Fig. 1 Mathieu, Battle of the Bouvines

On April 25, 1954, Filmmaker Robert Descharnes filmed Georges Mathieu at the Paris Salon de Mai painting Battle of the Bouvines. This huge canvas was meant to re-enact in paint the drama of a thirteenth-century battle in which Mathieu de Montmorency, one of Mathieu's ancestors, had played a decisive part. An article entitled "Mathieu paints a picture" by Michel Tapié appeared in ARTnews in early February 1955, illustrated with still photographs from Descharnes's film. This article, in which Tapié proselytizes for Mathieu, drew swift and negative criticism from American Abstract Expressionists. In an ARTnews "Letter to the Editor" of Feb. 22, 1955, Barnett Newman asks sarcastically, "are there any readers of ARTnews who wish to join me in sending a pair of sterling silver roller skates, suitably engraved, to Georges Mathieu so that he may redo his I WAS THERE dance routine of the Battle of Bouvines into a big Blitzkrieg production?" Newman goes on to castigate Mathieu for orchestrating a historical farce in paint, which he calls a "burlesque of immediacy." To Newman, Mathieu's painting was "clumsy and provincial work" that was nonetheless sure to "have the Rockefellers, the Burdens, the Harry Guggenheims, and the Jock Whitneys on their knees in admiration." The critical ire of Newman and other American painters like Clyfford Still served to stigmatize Mathieu's painting as shallow and self-promotional, and his artistic persona as silly, theatrical, and foppishly aristocratic. Such a polemic served to turn public opinion against Mathieu in the United States which, following World War II, was largely committed to asserting the cultural hegemony of Abstract Expressionism.¹ Subsequent art-historical analysis of Mathieu largely centers on Mathieu's paintings; I want to examine how he was photographed.

This essay will attempt to reconstruct the art production of Georges Mathieu in the early to mid-1950s according to the influences of the public identities of Jackson Pollock and Salvador Dali. These two sources, and their appearance in popular magazines such a s Life, made an impression on Mathieu, who in turn had an impact upon emerging performance art in Europe. The photographic conditions of Pollock and Dali's artistic personae, and their mythologization (in the Barthesian sense of myth) by the mass media, involves a shift in the representation of artists in photographs following World War II, and in the manifestation through photographs of the "personality of the artist" as both actor and mythmaker.

The first part of this essay will sketch the representation of artists in photographs since the turn of the century through a close reading of relevant examples. A discussion of the construction of Pollock's photographic persona by Hans Namuth will follow, involving diverse sources such as Native American rituals, psychoanalysis, phenomenological thinking, and photographs of Picasso that aided in the personification of the "action painter" Pollock through photographs. Salvador Dali's appearances in Life, which involved issues of public promotion, performance, and display, also had an influence upon Mathieu. The impact of Dali's and Pollock's photographic promotion upon Mathieu constituted an important historical shift involving the representation of artists in photographs, and heralded a fundamental change in the way artists considered their own production and its documentation and promotion through photographs. Such a change signaled a move toward a consideration of the art object as a phenomenological record of movement rather than an a priori form with an interior "essence." The indexical quality of photography became a vital component in the production of the artist's persona by capturing the physical trace of the artist, arresting his movement.² Not only does Mathieu's production provide a link from the "action painting" of Pollock and the self-promotial bravado of Dali, it incorporates issues of politics and national identity as well. Michel Tapié proselytized for Mathieu much in the same way as Clement Greenberg did for Pollock, involving issues of politics and a nationalist identification with a mythic hero.

A discussion of Dali, Pollock, and Mathieu must deal with the central role of photography and the dissemination of photographic images that captured the performativity of artistic production, and its circulation into mass culture in the personae of the artist-as-mythmaker. Most often the photographs took the form of the documentary photograph at the level of reception. Public consumption of documentary photography was at a new level of cultural centrality brought about by popular "photo-story" magazines, with Life leading the way; in many ways, Life represented the niche television would later fill during the Viet Nam War. Life's documentary photographs were the primary vehicle for public consumption of images of the war, and contained an inherent analogical truth-value that was manipulated by American wartime propaganda. The subject matter of documentary photographs and their captions were orchestrated by the photographers to constitute a particular theme, subject to the magazine's and the government's approval, but the public was not made aware of such artifice. Thus a certain amount of deception was involved, playing upon the belief of the public in the truth-value of the documentary photograph.

