If one accepts the idea of abstraction as the telos of the modernist visual arts, then American art of the early twentieth century can only be understood as derivative of the European avant-garde. This has always struck me as an odd piece of conventional art historical wisdom, particularly given Marcel Duchamp’s famously back-handed compliment to his new American friends in 1917 (offered in protest of the rejection, from an ostensibly unjuried exhibition, of the porcelain urinal he called “Fountain” and entered under a pseudonym): “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.” The quip is both devastating and insightful. As pure products of industrial ingenuity and material efficiency, America’s plumbing and bridges were, for a European artist like Duchamp, exemplary modernist forms. So why weren’t America’s artists equally ingenious? I think the answer is deceptively simple: they were. At least that seems to be the case if one focuses on their processes rather than their products.
Many American artists of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries received their fine arts training in schools that styled themselves on the pragmatic model of mechanics institutes and technical schools (art “institutes” as the more successful ones described themselves) where, in the pursuit of a useful, public role for the arts in daily life, they learned to deploy a surprising range of formulaic shortcuts to representation.[1] Although the result—a diagrammatic abstraction underlying otherwise figurative art—was a structural feature of the work of many of Duchamp’s New York colleagues and contemporaries, this aspect of American art would not surface fully enough to be recognized until its appearance in the abstract work of expressionist painter Jackson Pollock in the 1940s. Hailed as one of America’s first modernist artists, Pollock and his innovative technique of drips and pours may also be viewed as the culmination of a diagrammatic tradition with roots in nineteenth-century American craft traditions and educational reform. Recognizing the importance of diagrammatic techniques and strategies to American artists on both sides of the abstraction-figuration divide may help to shift the terms of this polarizing debate.
The question of how best to train young artists acquired its urgency in the United States at the same moment that the emphasis in American factories was on increasing industrial output through the rationalization of the processes of production. Taylorism, the system of time management originated in the late-nineteenth century in the United States by Frederick Winslow Taylor and publicized in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, encouraged the idea that there was a “science” for the efficient implementation of every job. As a result, many Americans came to believe fixed laws or principles of craft existed that, once stabilized, not only would facilitate the production of art but raise it to a higher level. When expansion of the industrial and commercial art fields brought increased enrollments in the 1890s, academic schools such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago also turned to abbreviated forms of training.[2] The mechanics of picture-making triumphed over the disciplinary rigors of figure study—at first for those pursuing the emerging design professions where speed of execution was a virtue (illustration and advertising), but ultimately for all students. At the same time, national debate over what was (or what should be) an authentic American art began to coalesce around the primacy of “decoration,” a civic-minded art that contributed to larger, public ensembles (as in a mural that is an integrated part of an architectural program).[3] Driven by this imperative to provide artists with practical tips and short-cuts to more efficient picture-making, many so-called “academic” art schools were, by the turn of the twentieth century, teaching through abstract, reductive principles.
The use of highly technical systems was based, like American techniques of mass production, on a belief in the interchangeability of art’s parts. This suited the aspirations of a country struggling to reconcile dual commitments to democracy and industrial capitalism. Two powerful (if somewhat antithetical) cultural tendencies were converging in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first was the largely practical interdependence of art and industry established in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second was far-reaching in the utopianism of its rhetoric: progressive reformers, reacting to the excesses of capitalist competition, began to focus on art as an arena of social improvement. For these reformers, working to inculcate an elite aesthetic in a mass audience whom they hoped might, as a result, come to better appreciate the application of high art principles to everyday products, the pedagogical diagram was a vehicle for popularizing and diffusing aesthetic ideals. The “diagrammatics” of my title, then, represents the complementary relationship that develops over the first half of the twentieth century between the production of art and its reception—between artists using diagrammatic exemplars and recipes to generate pictures with efficiency and popularizers intent on validating the results for the public by pointing out the underlying (abstract) idealism.
This essay will trace the visual motif of the pedagogical diagram from one of its earliest incarnations in a design manual published by educator Arthur Wesley Dow in 1899 (and admired by Georgia O’Keeffe and others in the circle of modernists associated with the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz), through the emergence of a highly technical variant promoted by illustrator Jay Hambidge in the immediate aftermath of the First World War (adopted with enthusiasm by the realist George Bellows and his friends), to the elaborate metaphysics of spatial design first articulated by Thomas Hart Benton in 1926, part of the artist’s embrace of both abstraction and figuration in his own work. Of course, when the hidden logic of the diagram burst vividly into view in the late 1940s work of Benton’s best-known student, the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, the jig was more than just up. The jig was no longer even recognizable: Pollock’s poured technique would be championed instead as an isolated, original innovation. In conclusion, therefore, I will try to restore to Pollock this aspect of his ambiguous sociability—the links between his breakthrough achievement and the quest for efficiency in design that characterized American art education in the first half of the twentieth-century.
