The "Irascibles"

If a photograph has the ability to immortalize the genesis of an artistic movement and to raise questions or at least to arouse critical thought, then this is unquestionably the case for the famous and historic photographic document that was first published in Life magazine on 15 January, 1951. In this photograph, that was taken by Nina Leen at the behest of the magazine, a group of artists was shown who had co-signed a vigorous protest in the form of an open letter with the date 20 May, 1950[1] directed to the Metropolitan Museum of New York which was preparing an exhibition with the title American Painting Today-1950. We consider it essential to quote this text[2], as it could be seen as a quasi manifesto of an avant garde movement which a little later would be introduced under the name Abstract Expressionism:

The undersigned painters reject the monster national exhibition to be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art next December, and will not submit work in its jury.

The organization of the exhibition and the choice of the juror’s by Francis Henry Taylor and Robert Beverly Hale. the Metropolitan’s Director and Associate Curator' of American Art, does not war-rant any hope that a just proportion of advanced art will be included.

We draw to the attention of those gentlemen the historical fact that. for roughly a hundred year’s. only advanced art has made any consequential contribution to civilization.

Mr. Taylor on more than one occasion has publicly declared his contempt for modernist painting; Mr. Hale. in accepting a jury notoriously hostile to advanced art, takes his place beside Mr. Taylor.

We believe that all the advanced artists of America will join us in our stand.
(Signed) Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell. William Baziotes, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman. Theodoros Stamos, Clyfford Still, Richard Pousette-Dart. Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Bradly Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Hedda Stern, James Brooks, Weldon Kees, Fritz Bultman.

The main point behind this protest are the reasons that brought the 18 co-signers together[3] to reject participation in the "monstrous" national exhibition, as they called it; nevertheless some of them were among the 18,000 receivers of an invitation[4]. They denounced immediately and outspokenly not only the conservative criteria of the members of the jury, the curator and even the director of the institution himself, but also their declared opposition to any form of "advanced" (avant garde) art. Indeed they did not hesitate in maintaining that for a century, only advanced art has made a contribution to civilization.

In contrast to the letter of protest, which was also sent to other artists opposed to the pictorial establishment and the institutions it served, the photo document revealed a closed group of specific individuals which had already, the day after the publication of the letter[5], been the negatively characterized as "The Irascible Eighteen". As Irving Sandler observes, although we cannot speak of a group with a common aesthetic or style, we must nevertheless accept that they chose each other not only because they recognized in their work "radicality, originality and quality" but much more because "they believed that their art was different and better than what other artists at the time were making, including colleagues of theirs in the avant garde whom they left out [...] of the protest."[6]

Theodoros Stamos

The present-day viewer, during his semiological reading of the photograph, will perceive that it truly does have a collective character, but one that does not negate the individuality of those being photographed as they pose before the lens. Without being certain that during the placement of the figures they were ranked according to some hierarchy, one is nonetheless impressed by the privileged position in which the youngest member of the company, Theodoros Stamos, who was only twenty-eight years old, has been placed, in the same front row with two of the members of the hard core of the group, the artist and theoretician Barnett Newman in the center and Mark Rothko on the right. The striking presence of the young American painter of Greek origin, in the historic photograph from 195I, with his non-conformist and practically insolent attitude in the midst of a group of protesting but at the same time nicely dressed artists, unquestionably bears witness to his direct participation right from the beginning in the movement of Abstract Expression that was being fashioned. Nevertheless, if one wants to get away from this self-evident photographic document, which was often called upon by critics and historians of Stamos' work in order to compensate for the gradual withdrawal of the artist from the American forefront and his obvious loss of popularity during the last two decades, then one is faced with an urgent question. How is one to interpret and in the end how is one to come to terms with the inclusion of Theodoros Stamos, despite the great age difference, among the "Irascibles" —in a group without the aesthetic composition of the surrealists, but with a clear awareness of their superiority and the new element they were bringing to art— and the relative obscurity the artist fell into after 1970, along with quite a few of the others in the photograph? The answer to the first part of the question can be sought in Stamos' intense artistic activity itself before 1950 and his entire non-conventional equipment and preparation which converged at the same time and helped form the open and even exploratory character of the group.

It must be stressed that though there was no lack of aesthetic or thematic similarities among the quests of these artists up till that time, particularly their common orientation toward myth and primitivism, the emphasis placed on the expression of the innermost psychism and the collective unconscious, the recognition of common ancestors from the recent past of modern art, their artistic identity, without even a name to that point, was many-sided, multi-dimensional and somewhat contradictory. It was not only the boundaries between abstraction and figurative painting, which are frequently fluid, the unclarified relationship of automatism and unconscious imagemaking, and the obvious gap between the artistic act and its theoretical justification by the creators themselves. Most of the time, the artists resisted[7] the endeavours of the critics and the gallery owners who, already by the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, were undertaking through exhibitions and articles in the daily press and in magazines[8] to present the new movement or school without the participation of the protagonists themselves, to create in their absence a common platform, and to subsequently impose, though not without making important or arbitrary classifications, two easily read abstract directions, "action painting"[9] and the "colour field"[10] or a third composite direction, which has been codified in recent histories of the New York School[11]. Furthermore, the attempts to give a name to the movement that was in the process of formation during the Forties, but above all the discussions centered around the term abstract expressionism during the three day meeting in 1951 at Studio 35 did not take place without strong rejoinders on the part of the artists who viewed with skepticism and mistrust any attempt at reducing open artistic creative thought to a closely knit dogma[12].

If there was any common feeling of identity among the modernist artists in 1950 and if the group of "Irascibles" did have something essential in common, there was no way to define this in the end except negatively, in relationship to what they did not want it to be, and in contradistinction to the prevailing aesthetic and institutional perception which they were battling against. This sense of cohesion that emanated from common purposes, set against "regionalism" and the Social Realism of the Thirties while at the same time being in favour of the formation of a new American pictorial identity, not only this created during this first stage of the movement a feeling of expansiveness and comprehension in the ranks of the painters who felt and behaved like pioneers when dealing with their various artistic realizations, but above all else it allowed for dialogue and aesthetic ferment among them. We could say that from this point of view, the two historical documents, namely the protest letter of 1950 and the photograph of the "Irascibles" that followed, perhaps revealed the most authentic moment in the history of so-called Abstract Expressionism. The multiplicity, the experimentation and the open artistic act were not sacrificed to a one-dimensional, stereotyped and exclusive schema, in the name of which others would later enclose themselves, while others would be marginalized or dismissed.