Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde

Reviewed by Greg Barnhisel

The so-called “New York School” of the 1950s and 1960s, which included Jackson Pollock, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Philip Guston and others, was one of those rare artistic formations in which creatives working in several diverse artforms coalesce and begin to influence each other across genre boundaries. Probably the most familiar and fertile of these is the Parisian avant-garde of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which included among many others Picasso, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Vaslav Nijinsky, Man Ray, and Josephine Baker. There, painting influenced literature, which influenced photography, which influenced dance, which influenced music, which influenced film, which influenced painting, and so on. But just in modern Western art we could also point to the patronage networks in Renaissance Rome and Florence, the early German Romantic circles of the late eighteenth century, Zurich Dada, and the hip-hop and street-art scene of late 1970s and early 1980s New York.

These are, almost exclusively, urban phenomena. (First-generation British Romanticism here is an exception, motivated as it was by a revulsion toward cities.) The reasons are pretty clear: that’s where the people are, and that’s where the money is. “Money” might mean patrons, or audiences, or galleries, or publishers, or anything else that provides artists with the financial means to survive and the material means to produce and disseminate their work.

So why these places and these times? I would suggest two factors: displacement and change. The artists who created these scenes, almost universally, were not from these cities. They came from elsewhere, and had been displaced — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by circumstance. But this displacement allowed them, forced them in fact, to make new connections, to try out new ways of living, new ways of expressing themselves. And they met others who were going through exactly the same displacement in a city that offered new opportunities and great uncertainty.

This is always the case, though. What catalyzed the alchemical reaction that produced these vibrant scenes is that the cities in which these artists found themselves were experiencing profound local changes. Early 1900s Paris, for example, had recently been Haussmannized, which created the grands boulevards we know today, but it was also adopting and adapting to all of the new technologies of the modern era, from the metro to the telephone to electrification to indoor toilets. Rome underwent massive reconstruction in the 1500s, much of it funded by the wealth brought to the city by Florentine financiers and traders whose sons became cardinals and popes. And late 1970s New York careened in the opposite direction, with seemingly unstoppable decay, deindustrialization, crime, and financial crisis.

But these local changes generally echoed, or were caused by, larger national or global developments — the Renaissance itself, the Enlightenment, the rise of the nation-state in Europe, World War I. The New York School arose along with the emergence of the United States as the world’s sole superpower, wealthy and largely unscathed on the home front by World War II. The U.S.’s new prominence crowned New York as the world’s most important city, the financial and media capital of the richest nation on the globe, and the thief of “the idea of modern art” itself, as Serge Guilbaut indelibly put it in his 1984 book.

But it’s not just structural factors that lead to the emergence, and supercharge the vitality, of these artistic nexuses, as Northwestern University music professor Ryan Dohoney shows in his new monograph Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde. For the New York School — particularly the avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, a rare native New Yorker in a circle of artists who came from elsewhere — just as important was the simple fact of personal friendship, which helped nurture this scene and its “coterie art.” In fact, Dohoney argues, “the most important medium within the New York School was friendship,” which “allowed these artists and musicians to do their work, to take aesthetic risks, and to make art a way of life” (4–5). Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s work on friendship and amor mundi, Lytle Shaw’s work on the “poetics of coterie” and the emergence of “kinship structures” among deracinated artists in the city, and his own immersion in Feldman’s archive, Dohoney here reads (hears?) Feldman’s work through his relationships with other members of the New York avant-garde. But the book is as much about the scene as it is about Feldman’s music. “Feldman’s friendships and collaborations through the 1950s and 1960s,” Dohoney argues, “provide fruitful ground upon which to conduct our analyses of inter-art collaboration which emerge in those years” (107).

Prominent among these close friends was the most famous New York School composer of them all, John Cage, who had been acquainted with Feldman during the 1940s but bonded with him after a January 1950 performance of Anton Webern’s Symphonie, Op. 21 at Carnegie Hall. Cage introduced Feldman to the importance of spontaneity, which became a hallmark of the younger man’s compositions. Feldman’s first work, written in the early 1950s, is often called “chance” music, as he did not indicate to the musicians what pitch they should sound, or the tone color they should use, or even the duration of the note. Rather, by composing in a sort of graph, he would indicate the rough range of each of these qualities they should play at a given time. Every performance, therefore, would be utterly unique, unpredictable even to Feldman himself. (Once, the musicians began riffing on “Yankee Doodle,” much to the composer’s surprise.) Cage admired their radical spontaneity, but it wasn’t for everyone. Many dismissed Feldman’s technique as a “gimmick” or even, as the critic Lester Trimble put it, “a sado-masochistic enterprise which upset my viscera for days” (38).

