The Photo League (1936–1951)

The Photo League was a cooperative of photographers in New York united by shared social and creative motivations. The group’s members included Morris Engel, Sid Grossman, Helen Levitt, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, and Weegee. Other figures who supported the group but were not members included Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, and Beaumont Newhall. The League was active from 1936 to 1951, and held regular meetings throughout its duration, as well as events, lectures, and symposia to promote education in photography skills and techniques. The group maintained darkroom facilities and an exhibition space in New York, initially on 21st Street and later on 10th Street. Combining social and political efficacy with a dedication to aesthetic standards in an environment that stressed creative collaboration, members of the Photo League produced imagery that contributed to the development of documentary practice within the greater creative and cultural ferment of the 1930s. On December 4, 1942, the Photo League was included on the list of "subversive" organizations submitted by U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark to President Harry S. Truman. The League denied the charges in a press release, and further challenged their blacklisting in a telegram sent directly to Attorney General Clark. Under this pressure, they ceased activity in 1951.

Kline, Franz (1910–1962)

A prominent member of the Abstract Expressionists, Franz Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In high school he drew cartoons and, after attending Boston University, studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Heatherly Art School in London. Kline became a regular at the Cedar Tavern, and for most of the 1940s painted urban and industrial spaces with boldly drawn architectural elements. These paintings later developed into the signature black and white canvases for which he is best known. The bold swaths of black pigment relate to one another as steel beams and bridge spans might, while the interstitial gaps are thickly painted and blended along the edges of directional motifs eliminating any illusion of depth, as in Painting Number 2 (1954) at the Museum of Modern Art. Kline’s canvases, canonized as "action painting" by Harold Rosenberg, were harbingers of individualism and vitality in American art exhibitions sent abroad during the Cold War. Kline died suddenly in 1962 just as color begun to reappear in his palette. His blustery abstractions inspired a large following, including Brice Marden, the sculptor Mark di Suvero and photographer Aaron Siskind.

Thrown Down Glyphs

The ‘modest’ aesthetic imagined by Olson and his contemporaries, critical of abstract or scientific reason, is seen in the fourth chapter to have found expression in a second major formal development. The chapter begins by asking why pictographic or ideographic writing emerged so strongly in American visual art between 1943 and 1951. Turning to the ‘sign which refuses to signify’ (Ad Reinhardt), American artists—including Olson, Pollock, Gottlieb, Lee Krasner, and the photographer Aaron Siskind—are shown to have found a language which reflected their critique of both scientific reason and those political languages (especially Marxism) which had failed to account for historical contingency. The avant-garde is seen to have valued the glyph, pictogram, or ideograph for its ‘uncertainty’; a major theme in Olson’s work of the period.