I would come to America, even when I was a boy.’

2. Take a Revolutionary Position

The painters that gathered in New York around this time reacted against the conservative art establishment in Europe. Barnett Newman explains.

‘There was no question that my work… took a revolutionary position you might say, against the bourgeois notion of what a painting is as an object – aside from what it is as a statement. Because in the end you can’t even contain it in the ordinary bourgeois home.’

In time Abstract Expressionism, with its bold, spontaneous articulation of an individual’s feelings, became the dominant movement. Painters began to measure themselves against its leading lights, rather than against artistic tradition. 

‘Both Pollack and Hofmann established American painting as a real thing for me. I didn’t have to go all the way back and worry again about where I stood in relation to Matisse and Picasso. I could worry about where I stood in relation to Hofmann and Pollack.’
Barnett Newman

3. Think Big 

The New York School was often characterised by the scale of its paintings. 

‘The scale of America is different. Most American painters work in what were once small factories, whereas most European artists work in either apartments or studios that were designed in terms of easel painting. There’s no doubt too that there’s a different experience in a large picture. But I think it was more to do with a heroic impulse as compared with the intimacy of French painting.’
Robert Motherwell

As the focus shifted from the easel to the mural, paint was applied, not by carefully controlled brush strokes and tiny movements of the wrist; but rather by big expansive gestures of the arm.

‘I did not want a small gesture, standing at the easel with a sable brush. And having looked at cubism, which can be very detailed and minute and fine and have that essence of the easel and the sable brush, I literally wanted to break free, put it on the floor, throw the paint around.’
Helen Frankenthaler

4. Celebrate the Process

With such a radically different approach to creating work, there was a good deal of thought given to the process itself. 

‘I was more interested in the making aspect of Abstract Expressionism than I was in the subject matter. And I mean by that the fact that the artists were handling the materials in a physical way, the fact that they were making paintings.’
Kenneth Noland

Robert Rauschenberg, whose much celebrated Combines incorporated found everyday objects, became fascinated by the properties of his discoveries.

‘You begin with the possibilities of the material and then you let them do what they can do. So the artist is really a bystander while he’s working.’

5. Find a Subject

Inevitably the film is filled with argument and counter-argument. Helen Frankenthaler, the painter of fluid, organic and colourful abstracts, was not interested in displaying her process.

‘A picture that is beautiful, or comes off, or works, looks as if it all was made in one stroke, at once. I myself don’t like to see the trail of a brush stroke, the drip of paint. To me that’s part of a sentiment, or clueing in, that has nothing to do with how a picture hits you.’

Similarly Newman contends that the subject is more important than the process. 

‘I felt the issue in those years was: ‘What can a painter do?’ And the problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in painting. Not the plasticity, not the look, not the surface, none of these things meant that much. The issue for me – and I think it existed for all the fellows, for Pollack and for Gottlieb: What we gonna paint?’

6. Seek the Universal

So what should that subject be?

For Newman it had to be universal. His paintings appear to be purely abstract, but he gave them titles that hint at big spiritual themes: life and death, and a world living in the shadow of the Holocaust. 

‘I hope that my work can be seen and understood on a universal basis - that is that the language is of nature, that it doesn’t have the necessity of its American labels.’

7. Look Somewhere Else

For Rauschenberg the key to finding a subject is raising your eyes from the narrow confines of art and examining the world around you.

‘I wasn’t interested in attaining a precious state of isolation. I was interested in what was around me. Art doesn’t come out of art, and you don’t work with one foot in the art book, and no painter has ever really been able to help another. I had no interest in being better or worse than any other artist… My paintings are invitations to look somewhere else.’

8. Decide What You Refuse to Do

Robert Motherwell, one of the youngest of the New York School, was noted for his black forms on white backgrounds and for his literary and political themes. He suggests that the first step in creation is determining what you’re rejecting or refusing to do.