Arthur Dow’s Elastic Advice
Among those taking early advantage of new standards of professionalism in education in the form of a mass-produced primer for design was the progressive educator and champion of an Anglo-Asian aesthetic fusion, Arthur Wesley Dow. A professor at Pratt Institute (a school of design and applied arts in New York’s Brooklyn borough) and later Columbia University Teachers College, Dow’s wildly successful book on design, titled Composition, was first published in 1899. Dow was hugely influential at the turn of the twentieth century, his program at Columbia carrying his ideas across the United States as his students became leaders in the new field of art education. The rhetoric of Dow’s Composition touched both professional design schools (where a bit of artistic idealism was a welcomed change), and also arts academies. For the latter, Dow’s approach represented an answer to repeated complaints of their inability to provide students with “useful” training: it was a long-standing concern among those arguing for more public and democratic forms of art that the academies taught students how but not what to do. Courses in pictorial arrangement, or composition were promoted as the solution to this problem.[4]
Although he chose the elevated term “composition” over the more prosaic “design” as the title of his book, Dow made clear he intended his pedagogy to level hierarchies: “Composition,” he wrote, “is made the basis of all work in drawing, painting, designing, and modeling—of house decoration and industrial arts—of normal courses and of art training for children.”[5] For Dow, decoration wasn’t something “added on,” it was inseparable from expression: he focused on originality and personal choice, encouraging students to explore the “line-idea” of a landscape view by first reducing the visual elements to a few “essential” lines and then varying their relationship according to the dictates of at least three different proportional schemes [figure 1]. This wonderfully elastic advice was aimed not at accuracy of representation, but towards a better understanding of what was pleasing in the arrangement of shapes—the shapes enclosed by the main lines of a subject. The art of composition resided then, for Dow, in a two-dimensional pattern, but not a rigid one. Dow’s line-idea was a pattern determined by the originality of the artist’s choice of an appropriate frame. He embraced design, in other words, as the living, organic force that made representation possible.
Figure 1. Arthur Wesley Dow. “Principles of Composition III” from the book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1899). Reprint Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1916, 25.
Georgia O’Keeffe is perhaps the most celebrated American painter to have generated a modernist vernacular based on these principles. Introduced to Dow’s diagrammatics as a student of Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in 1912, O’Keeffe was fresh from study with Arthur Dow himself at Teachers College when she executed the series of charcoal drawings—including Drawing XIII—that would bring her to the attention of the photographer and impresario of American modernism, Alfred Stieglitz in January 1916 [figure 2]. In the series, O’Keeffe takes Dow’s line-idea to its logical extreme; in Drawing XIII a sinewy arabesque (a motif deeply imprinted in social memory via Art Nouveau) and a jagged flash (or decorative frill?) are bound together by four hoop-like mounds to create the conceptual equivalent of a natural scene. Her bold gesture links Dow’s elastic advice to its historical precedent in the embedded schemata of medieval art, as well as in American craft traditions of patterning and piecework.
Figure 2. Georgia O’Keeffe, Drawing XIII, 1915. Charcoal on Paper, 24 3/8 x 18 ½ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1950 (50.236.2). Image © 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY.
Although a measured and designed approach to abstraction is something of an exception in a career otherwise devoted to lyrical interpretations of identifiable sites and subjects, O’Keeffe’s early experiments exploit the potential Dow had observed for artists to harness their decorative motifs to a vision of nationalist expression. In 1914, the year O’Keeffe enrolled at Teachers College, Dow focused his courses on the “primitive” and linear art of indigenous Americans. Native American art, he wrote, “has a peculiar character—a combination of straight line with restrained curve—a squareness, a round-corneredness, so to speak, giving a sensation of strength combined with easy motion.”[6] Accordingly, when he painted his Enchanted Mesa, a well-known formation located near the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico in 1913, Dow created a cloisonné-like effect by reducing the mesa’s profile to a basic geometry. Neither circle nor square, this blunt angle and curve combination reflected his commitment to the evolution of a new, national style, a project clearly shared by O’Keeffe and the artists Stieglitz championed.
