The public has, rightly, lost faith in politicians, experts and the media. Progress seems impossible in politics or culture. Massive impersonal bureaucracies, the beguilements of the capitalist market, and ideologies propounded by parties, intellectuals and institutions fill us with disorienting clichés and false identities. We are unable to discern the truth, communicate it effectively to each other, or find an authentic role through which to connect with others and escape the forces that divert our potential for genuine action into unthinking conformity or delusional grandstanding.
So argued, from the crisis of the Second World War until their deaths in the 1970s, two of the most important intellectuals of the midcentury United States: Harold Rosenberg and Hannah Arendt. Close friends for nearly three decades, their relationship inspired their intertwined theories of action and judgment, and their shared turn towards the role of cultural critic for a mass public. However, while Arendt is now seen as a central figure in the modern philosophical canon, Rosenberg has been all but forgotten, as has the critical dialogue between them.
Rosenberg was one of the leading American thinkers about art in the years after the Second World War, when the US replaced Europe as the centre of the art world. Thanks in part to his critical essays, artists like Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock entered art history, and made modern art seem synonymous with US culture. He also influenced, and was influenced by, Arendt, with whom he became friends in the late 1940s. The two developed a set of ideas about how what they called ‘action’ connected aesthetics and politics. Over the following two decades, they continued rethinking the meaning of action as they both taught on the Committee on Social Thought programme at the University of Chicago.
In the four decades after his death, Rosenberg has faded into poorly remembered caricature. His distinctive ideas of action – non-systematic, always evolving, and elaborated in essays gathered in collections out of print since the 1980s – have been dismissed by art historians like Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster as ‘half-romantic, half-petty-bourgeois’ and ‘a psychologising whine’, as Christa Noel Robbins puts it in Artist as Author (2021). While these scholars are wrong to write off Rosenberg, they are right to find in him an enemy of the kind of criticism they practise. His essays bristle with provocative critiques of how academics, museum professionals, gallerists and art critics reduce works of art into instruments of pedagogy or profit-making, diverting attention away from the real stakes of making art.
The artists about whom Rosenberg wrote were people he understood to be struggling to create a human life for themselves amid capitalism’s oppressions and illusions. In doing so, he argued, they broke with the conventions of art history. The production of beautiful objects, membership in a self-conscious avant-garde, the representation of politically useful subject matter and even the pursuit of originality fell away as they strove no longer to make art, but to act, whether on canvas, in sculpture or through the responses their deeds provoked. Art criticism, Rosenberg insisted in his most important and widely misread essay, ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952), was the least appropriate of all possible responses to such action. ‘The new painting,’ he declared, ‘has broken down every distinction between art and life,’ and required not criticism in the sense of a specialist’s evaluative search for quality, but rather an existential exercise of judgment. Instead of delineating an artwork’s place in the unfolding of historical tendencies, or revealing its interest as a lens onto social problems, the critic must judge the artist’s action for how it reveals a life.
Rosenberg’s own life, which is better known thanks to the 2021 biography by Debra Bricker Balken, began in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in New York in 1906. Ambitious but unfocused, Rosenberg wandered after law school (he never practised as a lawyer) amid the bohemians of Greenwich Village. Through his friendships with young would-be artists and intellectuals, he acquired a familiarity with the main currents of his era: Marxism, psychoanalysis and surrealism. Rosenberg’s creative activity was as eclectic as his intellectual milieu. For much of the 1930s, he shifted his energies restlessly among painting, poetry, fiction and nonfiction. All these efforts were informed by his Leftist politics. For example, his poem ‘The Front’ (1935) finds Rosenberg struggling to master a multi-perspectival modernist style, in which he celebrates violence committed by sailors, union members and farmers against forces of reaction symbolised by ‘some bastard of a business man’.
The WPA’s murals of heroic farmers and workers resemble nothing so much as the art promoted by Stalin and Hitler
As the Great Depression, starting in 1929, became an era-defining disaster, Rosenberg, like many young thinkers, found inspiration for a new model of society in the Soviet Union. During the mid-1930s, the Soviet government encouraged communist groups throughout the world to collaborate with the non-communist democratic Left as part of the so-called Popular Front. Rosenberg joined a number of these, working as an editor at Art Front, a Popular Front-inspired periodical created by two Communist Party-affiliated artists’ unions. He also joined a series of New Deal-era public works projects aimed at providing employment to writers and artists. He wrote catalogues and other texts about murals funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and put together an anthology of new US writing, American Stuff, organised by the Federal Writers’ Project. It seemed in those years possible to imagine a series of partnerships linking artists, writers, the American Left, the Roosevelt administration, and international communism.
By the end of the 1930s, Rosenberg had abandoned this synthesis. Like many on the Left, he was bitterly discouraged by the Soviet Union’s show trials and purges, its pact with Nazi Germany and its invasion of Finland. He was disappointed, too, by the narrow, doctrinaire attitudes of Stalinist-inspired activists on the US art scene, and the bland, backward-looking art subsidised by the WPA. Its murals of heroic farmers and workers resemble nothing so much as the art promoted by Stalin and Hitler in their own regimes. The Popular Front, in politics and aesthetics, seemed to have reached a dead end.
Poster for the Works Progress Administration. Courtesy Wikipedia
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