AFTER 1943, the New Yorkers who were venturing into automatist and
biomorphic abstraction -- among them Baziotes, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Mother-
well, Pollock, and Rothko -- became increasingly familiar with each other's
work and often exhibited together. (The exception was Gorky, who had
largely removed himself from his American contemporaries.) This resulted ill
a loose community based on mutual understanding and respect. Personal
interactions were of great importance, for they gave rise to an aesthetic cli-
mate in which innovation and extreme positions were accepted and en-
couraged. Except for Gottlieb, all these artists were given exhibitions at the
Art of This Century Gallery from the end of 1943 to the beginning of 1945.
Their works were also shown at the 67 Gallery, which was opened in the
winter of 1944 by Howard Putzel, who by then had left the employ of Peggy
Guggenheim. Putzel's first show, entitled "Forty American Moderns," in-
cluded canvases by Avery, Baziotes, Stuart Davis, Gottlieb, Morris Graves,
Hofmann, Matta, Motherwell, Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Rothko, and
Mark Tobey. The choice is a tribute to the remarkable taste of Putzel, who
in the early 1940's had the kind of discerning eye for artists of promise that
John Graham had had in the previous decade.

A few writers -- notably James Johnson Sweeney, Sidney Janis, Samuel
Kootz, Clement Greenberg of Partisan Review and The Nation, and Manny
Farber of the New Republic -- also recognized the gifts of some of the
Americans. Sweeney's admiration for Pollock led him to write the preface to
the painter's first show in 1943. In it he asserted:

Pollock's talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is un-
disciplined. It spills itself out in a mineral prodigality not yet crystallized.
It is lavish, explosive, untidy. But young painters, particularly Americans,
tend to be too careful of opinion. . . . What we need is more young men
who paint from inner impulsion [sic] without an car to what the critic
or spectator may feel -- painters who will risk spoiling a canvas to say
something in their own way. Pollock is one. ¹

In the same year, Greenberg also acclaimed Pollock: "Conflict and
Wounded Animal. . . are among the strongest abstract paintings I have
seen yet by an American. . . . Pollock has gone through the influences of
Miró, Picasso, Mexican painting, and what not, and has come out on the other
side at the age of thirty-one, painting mostly with his own brush." ² In 1945,
Greenberg was even more laudatory: "Jackson Pollock's second one-man
show . . . establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his
generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró." ³ Greenberg
also bailed Baziotes and Motherwell in 1944, commenting "that the future
of American painting depends on what [they] . . . and only a comparatively
few others do from now on"; in 1945, he called Hofmann's painting "com-
pletely relevant. His painting is all painting." ⁴

Motherwell, writing in Partisan Review in 1944, asserted:

Certain individuals represent a young generation's artistic chances.
There are never many such individuals in a single field, such as paint-
ing -- perhaps a hundred to begin with. The hazards inherent in man's
many relations with reality are so great -- there is disease and premature
death; hunger and alcoholism and frustration; the historical moment
may turn wrong for painters: it most often does; the young artist may
betray himself, consciously or not, or may be betrayed -- the hazards are
so great that not more than five out of a whole young generation are
able to develop to the end. And for the most part it is the painting of

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