Jay Hambidge’s Whirling Squares
Figure 3. Jay Hambidge. Illustration from Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920, 135.
For the illustrator Jay Hambidge, intuitive approaches to composition were misguided, at best. Instead, Hambidge insisted, there was a scientific basis to design, known and used in classical antiquity, and rediscovered by him. Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry deployed the mathematical theory of proportion known variously as the Logarithmic Spiral, the Golden Section, or the Fibonacci Series, the laws of which, he claimed, were distilled by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks from their observations of the organic growth of shells and the sequence of leaf distribution in plants [figure 3].[7] Symmetry, according to Hambidge, has two aspects: static and dynamic. The first results from the use of regular geometric figures such as squares or equilateral triangles and their subdivisions as the foundation of design. This can be seen in the “decadent” Gothic, Byzantine, Coptic, Celtic, Roman, Assyrian, Persian, Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese traditions (or Dow, though he remains unmentioned by Hambidge). Dynamic symmetry, by contrast, is generated through the repeated (rhythmic, in Hambidge’s terms) application of square root ratios—a process Hambidge referred to as “whirling squares.” The advantage of the dynamic approach is that it provided the artist or designer with an infinite (or at least, incrementally different) number of “patterns” on which to build an embellishment.
The appeal of Dynamic Symmetry was precisely this promise of variety within certitude. Hambidge’s apparently scientific template all but guaranteed the user a harmonious arrangement, even in the case of a complex or multi-figured subject. Dynamic Symmetry meant that representational artworks could be both modern (up-to-the-minute), and ideal (conforming to a timeless standard of beauty). No wonder, then, that it had strong appeal for the realist painters and illustrators we know today as the Ashcan School. Painter George Bellows and his friends were perhaps the first to embrace Hambidge’s theories, which they encountered in informal discourse at the Salmagundi Club in New York around 1915. Bellows’s mentor Robert Henri, who would use Hambidge’s theories as the basis of his own later teaching, even wrote and circulated an unpublished treatise on Dynamic Symmetry that outlined the geometric system for his students in the interim before the appearance of Hambidge’s first book.[8]
Though no doubt the most prominent, Bellows and Henri were by no means the only advocates of Dynamic Symmetry. Beginning in 1916 or 1917, Hambidge gave several lectures at the offices of his Century Magazine employer George Whittle that further stimulated the interest in his doctrines. In a series of lectures on Dynamic Symmetry given in New York during the winter of 1921, Hambidge demonstrated how his system might usefully be applied to furniture design, architectural decoration, page layout, and last, but not least, to the composition of paintings. In response, the British illustrator Maxwell Armfield noted in the magazine International Studio that “Mr. Hambidge’s discovery comes at an opportune moment when the more thoughtful artists are searching for something more stable than mere personal likes and dislikes, upon which to base their practice.”[9] Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by Artists, a slim volume and the basis of posthumous editions including the 1932 Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry, was an homage to those artists who had adopted practices based on Hambidge’s system (the book paired illustrations of paintings and drawings by a variety of artists with detailed descriptions of the methods and formulae used in their construction).[10]
Ultimately, Bellows would describe the study of Dynamic Symmetry as more valuable for artists than the study of anatomy, and his advocacy played an important role in its diffusion. Writing in 1921 in The American Art Student, a nationally-circulated journal, Bellows observed that Dynamic Symmetry “might be called the ‘law of the constructive armature of living things’ and consequently the law of the constructive armature of a work of art, as the artist is trying to give life to space.”[11] He also likened the role of Dynamic Symmetry in composition to his experience of hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski:
At the same time my ears were enjoying the strains of great music, my eyes were enjoying the movements and inspired gesture of its great conductor. Every movement of his hands, every changing expression of his face invoked by the music fitted perfectly into the interpretation of the selection played: he was literally a fine bit of Greek sculpture in motion.
Yet the results achieved with Dynamic Symmetry were rarely as poetic as Bellows’s description would suggest, and many point to his adoption of the method as the start of a long period of academicism in his later work.[12] The stilted quality that derives from an abstract scaffolding built of triangles drawn at right angle to diagonal lines crossing at the picture’s center is a feature of the group portrait, Elinor, Jean, and Anna, 1920—as confirmed by Bellows’s preparatory sketch [figure 4].
