Clement Greenberg? Robert M. Coates? Jane Holtz Kay? Pablo Picasso? Gertrude Stein? Tom Wolfe?
Question for Quote Investigator: Modern art evokes divergent reactions. One unhappy critic described three paintings by Jackson Pollock as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless”. However, an influential critic who championed Pollock stated:
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
Would you please help me identify these critics and find citations for these remarks?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1945 art critic Clement Greenberg published an essay in “The Nation” which praised contemporary artist Jackson Pollock as “the strongest painter of his generation”. Greenberg celebrated courageous artists. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
There has been a certain amount of self-deception in School of Paris art since the exit of cubism. In Pollock there is absolutely none, and he is not afraid to look ugly—all profoundly original art looks ugly at first. Those who find his oils overpowering are advised to approach him through his gouaches, which in trying less to wring every possible ounce of intensity from every square inch of surface achieve greater clarity and are less suffocatingly packed than the oils.
In 1948 “The New Yorker” magazine published a piece by art critic Robert M. Coates who described the paintings of Pollock as large blobs of color laced with fine lines. Coates contended that the pictures contained no recognizable symbols:2
Such a style has its dangers, for the threads of communication between artist and spectator are so very tenuous that the utmost attention is required to get the message through. There are times when communications break down entirely, and, with the best will in the world, I can say of such pieces as “Lucifer,” “Reflection of the Big Dipper,” and “Cathedral” only that they seem mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless.
Coates’s judgement of Pollock was not uniformly negative. He also stated:
. . . both “Magic Lantern” and the larger “Enchanted Forest” have a good deal of poetic suggestion about them.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
The notion that pioneering artworks are initially considered to be ugly was voiced several years earlier. Art collector Gertrude Stein credited this opinion to Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in 1933:3
Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.
Clement Greenberg’s opinion from 1945 was quite memorable. The critic Jane Holtz Kay referred to a slightly altered version in a 1973 essay published in “The Christian Science Monitor”. The word “at” was deleted:4
In the 1940’s, critic Clement Greenberg made a clarion statement that was relevant to all 20th-century art criticism. “Jackson Pollock,” he said, “is not afraid to look ugly — all profoundly original art looks ugly first.”
In 1975 U.S. journalist and social satirist Tom Wolfe published “The Painted Word” which mocked modern art criticism:5
With each new article Greenberg edged Pollock’s status a little higher, from “among the strongest” American abstract artists ever to “the strongest painter of his generation” in America to “the most powerful painter in contemporary America” to a neck-and-neck competition with John Marin (John Marin!) for the title of “the greatest American painter of the twentieth century.”
To the few remaining dissidents, Uptown or Downtown, who still pulled long faces and said Pollock’s work looked terribly “muddy” or “chaotic” or simply “ugly,” Greenberg had a marvelous comeback: but of course!—“all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”
In September 1975 editor and curator Judith Goldman discussed Wolfe’s book in the journal “ARTnews”:6
Two statements that earn Wolfe’s contempt are Greenberg’s “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first” and Steinberg’s “Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed.” These lines are props in The Painted Word’s imaginary battle of art critics.
In 1981 “The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations” contained the following entry:7
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
Clement Greenberg
In conclusion, art critic Clement Greenberg deserves credit for his 1945 insight into the reflexive resistance to novelty: “all profoundly original art looks ugly at first”. Also, art critic Robert M. Coates deserves credit for this 1948 barb aimed at Pollock’s paintings which reduced them to “mere unorganized explosions of random energy”.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Steven Strogatz whose inquiry about the 1933 quotation attributed to Pablo Picasso inspired QI to examine the thematically related remark made by Clement Greenberg.
Image Notes: Public domain blue-green painting using the drip style. The image has been resized and cropped.
- 1945 April 7, The Nation, Art by Clement Greenberg, Start Page 396, Quote Page 397, Column 2, The Nation Associates, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1948 January 17, The New Yorker, The Art Galleries: Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock by Robert M. Coates, Start Page 56, Quote Page 57, Column 1, Published by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc., New York. (Online New Yorker archive of digital scans) ↩︎
- 1933, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, Chapter 2: My Arrival in Paris, Quote Page 28, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1973 October 27, The Christian Science Monitor, In a class by itself by Jane Holtz Kay, Quote Page 17, Column 1, Boston, Massachusetts. (ProQuest) ↩︎
- 1975, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, Chapter 4: Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat, Quote Page 64, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1975 September, ARTnews, Volume 74, Number 7, Who’s afraid of Tom Wolfe? by Judith Goldman, Start Page 64, Quote Page 67, Column 1, ARTnews Associates, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1981, The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, Edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry, Section: Art and the Artist, Quote Page 28, Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto. (Verified with scans) ↩︎