Fig. 2 Edward Steichen, August Rodin, 1901

To understand how Mathieu's artwork is influenced by the photographs of Pollock and Dali, we must first trace how artists had been represented in photographs earlier in the century. Analyzing such a lineage will establish certain tendencies which influenced the decisions of the photographers of Dali and Pollock, and the way in which these photographs may be read. Edward Steichen's 1901 photograph of Rodin (figure 2) is an exemplar of how artists were depicted in the first decades of the 20th century, and set the
unofficial standard for subsequent photographs of artists. Steichen captures the French sculptor in a moment of cogito ergo sum: Rodin is presented in his studio as the artist/philosopher, "le penseur," who cogitates before he creates. The awareness of sculpture as an a priori form is inherent in Rodin's decision-making; such form need only be liberated from the mass of stone or breathed life from out of the vaporous void which constitutes the space of the studio--a space of quasi-divine creation given a physical corollary by the analogical nature of the photograph. The vapor in Steichen's photograph of Rodin's studio may be said to represent the physical manifestation of Rodin's artistic genius, given physical substance by light, which draws a link between Rodin's thought, the studio space, and the sculpture he has created.

Alexander Liberman was inspired by Steichen's photograph of Rodin, and contributed to what was a growing genre of "artist photographs." Lieberman photographed Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Giacometti, among others. Many of Lieberman's photographs were published in Vogue and ARTnews in the late 1940s and 50s together with accompanying essays on the artists and their work.³ The photograph of Giacometti entitled Concentration (Alberto Giacometti in his Studio) of c. 1951 continues in the tradition of Steichen's Rodin in capturing the artist as the isolated male genius. Liberman's photograph may be said to embody the visual equivalent of Jean-Paul Sartre's characterization of Giacometti in "The Search for the Absolute," written in 1948. Sartre considered Giacometti to be a sculptor who worked "outside of history."

What must be understood is that these figures, who are wholly and all at once what they are, do not permit one to study them. As soon as I see them, they spring into my visual field as an idea before my mind; the idea alone is at one stroke all that it is... the original movement of creation, that movement without duration, without parts, and so well imaged by these long, gracile limbs, traverses their Greco-like bodies, and raises them toward heaven. I recognize in them, more clearly in an athlete of Praxiteles, the figure of man, the real beginning and absolute source of gesture [my italics]. Giacometti has been able to give this matter the only truly human unity: the unity of the Act.⁴

For Sartre, Giacometti's sculpture embodied the existentialist, transcendental, unitary gesture. Giacometti's "gesture," his additive process, signifies for Sartre the appearance of a phenomenological activity of movement without duration" which creates the "idea" of man in sculpture. Sartre considers Giacometti's work to be equivalent to the signification of man in art for the first time, much like the lines which compose stick figures of cave paintings. The index, the physical trace of the artist's hand, is a vehicle for the revelation of the "language" of art which cannot be known a priori, only experienced in a phenomenological sense.

Giacometti, like Steichen's Rodin, sits in shadowy profile, his head in his left hand, in a moment of what appears to be intense concentration. We notice his sculptures and studio objects readily enough, but what really holds our attention are the scrawlings and scratches on the wall behind him. These indexical marks serve as a physical corollary to the unitary gesture Sartre speaks of, and provide a visual analogy to Sartre's studio as a "cave" where "primitive" scrawlings adorn the walls.⁵ Liberman's photograph of Giacometti does not create an ethereal, mystic atmosphere like Steichen's photograph of Rodin. Conversely, physical traces of Giacometti's "existential anguish" within the clearly articulated space of the studio are focused upon.⁶ But the conception of the artist as an isolated genius remained the same, and would affect how the Abstract Expressionists were photographed.

Fig. 3 Gjon Mili, Picasso's Space Drawing

The collaboration between Namuth and Pollock has its roots in Namuth's knowledge of earlier projects involving Picasso. Namuth knew about Paul Haesaert's film "Visite á Picasso," shot in 1949 and released in spring 1950, in which Picasso paints on a vertical pane of glass, behind which the camera recorded the master in action.⁷ Pollock would probably not have seen illustrations from Haesaert's film, but he certainly would have seen the next best thing: Picasso's Space Drawings photographed by Gjon Mili and not
only widely published in 1950 but exhibited as well at The Museum of Modern Art. (figure 3).⁸ Mili's photograph of Picasso captures him drawing in space with a flashlight what appears to be a bull or a minotaur. The long exposure arrests Picasso's motions as one continuous, flowing line of light. The vertical, two-dimensional plane of the photograph, then, becomes the plane of the canvas. Picasso wears nothing but shorts and sandals, and has finished his gesticulations with the flashlight in a balanced, athletic crouch that emphasizes his physical agility. The light drawing, arrested for our eye by the long exposure, only exists by the intersection of photography, just as the gait of a running horse was proven by Muybridge to have all four hooves off of the ground simultaneously--information about movement unavailable to the naked eye. Movement through space and the duration of this movement are arrested and coded by the photograph. The phenomenological articulation of Picasso's movements become the sum of their parts; for Namuth's photographs of Pollock, this meant that the creation of art rests upon the articulation of that movement within the space of the studio frozen by the camera and reproduced in popular magazines like film stills.

