Art Uber Alles : THE TURNING POINT: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art, <i> By April Kingsley (Simon & Schuster: $30; 372 pp.)</i>

Nineteen-fifty, for April Kingsley, marked a pivotal point in the development of Abstract Expressionism (AbEx). It was the year that many of the painters associated with AbEx (Arshile Gorky and Hans Hoffman), designated as AbEx (Newman, Rothko, Reinhardt, Brooks, Baziotes, etc.) or identified with AbEx (Pollack, De Kooning, Guston and Kline) all had found galleries and had exhibitions.

More important, it was the year “advanced American art” entered not only the museums but also the public imagination, with the New York Times’ front-page publication of a letter from several abstract expressionists protesting the Metropolitan Museum’s jury selection and Life magazine’s photo spread on Jackson Pollack (“Jack the Dripper”). Internationally, the exhibition of AbEx painting marked the triumph not only of American painting over its European models but also of abstract art over America’s provincialism.

“The Turning Point,” unfortunately, is not a chronicle of the events of 1950 but a retelling of the biographies of the “big boys” of the New York School. It is clear that Kingsley most admires those artists who epitomize the doomed romantic hero. The longest sections are given over to suicidal male artists who brood; are self- absorbed, death-obsessed and maniacally and egocentrically committed to art over life.

Kingsley’s cast of characters, rather than being erratic, dynamic and culturally reflexive, always are motivated by fate, which reduces them to mere puppets and victims of their own flawed personalities. It is these glorious tragedies that Kingsley celebrates.

No wonder the women who occupy this world are represented as muses, mistresses and mothers. Kingsley’s uncritical approach replicates the prejudiced view of those artists who never wanted to become one of the boys or whose lives, concerns and ambitions did not feed the myth of AbEx.

Artists such as Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning (both of whom were abstract painters when their husbands were still struggling with the heritage of Picasso), Dorothy Dehner and Charlotte Parks are positioned as bit players who nursed their male geniuses along (Pollack, De Kooning, David Smith and James Brooks, respectively). Kingsley evaluates their work either in comparison to the endeavors and achievements of their male counterparts or, in the case of Dehner, given the abuse she suffered at the hands of David Smith, with wonder that she was able to accomplish anything at all.

Kingsley feels that the recent praise for an artist like Krasner can only be attributed to post-feminist considerations. She is not much better with the handful of black abstract artists (Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Thomas Sills and Hale Woodruff) whom she dismisses because their works are gentle, lyrical and lacking in the violence of De Kooning or the force of Still.

Kingsley gives the work of such minor artists as Weldon Kees (best known as a critic and writer), Pousette-Dart, Fritz Bultman and Estaban Vincente, etc. greater consideration because of their presence at this or that drinking match, studio visit or friendship, over the hard-won achievements of women and black artists in these circles.

From this social history, Kingsley constructs a one-dimensional image of the abstract expressionists’ aspirations. Their complexity is reduced to selected references, associations or conjectures. Repeatedly, Kingsley hunts out literary and biographical references. She finds in Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb and early De Kooning an iconography derived from a newspaper description of the atom-bomb explosions, while dance motifs come to dominate her discussion of Kline (his wife was a dancer) and death and Spain are everywhere in Motherwell. In this manner, Kingsley explains everyone’s imagery, but her analysis never extends beyond these explanations. For her, any formalist reading of these works empties them of their meaning.

Kingsley brings no new insights to the lives of these artists, their works or their times. There is not much here for those who have read Dore Ashton’s more insightful book on the New York School or the books by Irving Sandler or Sam Hunter on the same subject. And Kingsley has filled her text with conjectures, unsubstantiated assertions and questionable analyses of the artists’ motivations and their work, annoyingly prefaced by such qualifiers as “probably,” “apparently,” “obviously” and “most likely.”

Kingsley ignores the fact that one of the radical achievements of such AbEx painters as Pollack, Still, Kline, Rothko, Newman and De Kooning (before and after his “woman” paintings) was their ability to abandon the very literary content that Kingsley would put back into them. By purging their works of representation and symbolism, they allowed the painting itself to be a symbol of their efforts to unite subject and object.

For these artists there was no image that could express the poverty of the Depression or the uncertainty caused by the Holocaust or the threat of nuclear destruction. Their hopes lay in creating works that would be experienced in a “here and now” filled with the awe, horror and beauty of being present in the world. The triumph of abstract expressionism, the legacy of 1950, is not that of “self” expression, abuse, tragedy and suicide, as April Kingsley would have it, but the opening of American culture to a phenomenological and conceptual doubt that could only be represented by the precarious balance between the contending forces of seduction and abuse.