American Abstract Artists
[8] In late 1935 and early 1936 a small group of artists, who would become founding members of AAA, had sporadic informal meetings in their studios about exhibiting abstract art.
This culminated in November 1936 at a larger meeting in Harry Holtzman's loft where he was seeking support for an abstract artist cooperative and workshop but the idea was not accepted among the attendees.
[16] Other 1930s Depression Era artist run organizations included AAA members: Sculptors Guild (Louise Bourgeois, Ibram Lassaw, José Ruiz de Rivera, Louis Schanker, Wilfred Zogbaum[22]), The Ten also known as The Ten Whitney Dissenters (Ilya Bolotowsky, Louis Schanker,[23] Karl Knaths, Ralph Rosenberg[18]), Artists Union (Byron Browne,[24] Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, Ibram Lassaw, Michael Loew[25]) and American Artists' Congress (Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne, Werner Drewes, Carl Holty, Irene Rice Pereira[26]).
[15] The majority of AAA worked in either a Cubist inspired idiom, a geometric style with biomorphic forms or Neoplasticism, and the group officially rejected Expressionism and Surrealism.
[32] Over the next few years Morris and his wife Suzy Frelinghuysen, who joined AAA, collected artwork by 25 members of the American Abstract Artists group.
The most influential critics dismissed American abstract art as too European and therefore "un-American", a term that meant suspected of having communist ties.
[39][40] AAA founders Balcomb and Gertrude Greene were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art within the anti-Stalinist left.
[55] The argument of class struggle was that the government should eliminate the dependence of American artists (the worker or proletariat) from the caprice of private patronage (the bourgeoisie).
[56] In an Art Front review of AAA's first exhibit Jacob Kainen wrote that dictates of the market conspired against abstract artists in the United States and it is natural they band together in mutual defense.
[62] At the time the Museum of Modern Art also had a policy of featuring European abstraction while endorsing American regionalism and scene painting.
"[64] However, out of the fifty-two AAA members listed on the broadside distributed at the MoMA protest, eighteen had exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art including George L.K.
The ensuing years would see a growing public appreciation for abstract art until, in 1939, the critic made an about-face and lauded Picasso for his "unrivaled inventiveness".
The pamphlet applauded Henry McBride of the New York Sun and Robert Coates of The New Yorker for their critical efforts regarding abstract art.
[68] Controversy persisted and in a 1979 New York Times exhibition review Hilton Kramer asserted that "The truth is, a group like the American Abstract Artists no longer has any serious function to perform, and its continued existence is little more than an act of nostalgia...
"[69]The picketing, broadside and brochure in 1940 were a game of positioning the organization in opposition to an art institution and established critics as part of a self-conscious process to legitimizing an avant-garde.
[75][76] During the 1920s and 1930s many European artist immigrants settled in New York and joined AAA: Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Giorgio Cavallon, Fritz Glarner, Ibram Lassaw, Fernand Léger, László Moholy-Nagy, and Piet Mondrian and Hans Richter.
Though some members of American Abstract Artists rose to fame and international recognition in the following decades, the membership represented the interwar generation with all the doubts and inner turmoil of that time.
[83] As an egalitarian artist run organization, AAA was serious about its professional goal of gaining acceptance of abstraction but applied minimal standards in selecting applicants based on the quality of their work for membership.
[89][90][91] In a 2019 interview AAA affirmed that the key to its future is diversity, equity and inclusion in demographics, artistic disciplines and expanding to other regions outside of New York City.
[15] Early members included Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, David Smith,[94][95][96][97] John Ferren, I.
The collaboration aimed at sharing, editing and exhibiting new historical materials related and connected to the world of abstract art of the seminal period of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe and in the USA.
[111] At one early meeting George McNeil was tasked with making a list of forty present and future members so the group could procure all four floors of the Municipal Art Gallery in New York City to exhibit.
[10] Rosalind Bengelsdorf's account lists 9 founders detailed as a "small group of abstract artists who met at Ibram Lassaw's studio at 232 Wooster Street, New York, early in 1936.
The gathering consisted roughly of Byron Browne, Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, Harry Holtzman, George McNeil, Albert Swiden, Lassaw, Burgoyne Diller, and myself.
"[120] The AAA General Prospectus from January 29, 1937 lists 28 artists: "The present membership (January, 1937) of American Abstract Artists consists of the following names: George McNeil, Jeanne Carles, A. N. Christie, C. R. Holty, Harry Holtzman, Marie Kennedy, Ray Kaiser, W. M. Zogbaum, Ibram Lassaw, Gertrude Peter Greene, Byron Browne, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, George L. K. Morris, Vaclav Vyrlacil, Paul Kelpe, Balcomb Greene, R. D. Turnbull, Frederick J. Whiteman, John Opper, Albert Swinden, lIya Bolotowsky, George Cavallon, Leo Lances, Alice Mason, Esphyr Slobodkina, Werner Drewes, Richard Taylor, Josef Albers.
[124] In a review in The New Yorker of the 1939 Annual Exhibit, Robert Coates said "the trend of the group is toward the purest of 'pure' abstraction, in which all recognizable symbols are abandoned in favor of strict geometric form.
[126] In a Smithsonian Archives of American Art interview Ad Reinhardt discusses censorship in American Abstract Artists exhibits during the late 1930s when some members insisted on strict purity and urged that painters like Irene Rice Pereira, Louis Schanker and Byron Browne not be shown in the AAA exhibitions describing their shapes as gimmickry.
He was asked to resign his membership because his abstract shapes, inspired by Wassily Kandinsky and El Lissitzky, appeared to float illusionistically in three-dimensional space making his paintings too representational for the AAA.
[131][132][133] During the 1940s some members left the cooperative, including founders Rosalind Bengelsdorf and Ray Kaiser, because the organization abandoned a broad interpretation of abstraction for strict geometry.
[138][139][140] The American Abstract Artists worked to develop a utopian vision of universal harmony using geometry and nonobjective art based on order and stability, free from references to the real world.