Figure 4. George Wesley Bellows. Elinor, Jean and Anna; and Old Lady in Black, circa 1920. Study for painting, pen and black ink over graphite on tracing paper. Sheet: 12 5/16 x 18 13/16 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seth K. Sweetser Fund (31.917). Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Large-scale mural paintings produced in the 1920s also reflect the “efficiency” associated with Dynamic Symmetry, particularly those designed as modernistic decorations for the public spaces of capitalism, including movie theaters, retail stores, hotels, and restaurants. Although an important precursor to the mural programs of the New Deal (which are themselves closely linked with the emergence of abstract expressionism), these commercial paintings are rarely discussed as part of a continuous history in American art.[13] This is a missed opportunity, to say the least, in light of the importance of the decorative mural in discourse around American art and education in the early twentieth-century. A formulaic method of pictorial construction such as Dynamic Symmetry was particularly useful in the production of murals and, in most cases, remained a hidden feature. Not so with modernist John W. Norton’s “Gathering the News, Printing the News, Transporting the News,” an enormous project created for the concourse of the art deco Chicago Daily News complex completed in 1929 [figure 5]. The 180-foot mural wears its dynamic symmetry proudly on its surface, as the very emblem of mechanistic modernity.
Figure 5. John Warner Norton. Gathering the News, Printing the News, Transporting the News, 1929, mural for the concourse of the Chicago Daily News Building, 1928-1929. Holabird & Root, architects. Photograph: Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection, Ryerson & Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #31005.
Tom Benton’s Mechanics
Figure 6. Thomas Hart Benton. Illustrations from “The Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” redrawn from Benton’s pencil sketches by Lloyd Goodrich, published in The Arts, 1926-27. © 2019T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
When the realist painter Thomas Hart Benton published his theory of composition in 1926-1927, he labeled the effort a “Mechanics of Form Organization.” As was typical of the genre, Benton’s essays featured a number of schematic illustrations intended to demonstrate “fundamental mechanical” design principles and to analyze the compositions of certain old master paintings [figure 6]. At the same time, his text outlined the major tenets of a conceptual, diagrammatic structure that the artist was by then employing to secure the formal coherence of his own figurative subjects.[14] However, Benton’s mechanics had little to do with older notions of surface arrangement as articulated by Dow or Hambidge. They were grounded instead in notions of social production and embodied experience: a belief that the body was the engine of design. In their foray into the all-important case of deep space, for example—what was, for Benton, the expressive apotheosis of painting[15]—Benton’s diagrams do more than provide a generative framework for idealized forms of beauty (as with Dow’s two-dimensionally oriented line-idea or Hambidge’s flexible triangles); Benton’s diagrams connect composition with the representation of specific psychological or expressive effects.
Benton argued that all compositional organization is based on a shared experience of embodied movement: “In the ‘feel’ of our own bodies,” he wrote, “in the sight of the bodies of others, in the bodies of animals, in the shapes of growing and moving things, in the forces of nature and in the engines of man, the rhythmic principle of movement and counter-movement is made manifest. But in our own bodies it can be isolated and understood. This mechanical principle which we share with all life can be abstracted and used in constructing and analyzing things which also in their way have life and reality.” The illusion of depth, according to Benton, whether it appeals to the visual sense (through such devices as the overlapping of flat planes) or to the tactile (through perspectival projections of cubic forms), is always a function of analogy—always, in his word, inferred.[16] Human anatomy, Benton insisted, is the basis of that analogy: the characteristic action of muscular movement, with its succession of rippling bulges and recessions organized around a fixed center of bone, for example, is “responsible for much fine compositional work [figure 7].”[17]
Figure 7. Thomas Hart Benton. Page from “The Mechanics of Form Organization, Part IV,” The Arts (February l927): 95, text by Benton, illustration redrawn by Lloyd Goodrich from Benton’s pencil sketch. © 2019 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Historians today recognize in Benton’s work a modernism of complex genealogy.[18] In forging his characteristic style between 1919 and 1928, for example, Benton managed to confirm his modernity by discovering its affinity with a vision of the American past. In his search for an art that would be of his own time and place, Benton reinvented the language of industrialization as an organic “turmoil of rhythmic sequences” pressed into service of the depiction of a rapidly disappearing rural America. In 1928 Benton defended the style of his ambitious new series of representational paintings, The American Historical Epic, as one that embodied his desire to combine the “extensive experience one has of the real world” with the abstract patterns and designs that were his “modern inheritance” [figure 8].[19] Such a technique, Benton explained, allowed him to “handle the modern world” in a style of representational dynamism.[20] In other words, Benton’s doubling of the diagrammatic structure of his pictures—his simultaneous tracking of both surface and depth—meant the representation of bodies in space could also secure the abstract, or two-dimensional integrity of his design.