Fig. 4 Hans Namuth, Pollock in his studio, 1950

Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock (figure 4) were taken in the summer and early fall of 1950 in Pollock's studio with the intention of mythologizing the already-infamous painter. Pollock had first appeared in a magazine in December 1947 when Time reported the opinion of Clement Greenberg, critic for The Nation, that Pollock was one of the three best American artists.⁹ Pollock appeared in Vogue in 1948, and twice in Life. In 1949, Life asked its readers, "Jackson Pollock: Is he the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?"¹⁰ The photographs and text seemed to indicate that the answer was "yes."¹¹ During this period, Namuth made over 500 photographs, a black and white movie, and a color movie (with Paul Falkenberg), all of Pollock at work. These photographs and films are pivotal to reckoning Pollock as a mythical figure.¹² Namuth's photographs of Pollock moving around the canvas on the floor of his studio served to confirm the persona of Pollock, which had been developed by numerous articles and photographs appearing in the mass media.¹³ Pollock sought non-traditional artistic sources such as Native American shamans to engage the space "between the easel and the mural,"¹⁴ but still was acutely aware of his position within the larger development of avant-garde painting, which had been abstracted into model form by Alfred Barr in 1936.¹⁵ In 1947, Pollock stated that "I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely."¹⁶ Due to the influx of influential European surrealists before or during the war, American artists like Pollock were forced to reconsider their approaches to art production. Disenchantment with political strife in Europe and a rejection of what was considered "decadent" classical aesthetic sources led both the Surrealists and American artists to search for non-western sources for their inspiration. The Surrealists's belief in the use of dreams, metamorphosis, and myth as subject matter for art radically altered the American artists's perception of what their own role as an artist should be. Barnett Newman looked at the art of Oceania and the pre-Columbian Americas, Pollock at Native American sand painting and shamanic ritual dance. Adolph Gottlieb examined prehistoric petroglyphs, and Mark Tobey was deeply influenced by Bahai and Zen. Such sources were romanticized by American artists to a degree; however, the tropes of such non-Western sources were not utilized to draw attention to these cultures, but to engage their "primitive power" as a means of circumventing the outmoded stylistic conventions of European art.

Through the Surrealists, Pollock developed an acute interest in psychoanalysis. In 1939, Pollock began four years of psychotherapy that would aid him in an identification with the growing interest in the themes of Jungian thought. Pollock identified with Jung's notion of a "collective unconscious" that all human beings share at a level of archetypal recognition.¹⁷ Jung's postulation of a "phenomenology of the self" fused tenets of psychoanalysis and phenomenology into a construction of the "self" (analogous the to the Freudian ego) whose unconscious was regulated by internal and external stimuli, creating a "field" of experience and a response to stimuli of which the conscious ego is but one part.¹⁸ The other part is an "extra-conscious" psyche whose "contents are impersonal and collective...form[ing]...an omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical quality or substrate of the psyche per se."¹⁹ For Pollock, Jung's thought seemed homologous with the mythic subject matter of American Indian ritual, which involved a process of engaging the tangible world to express the universal or mythological. Such a process for Pollock involved a fundamental reorientation of the role of the artist from that of the thinker to that of the "act-or."

Harold Rosenberg, for example, described this meaning as the transcription of an artist's inner emotions by means of a pictorial or sculptural "act." "A painting that is an act," Rosenberg wrote, "is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a moment in the inadulterated mixture of his life."²⁰ Or, again, "Art...comes back into painting by way of psychology. As Wallace Stevens says of poetry, it is a process of the personality of the poet."²¹ Rosalind Krauss mentions that

In speaking this way, Rosenberg is equating the painting itself with the physical body of the artist who made it. Just as the artist is made up of a physiognomic exterior and an inner psychological space, the painting consists of a material surface and an interior which opens illusionistically behind that surface. This analogy between the psychological interior of the artist and the illusionistic interior of the picture makes it possible to see the pictorial object as a metaphor for human emotions that well up from the depths of those two parallel inner spaces.²²

For Rosenberg, the picture surface as a locus of gestural marks demanded that one look at it as a map on to which one could read the complexity of the artist's psychological condition--a physical transcription of the artist's inner self.²³ Rosenberg's seminal article re-affirmed Steichen's encoding of the image of the artist as an isolated genius, but not as "le penseur," the inert and bearded demiurge. Rosenberg's "action painter" moved through his work and through the world, linking the body of the painter and his genius with the artwork itself. Thus the "inner life" of the painting is a physical register of the phenomenal experience of the painter, and a tangible articulation of his psychological, existential necessity.