‘In some ways it’s easier to say what I’m doing by saying what I’m refusing to do. If I look at one of the Open series now, I see that I refused to have it glossy rather than matt; there are no shadows; there’s very little representation; the space is ambivalent in that the line is clearly drawn on a flat surface.’

9. Make Immediate Impact

Newman’s paintings often featured thin vertical lines, or ‘zips’ as he called them - flashes of light at once uniting and dividing the image. He encourages us to work spontaneously and instinctively, to disregard detail.

‘Your first reaction when you meet a person for the first time is immediate. And it’s a total reaction in which the entire personality of a person and your own personality make contact. And to my mind that’s almost a metaphysical event. If you have to start examining the eyelashes and all that sort of thing, it becomes a cosmetic situation in which you remove yourself from the experience.’

Kenneth Noland, who painted circles, chevrons and stripes in bright, bold colours, often described himself as ‘a one-shot painter.’ He rejected preparatory drawing and sketching as part of the redundant Western tradition.

‘If you were in touch with what you were doing, you only had to do it one time.’

10. Push and Pull at Reality

Frankenthaler reflects on the liberating power of art to transform reality.

‘For me learning cubism was the greatest freedom.’

She strikes the white wall at her side as she speaks.

‘That’s flat, but I can make it – if I do it right - play around. So that, because of a color and a shape, things go back miles and come forward yards. Hoffman called this ‘push and pull’.’

11. Act on Your Dreams

In 1954, frustrated with the grand individual expression at the heart of Abstract Expressionism, Jasper Johns burned all his previous work and started introducing symbols, text and numbers into his paintings - so integrating the impersonal with the personal, the representational with the abstract. 

Johns’ new period began with ‘Flag,’ which was prompted by a dream.

‘One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag. And the next morning I got up and I went out and I bought the materials to begin it.’

12. Mean What You Do (and Don’t Mean What Others Do)

Johns makes a compelling case for artistic individuality and integrity.

‘The idea did come to me that I should have to mean what I did. Then accompanying that was that there was no reason to mean what other people do. And so if I could tell that I was doing what someone else was doing, then I would try not to do it.’

13. Go That Further Step

Over time Abstract Expressionism became the new establishment, and a new generation rebelled against it. Frank Stella complained that its big expansive gestures ‘got lost on the corners.’ Regarding the picture as an object in its own right, rather than as a representation of something, he painted flat cool colourful geometric patterns.

‘[Abstract Expressionism] got to be more of an illustration of energy than an establishment of real pictorial energy. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to have some of the virtues of Abstract Expressionism, but still have them under a kind of control. But not control for its own sake, a kind of conceptual painterly control that I thought would make even stronger pictures.’ 

The New York School continued to evolve. Jules Olitski spray-painted large canvases to create dematerialised fields of colour. His process involved taking an idea beyond its natural conclusion.

‘It’s also the taking the chance to play and to wreck, to destroy. I find it very exciting and irresistible to try to go that further step and see what will happen. You get the thought in your head: ‘If over this I put this, or I change this in that way’, spray some more varnish on it, spray a whole pool of glop over it, or over part of it, or any number of things that you can do. What will happen? What will it look like?’

14. Find Human Scale

Finally we return to Newman and the issue of the size of a painting. He suggests that really it’s the scale of the idea that matters.

‘In the end size doesn’t count. Whether the easel painting is small or big is not the issue. Size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. And the only way you can achieve human scale is by the content.’

So. A free flowing collection of insights and observations about the creative process. Free flowing, because that’s the way the film is structured, and because that was the spirit of the New York School.

I hope nonetheless that you find something encouraging in here as you embark on 2023.

Happy New Year!

'Everyone has a destiny, so do I.
I got no time to waste.
I'm the star in my life, you see.
Yes, it's me and only meant for me.
Gonna get myself together, enjoy my life forever.
Not thinking of you, because you made me blue.
Shame on you, because my love was true, it was true.
Gonna get, gonna get over you, over you.
Tomorrow I know I'll get over you.’

France Joli, 'Gonna Get Over You’ (W E Anderson)

No. 400