Figure 8. Installation view of American Historical Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood at Peabody Essex Museum, 2015. © 2019 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo © 2019 Peabody Essex Museum. Photography by Allison White.
No one learned this lesson better than Benton’s student Jackson Pollock. But to demonstrate that convincingly will require an analogy, which will, fittingly in this case, take the form of a diagram. It will also require a bit of a digression.
Jackson Pollock’s Motion Studies
Time had trumped motion in the work of efficiency expert Frederick Taylor, for whom it had been sufficient simply to observe and to analyze the processes of production. Breaking tasks down into their constitutive parts and assigning each an ideal time for its execution, Taylor made no prescriptions as to how (that is, by what motions) a worker was to satisfy the increased demands of a new schedule (he simply dismissed anything less than ideal performance as “soldiering”—his term for intentional malingering or laziness). But concerned Taylorites moved in the 1920s to redress the absence of direct demonstration in their founder’s system. For Taylor, who understood human efficiency as analogous with that of a machine, it was enough to link the analysis of work with ideal timings. The problem for Taylor’s followers and rivals, notably the married couple, contracting engineer Frank B. Gilbreth and psychologist Lillian M. Gilbreth, was that the determination of the most efficient motion remained subject to interpretation—it was more a matter of art than of science.
The Gilbreths devoted themselves to the study of motion—literally to the quest to find each task’s perfect execution—by concentrating their attention on talented individuals and the specific tasks at which they excelled. Marshaling the technology of the chronocyclograph to record ideal motion as exactly as possible, the Gilbreths later “fixed” the results of their photographic motion studies in the form of three-dimensional wire models which carefully calibrated movement against axes representing time and space [figure 9]. In theory, these models could be studied by other workers (in this example, the model illustrates successive attempts to perform a specialized task by a retired, though once expert, worker).[21] This codification of what was once individual ingenuity and initiative triumphed in the 1920s over Taylor’s less obviously hierarchical or exacting methods. Spontaneity in labor, once expressive of an individual worker’s particular talents or expertise, became a codifiable commodity, intended, in studies like those of the Gilbreths, to serve as the paradoxical model for successive generations of mannered performance.
Figure 9. Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth. “Movement Translated into Wire Models,” ca. 1912, from Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers on the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness. New York, Sturgis and Watson, 1917.
Because they graph similar kinds of information, it is possible to use the image of human motion visualized by the Gilbreths as an aid to reading a painting like Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 [figure 10]. The painted trace of Pollock’s gestures, like the wire of a Gilbreth model, marks the flattening of time and space across a perspectival grid (a literal grid in the Gilbreth model, an implied one in the case of Pollock’s conventionally rectangular canvas). Moreover, the art and theory of composition, having been remade through a succession of diagrammatic schemes (including Benton’s) into the labor of the artist, makes Pollock’s painting, like a Gilbreth wire model, the site of a phenomenological dislocation of the body of the artist (as worker) by the eye of the beholder. What Pollock gleaned from Benton’s mechanics was an aestheticization of his mentor’s industrial age obsession with perfect movement; a way of conceiving the relationship between the schematic representation of the gesture or pose of the human figure in action and the representation of his own embodied gesture.[22] Yet what we recognize now in the Pollock, courtesy of the Gilbreths, is an allegory of the loss of embodied experience. That successive generations would transform Pollock’s gesture into mannerism was perhaps inevitable.