Mathieu's work of the early 1950s may be said to literalize Rosenberg's "Action Painters" mantra. Realizing the importance of Namuth's photographs, Mathieu was the first artist to stage live action painting as the subject of photography, and as a performance before a viewing public. On January 19, 1952, he had his picture taken in his own studio while painting Hommage au Marichal de Turenne, a canvas that he consigned to his "Zen" period, and one loosely in the style of the German gestural painter Hans Hartung, whose work he respected. The conceptualization of painting a picture for the camera clearly emerged from Mathieu's deep admiration for Pollock, whom he considered the greatest living painter. Through the example of Pollock, Mathieu realized the potential connection between painting, photography, performance, and the public.²⁴ The documentary nature of the photograph, given world attention by magazines like Life, carried the content of painting and the process of performance to the public. Mathieu was the first to synthesize this connection.²⁵

But Mathieu's Battle of the Bouvines(figure 1) cannot be seen only to operate solely within the dialectic of Pollock's working method and Rosenberg's action painting proclamation. His work must be understood within the context of his relationship with Dali as well. Mathieu and Dali were in close correspondence in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and it certainly was not lost on Mathieu that Dali had appeared in Life magazine twice before Pollock. The Life articles contributed greatly to Dali's international reputation as a Surrealist performer whose life and art were largely inseparable. Salvador Dali's first appearance in Life was in January of 1941 (figure 6), and presented a "lighthearted" piece, a bit of escapist amusement from the overbearing presence of World War II photographs. In "Life Calls on Salvador Dali," Dali is presented as the "eccentric" houseguest of wealthy Virginia matron Mrs. Phelps Crosby at her mansion, Hampton Manor, designed by Thomas Jefferson (figure 7). Dali is completely de-politicized in the text and photographs of the article; there is no mention of him as an exile forced to flee Europe, nor of the similar fate of many artists before or during the war. Dali is described in terms of comforting, harmless, and solid American values, like "he's nuts about his wife," and is "enchanting" to his host, the eccentric European aristocrat with the wild moustache. Despite the fact that Dali is boarding with an aristocratic woman and behaves like a wealthy man who has time to do wacky things like putting manikins in ponds, he is still presented as a "man of the people"; he is photographed at the local store in De Jarette, VA sitting around the coal stove and talking to the locals. The caption accompanying the photograph of Dali sitting in the store conversing with De Jarette citizens reads: "In the general store at De Jarnette, Dali loafs by the stove and leers at his wife while Mrs. Crosby does her daily marketing. Small, drab, and populated mostly by Negroes, De Jarnette attracts Dali daily. He likes to look at the cans in the store, to drink Cokes, and to converse with the bewildered but fascinated citizens." Thus Dali's eccentric, aristocratic behavior is presented as accessible to the common man, and by inference to the readership of Life. Dali's surreal life is presented as harmless and cozy, a down-home, folksy Surrealism designed to appeal to the readers of Life.

Fig. 5 Photograph of Salvador Dali from Life Magazine

The second article, which appeared in Life in September of 1945 (figure 5), was concurrent with the victory of the Allies in Europe. The issue which included Dali's article, fortunately for him, was perhaps Life's most popular issue, containing V-E Day coverage, and the famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in the celebration at Times Square. News and images of the war dominated the issue, and tropes of the "support our boys overseas" variety were dominant in product advertisements. Dali's self-promotional theatricality is accentuated by columnist Winthrop Sargeant. The article's title clearly indicates its content: "Dali: An excitable Spanish artist, now scorned by his fellow surrealists, has succeeded in making deliberate lunacy a paying proposition." ²⁶ Sargeant's description of Dali's performative persona often sounds like British huckster Robin Leach's shills for "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" of early 1990s American TV: "Dali...is not only a surrealist in paint; he has acted the part of a surrealist in real life [my italics] to a point that, at times, seems indistinguishable from actual insanity. The act [my italics] has been amazingly profitable."²⁷ Sargeant goes on to situate Dali's biography within a sketchy historical account of the emergence of surrealism within modernism, in tune with Alfred Barr's linear model of 1936. Dali's successful blurring of the boundaries between art, commerce, performance, and life would have an impact upon Mathieu.

