Abstract Expressionism's Evasion of Language

Abstract

The conviction that language is basic not only to the expression of thought but to its formation has occupied an important place in modern studies. By 1924, for instance, Edward Sapir had written, “It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.” Although there has been an increasingly open interest among artists throughout the last two decades in the use of linguistic theory as a model for artmaking, this was less common in America at mid century. By 1949, when Sapir's Selected Writings was published, there was, in fact, a strong resistance among a certain group of artists—the Abstract Expressionists—to the idea that language was inextricably meshed with every mode of apprehending the world and therefore, of course, to the idea that what their works represented could be put into words.