Figure 10. Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950. Enamel on canvas, 105 x 207 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1957 (57.92). © 2019 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The diagrammatic underpinnings of American art are revealed without irony in the technique of art historical diagramming—the marking of an image with a few bold lines in order to suggest certain “truths” about its internal structure, which was once as common to the teaching of art and to its appreciation in the United States as diagramming a sentence was to a grammar school education. But Pollock’s paintings, in becoming diagrams themselves, perversely resist explanation—or rather, they become “explanation” writ large. In a telling inversion, the introduction to the fourth edition of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, the perennially popular survey of art’s global history, opens with a vivid example: linked, in a single, breathtaking conceptual leap, are two works widely separated in time and space—one a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, Raphael’s School of Athens, the other a contemporary work, Jackson Pollock’s Number 29 of 1950:
It is [a] function of the artist to guide our eyes as we look at a painting, to bring order into what otherwise might be chaos. This order we speak of as the composition, or design, of a painting. Sometimes this order is immediately apparent and we ‘read’ the picture easily; in other instances we may have to search out the order if we are to understand the artist’s message.[23]
The conviction that the rhythmic gestures of Raphael’s figures and the enigmatic arcs of Pollock’s pourings share a special affinity is reinforced visually, in no uncertain terms. The Raphael, captioned “A diagrammatic rendering of rhythmical relationships which are one of the unifying factors in the composition of the School of Athens,” boasts an extraordinary overlay—a heavy, black line that loops and swells in dramatic fashion as it makes its way across the painting’s horizontal axis [figure 11]. Although the eloquence of the visual analogy is such that the truth of the comparison surely appeared unassailable at the time, today this unintentionally hilarious attempt to transmute uninhibited gesticulation into an art appreciation lesson is more likely to provoke questions concerning the circumstances of the appropriation (as does the context of the edition’s publication in 1959, the year that the New York School of painting made its triumphal European tour courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art).
Figure 11. Figure 0-22 in Sumner McK. Crosby, et al, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1959, 23.
Yet the textual hiccup (“the composition, or design”) reveals that something more than the aggrandizement of abstract expressionism was at stake. In that still fluid moment, it was possible to imagine several alternatives for the writing of the history of modern art. Was Abstract Expressionism the next logical lockstep in a relentless march towards abstraction that had begun in Europe? Or was it the latest (perhaps nostalgic) iteration of an aesthetic of efficiency, admired grudgingly by Duchamp, and grounded in American industrialism? To believe the former, as the authors in 1959 clearly did, meant that world war had failed to rupture the promise of progress in the twentieth century (an illusion impossible to maintain today); to argue the latter, as I have, requires us to actively rethink the implications of the advent of abstract art, perhaps even in its European context.
Diagrams are highly intentional representations. They pointedly explain, unabashedly instruct. They are in every sense the opposite of the indeterminate, ambiguous form of representation we know as modernist abstraction. Jacques Bertin, writing the first comprehensive Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps in 1967, polarized the practices of abstract painting and the graphic techniques of scientific representation, claiming that the former resist precise explication because of the inherent ambiguities of symbolic language while the latter operate immune to misinterpretation—their elements defined explicitly beforehand.[24] Where the art-historical diagram and its predicate, a diagrammatic art, lie on the continuum between art and science is unclear. An early antecedent, the comparative method of formal analysis introduced into the discipline by late-nineteenth century Swiss-German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (the juxtaposition of images emphasizing stylistic difference), may lay claim to having been a kind of science of art—one that worked towards elimination of the subjective uncertainties of interpretation. But the symbiosis I’m calling diagrammatics reveals an inherent contradiction: the gap between what is supposed to be represented—that is, the self-evident legibility of visual language—and what is represented unwittingly—that is, the lack of any such transparency, the presence of which would, of course, render any diagram merely redundant.
Barbara Jaffee is a historian of modern and American art and design and associate professor emerita at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. Her research and writing focuses on unconventional narratives of the origins and development of modernism in the United States and can be found in various publications, including Art Journal, Design Issues, and Panorama, the online journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Barbara has received grants and awards including from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in visual arts practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before completing a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Chicago in 1999.
[1] According to Nancy Austin, even schools founded specifically to train students for trade and manufacture in actual practice also combined fine arts with their design curricula. Nancy Austin, “Educating American Designers for Industry, 1853-1903,” pp187-206 in Georgia Brady Barnhill, Diana Korzenik, and Caroline F. Sloat, eds., The Cultivation of Artists in Nineteenth-Century America (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1997). Early “art and design” schools that continue in prominence include the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY (founded in 1859 and known informally in its early years as the Cooper Institute), the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (founded in 1876 as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Applied Art), the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (founded in 1877), the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH (founded in 1882 as the Western Reserve School of Design for Women), and the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (founded in 1887).
[2]. See my essay, “Before the New Bauhaus: From Industrial Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago,” Design Issues 25:1 (Winter 2005): 41-62.