Cage came to disapprove of Feldman’s engagement with jazz in works such as 1952’s Marginal Intersection, but this particular piece intrigued poet Frank O’Hara, whose spontaneous-seeming Lunch Poems (1964) are among the New York School’s most beloved achievements. The two met each other through the Eighth Street Artists Club in 1951 and quickly became close friends. Feldman collaborated with O’Hara on a 1962 musical accompaniment to his poem “Wind” in which “performers are given specific pitches to sound at minimal volume, but decisions regarding the duration of those pitches and the alignment between the parts are left largely to the musicians” (111). After O’Hara’s sudden death in a car accident in 1966, Feldman wrote several elegiac works to his friend, which Dohoney interprets as “Feldman learning from O’Hara’s poetry and letting it influence… his compositional method” (122).

O’Hara had particularly admired how Feldman’s spontaneous approach was a “personal search for expression” and likened his 1957 Piece for Four Pianos to the similarly improvisational paintings of Jackson Pollock, who had become the biggest celebrity of the group after a sensational 1949 Life magazine profile. Feldman, in fact, provided background music for Hans Namuth’s 1951 short film Jackson Pollock 51, which Dohoney sees as expressing a common, if heretofore unrecognized, preoccupation with Bergsonian élan vital among the New York School. Namuth’s film, like the similar Works of Calder (scored by Cage) from the previous year, “dramatize artistic practices as a process of becoming — one that returns to the undifferentiated vital impulse of life itself” (83). These artists’ collaborations among themselves and with others such as Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, and Joan La Barbara, Dohoney claims, exhibit the influence of Bergsonian ideas in this group.

Dohoney concludes his short study by looking at Feldman’s intense relationship with the painter Philip Guston — “truly one of the greatest and most fraught friendships in modernism” (143) — whom, like so many others, Feldman met through Cage. Feldman dedicated his Three Pieces for String Quartet (1954–6) to Guston, whose “love and respect” made the work possible, and Guston allowed Feldman to use his painting Head-Double as the cover art for his first LP. But the two ruptured at Midtown’s Marlborough Gallery in 1968 when Guston, who had controversially turned away from abstraction and toward figuration, took offense at Feldman’s response to one of his paintings. “With that,” Feldman remembered, “our friendship was over” (145). But not their connection. For the rest of their careers, Dohoney shows, the two men chewed over their friendship in their work, such as Feldman’s five-hour composition For Philip Guston or Guston’s The Coat II (1977) and Friend—to M.F. (1978), in which each appears as a “spectral presence” in the other’s work (163). “Where Guston had drawn upon Feldman’s ideas of abstract experience to nurture his art and had depended upon his companionship to sustain, his creative spontaneity,” Dohoney says, “after the 1970s Feldman’s memory remains a necessary other that helps Guston do his work” (167).

The portrait of the personal relationships among the artists of the New York School in Dohoney’s book is sophisticated and sensitive, giving us both a new historical view of these figures and new ways of understanding their works. In literary and artistic studies today, so-called “network analysis,” or the documentation and digital visualization of the connections between people and places, has offered an enormously useful new tool for understanding artistic networks. (I particularly recommend the Shakespeare and Company project at Princeton University for an example of how this kind of work can open up new perspectives on very familiar formations.) Dohoney’s book reminds us that such big-data undertakings, valuable as they are, need to be accompanied by deeper and more sensitive — more “granular,” to use the au courant term — accounts of such coteries. And while those network analyses make even clearer the key role played by the urban environment in those artistic formations, we equally need subtle and textured biographical studies like Dohoney’s to help us recover the feel of being inside these scenes, of the scrappy postwar galleries and clubs and concert venues and cold-water walkups that engendered the remarkable artistic ferment of the New York School.

Greg Barnhisel is a Professor of English at Duquesne University. He is the author of many books and articles, including Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015), and is currently completing a biography of the professor and spy Norman Holmes Pearson.

Reviews, Arts & CulturePeter-Christian AignerJanuary 18, 2023Comment