In 1954, Dali cabled Mathieu from New York: "need to continue paranoiac-critical study of Vermeer's Lacemaker before live rhinoceros stop Arriving Paris next week."²⁸ Dali explains that his interest in the rhinoceros at this point was not accidental. Of all living animals with horns, only that of the rhinoceros is constructed as a perfect logarithmic spiral. The spiral was a mystical, archetypal form which was engaged by cultures outside of European cultural history. Dali's search for sources which subverted the classical tradition of western art due to the trauma of World War II and the atom bomb led him to Spanish mysticism as well.²⁹ Mathieu's adoption of the persona of Mathieu de Montmorency for the Battle of the Bouvines parallels Dali's search for non-classical sources. Robert Descharnes, who filmed Mathieu painting, provides another link to Dali: also in 1954 he filmed Dali's reconstitution of The Lacemaker at the Vincennes Zoo in front of a rhinoceros named Frangois.³⁰

The criticism of Clement Greenberg endowed the work of Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists with a political agenda. Krauss aptly characterizes Greenberg's critical position: "Greenberg's entire critical vocabulary was that of rivalry and of American artists besting the Europeans, outwitting them in the battle for history."³¹ In the March 1948 Partisan Review, Greenberg asserted the shift of "the main premises of Western Art" from Europe to the United States.³² Greenberg's belief was that The New York School had "wrested the torch of high culture" from an enfeebled, faction-ridden Paris which was threatened internally and externally by communism.³³ Tapié, keen to rival Greenberg's apparently strong critical position, sought to be the same vigorous polemicist for European painters that Greenberg was for the American Abstract Expressionists. Tapié employed the lofty, mystical rhetoric reminiscent of Bruno Taut, Paul Scheerbart and the German Expressionists:

Everything has been called into question once more since that cascade of revolution going from Impressionism to Dada and Surrealism: we are beginning to realize what that means, and at which point this total review has caused the epoch in which we live to be equally thrilling. After centuries, if not a millennium, during which conditions evolved so slowly that in the normal rhythm of life, chance could not be perceived, and in which artistic problems (even ethic-aesthetic ones) were safe...an entire system of certainty has collapsed. ³⁴

Tapié engages the tropes of Abstract Expressionist promotion (existentialism, masculinity, myth) to situate Mathieu's production. Tapié describes the painting of the Battle of the Bouvines as one "in which [Mathieu] has been able to gesticulate to paroxysm the quintessence of his inductive myths."³⁵ But Tapié claims that there is an absurdist, neo-dada element to Mathieu's aristocratic persona echoing that of Dali: "Mathieu regards everything as totally absurd, and shows this continually in his behavior, which is characterized by the most sovereign of dandyisms."³⁶ The intention of this absurdity is to willfully "thrust the spectator forcibly outside the absurdity of the humdrum and the mediocre and into that atmosphere of dynamic power the creative-destructive side of which was so masterfully revealed by Nietzsche."³⁷ With such lofty, absurdist rhetoric and references to Nietzsche, it is not surprising that American artists and critics misunderstood Mathieu's intentions. The construction of his persona drew from tropes which were anathema to the personae of the pragmatic American Abstract Expressionist painters.

Mathieu's reception in Europe was mixed, but was acknowledged by Yves Klein as a mentor and fellow monarchist.³⁸ Klein's notorious Leap into the Void of 1960 which purports to document a single, spontaneous, risky leap into space, demonstrates his debt to Mathieu in terms of staging his art for photography. But Klein's debt to his mentor is also conceptual and intellectual. Klein's attention to risk, spontaneity, speed, and improvisation, carried out in his "living brushes," and other work, echoes Mathieu's thinking: In Mathieu's "Towards a New Convergence of Art, Thought, and Science," published in 1960, he outlines what he terms the "phenomenology of painting": "1. First and foremost, speed in execution. 2. Absence of pre-meditation, either in form or movement. 3. The necessity for a subliminal state of concentration."³⁹ Mathieu was also recognized by the Viennese action artists, who acknowledged his performance in Vienna April 2, 1959, at the Theater am Fleischmarkt, as significant in their move into action.⁴⁰ Traveling to Japan in 1957, Mathieu and Tapié were warmly received by the performance-oriented Gutai Group as colleagues in exploring a new aesthetic direction.⁴¹ In front of crowds of people in Tokyo, Mathieu painted twenty-one canvases in three days, including a fresco approximately 45 feet long.⁴² The September issue of Time magazine covered the event extensively. Mathieu had come full circle, gaining a major magazine article like Dali and Pollock, captured forever in words and photographs as an internationally recognized artist who acts.

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