[3]. For example, the muralist Will H. Low’s impassioned cry, “The Decorator Works for the World!” in “National Expression in American Art,” The International Monthly, A Magazine of Contemporary Thought 3:2 (March 1901): 231-251.
[4]. See W. H. Low, “The Education of the Artist, Here and Now,” Scribner’s Magazine 25 (June 1899): 766-767.
[5]. Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition, A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers, Ninth Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1916), 5.
[6]. Arthur Wesley Dow, “Designs from Primitive American Motifs,” Teachers College Record (New York: Columbia University, 1915), 32.
[7]. Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920) and The Parthenon and Other Greek Temples: Their Dynamic Symmetry, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924).
[8]. Described by William Innes Homer and Violet Organ in Robert Henri and his Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 189-194.
[9]. Maxwell Armfield and his wife, the writer Constance Smedley, lived and worked in the United States between 1915 and 1922. Together, they ran the department of stage design at University of California Berkeley beginning in 1918. See Armfield’s “Dynamic Symmetry and its Practical Value Today,” International Studio 74 (November, 1921).
[10]. Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by Artists (New York: Brentano’s, 1923) and Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932).
[11]. George Bellows, “What Dynamic Symmetry Means to Me,” The American Art Student 3 (June, 1921): 5-7.
[12]. These qualitative differences have been explored in many studies of Bellows’s work, including Robert Haywood, “George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s: Boxing, Violence, and Male Identity,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2:2 (Spring 1988): 2-15.
[13]. The exception is Francis V. O’Connor, whose The Mural in America: Wall Painting in the United States from Prehistory to the Present, 2010 remains unpublished (formerly available on O’Connor’s website, muralinamerica.com).
[14]. Thomas Hart Benton, “The Mechanics of Form Organization,” Parts I-V. In The Arts, November, 1926: 285-289; December, 1926: 340-342; January, 1927: 43-44; February, 1927: 95-96; March, 1927: 145-148.
[15]. Benton notes that in composition two forms of diagrammatic representation are necessary: one that follows superficial rhythmic relationships and another that translates these patterns into their cubic equivalents.
[16]. In this context, Benton mentions the psychological effects of color—crucial to the organization of form in painting, but as a means rather than an end. Benton, 1927, 44.
[17]. Benton, 1927, 95.
[18]. Denounced by the artist Stuart Davis as fascist in 1935 and pronounced philistine by the art historian Meyer Schapiro in 1938, Benton long was considered representative of an antimodernist tendency in American art. See Meyer Schapiro, “Populist Realism,” Partisan Review 4 (January 1938). The reconsideration began with Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 essay, “The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912-1943,” Artforum 5 (May 1967): 16-23. It now includes Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1974), Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry (Madison, WI: University of WI Press, 1998).
[19]. See Lee Simonson’s criticism in Creative Art 3 (October 1928): 28-32 and Benton’s defense, “My American Epic in Paint,” in Creative Art 3 (December 1928): 31-36.
[20]. Ibid.
[21]. Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers on the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness (New York: Sturgis and Watson, Co., 1917). While it is difficult to imagine their demonstrations worked well in actual practice, the Gilbreths achieved minor celebrity on the basis of personal efficiency—documented in the classic memoir of their parents (and 1950 movie of the same title), Cheaper By the Dozen (New York: Crowell, 1948), authored by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey.
[22]. Francis V. O’Connor first made the point about the impact on Pollock of Benton’s art theory in the May 1967 essay cited above (cf n18). The March 1979 issue of Arts included an extended analysis by Stephen Polcari of both Benton’s essays and their role in the development of Pollock’s style, accompanied by a note penned by Mark Roskill, crediting the initial insight to Robert Goldwater (according to Roskill, Goldwater had referred to the Benton diagrams in unpublished lectures many years before). Rosalind Krauss revived Benton’s diagrams in 1993, as a visual aid to her argument about the unconscious anxieties at the core of Pollock’s painted performances. Most recently, Pepe Karmel has argued in the catalogue produced by the New York Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with their Pollock retrospective, that Pollock transformed the graphic flatness of Benton’s diagrams into an optical flatness through an obsessive layering. See Stephen Polcari, “Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton,” Arts Magazine 53 (March 1979): 120-124. Mark Roskill, “Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, and Cubism: A Note,” Arts Magazine 53 (March 1979): 144. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” pp87-137 in Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998).
[23]. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Sumner McK. Crosby, et al, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959), 23.
[24]. Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).