Taming Action Painting

FOR SOME REASON drawings almost never fare well at art exhibitions. Although most artists rely heavily on them to vent ideas, drawings are usually not exhibited or begrudgingly relegated to some obscure spot on the wall. Perhaps they are denied the stature of paintings and sculptures because they often represent preliminary explorations rather than finished products. But for just this reason they can be extremely revealing.

The Hayden Gallery exhibition of drawings by Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Line, and Guston is a pleasant exception to the rule. These five painters have been labeled Abstract Impressionists because they broke with the traditions of Cubism and Mondrian aesthetics by eliminating concrete forms and images from their work. Pollock, for example, is best known for paintings made by squirting paint out of tubes directly onto a canvas on the floor. For him, the act of releasing paint itself constitutes a valid artistic statement.

This particular exhibition is also exciting because it includes work that departs from the artists more familiar styles. For instance, Gorky is noted for composing basic shapes in drawings and then improvising on them in his paintings--in one the lines might dissolve into a wash of color; in another they would be accented by being presented against a different--colored background. This technique is apparent in Calendars, a charcoal drawing in the exhibition where ambiguous forms interweave and recede into the background. Although Gorky's manipulation of abstract shapes is imaginative, his portraits display a more impressive versatility. Portrait of Vartoosh (his sister with whom he fled from Turkish Armenia) makes use of uncommonly bold pencil lines that stand out individually and blend to form a unified composition. Gorky chooses a different approach for the portrait of his mother. Here there are no discrete lines; the features are formed by altering the intensity of the charcoal. His careful regulation of tonality enhances the sullen quality of the woman's somber face with large, searching eyes and pursed lips. In another set of drawings, Gorky uses pen and ink hatch marks exclusively to create more abstract human outlines.

De Kooning's portraits are equally fascinating. Portrait of Max Morgulis displays great sensitivity to the intensity of the pencil line. Subtle changes in pressure lend a delicacy to the face, which seems to emerge quietly from the paper. A less representational series of pen and ink drawings are devoted to the female form in relation to its surroundings. In Figure in Interior the human body is absorbed by bold black strokes that envelop it. The woman in Untitled, 1967, is swept up in the rhythm of the lines as one might be carried off by a hurricane.

Kline's outlook on both painting and drawing is very different. His reputation is based on the development of a broad swinging stroke that varies in texture--in Rocker he reduces a chair to its fundamental elements with a few diagonal and horizontal black strokes. Some of Guston's single stroke drawings make use of a similar technique.

THE MOST INTERESTING work by these men in the exhibition, however, departs from this style. Kline is capable of using a few of his characteristic thick black strokes to suggest a face in Nijinsky. The same economy of line makes his more traditional drawing, David Orr's Mother, just as intriguing. Although most of the page is blank, Kline chooses lines that make the white areas play an integral role in the portrait. Guston, in Untitled, 1953, and Drawing No. 19 uses contrast in the quality of his strokes to create the illusion of depth in his shapes.

Abstract Impressionists have also been called Action Painters because they place so much emphasis on the brush and pen stroke itself. In fact, Jackson Pollock once explained his art by saying, "The source of my painting is the unconscious," and his works, some of which have been made with sticks and syringes. Indicate that he is more concerned with drips and squirts of paint than with the organization of his canvas and the control of his lines. The Action Painting trend peaked around 1950; afterwards artists returned to concrete images and forms. This exhibition seems to help explain why: the most memorable drawings are the ones that deal, however hesitantly or abstractly, with form and image. When Pollock does incorporate more representational images into his drawings the relation between real and abstract anchor them; they become stronger and legible on different levels.

Drawings composed of unspecified shapes, even if they are carefully conceived, run the risk of seeming flat and dull, not because they fail to give us something to recognize and latch onto, but because they lack a certain attention to organization. Many of Kline's and Pollock's patterns seem repetitive and senseless because they have no apparent structure, even though the artists might have brooded over their drawings for weeks. And the work of these five artists is most captivating when it reveals a consistent, internal structure. One can't help feeling that art, no matter how expressive, isn't arbitrary.