Carl Heidenreich, Sierra Nevada, 1962. Mixed media on Japanese paper. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez. — Carl Heidenreich, *Sierra Nevada*, 1962. Mixed media on Japanese paper. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez.

In my second post, I focused on Carl Heidenreich’s use of text, broadsheet newspaper, and political statements in his paintings, including those of Durruti’s funeral and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I saw a through line of text emerging in paintings that relate to Heidenreich’s experiences as an exile and an immigrant, but also in works in which his political viewpoints are foregrounded. Works like Kennedy’s Death were not just documentary acts recording the events of his time. They were expressions of activism. Or, as in Heidenreich’s words, each painting was “a statement, an enormous protest.”

Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “dictatorial perpendicular” is useful as an idea here. With his idea of the “perpendicular,” he proposes that language, which typically lays flat along the horizontal, can be deformed. Words can be misappropriated for commercial and political benefit. It’s an idea that’s resonant with recent U.S. politics as we stand in 2021. We’ve seen Benjamin’s locust swarms of print take to the web in the form of rapid-fire tweets, angry diatribes, and general political obfuscation. Words, leaving their place in books find ways to corrode language, alter reality, and reinforce authoritarianism.

But letters are the tools of the writer’s trade and offer a respite from the the world as well. They help to improve the world. Benjamin’s writing proves that. So do his examples of visual art and poetry in “One-Way Street,” recalling creative works that expose and perhaps resist the dictatorial approach: the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose Symbolist writing was an expression of “crystalline structure,” and the artists who gathered to form Dada, chopping up and recombining elements of traditional culture in their collages, sound poems, and simultaneous poetry readings.

Elsewhere in visual art the perpendicular had its opponents. While writing about Benjamin’s idea of dictatorial language, I was reminded of another opposition between horizontal and perpendicular which took place around the time Heidenreich arrived in New York. In arguing against the “dictatorial perpendicular” and the commercialization of writing, Benjamin enacts a future argument made by the art critic Rosalind Krauss against what were often termed “literalist” readings of New York’s postwar abstractionists.

Krauss is an art critic and historian of modernism, whose writing has brought concepts of formlessness, pastiche, and the “optical unconscious" into dialogue with modern art. Her reading of modernist art practices spans the shift from early abstract expressionism in the 1940s to the expressionist, minimalist, and land art movements of the 1960s, years that coincide with Carl Heidenreich’s time in New York from 1941-1965.

During its height, abstract expressionism was understood as a pure form, evoking sublime ideals and optical flatness. The epicenter of artistic innovation had migrated from Europe to New York and its syntax had become formalist, or “literalist”: paint laid over canvas in a shallow plane of depth. Krauss’ writing sought to overturn the ideal of flatness, in particular by looking at Jackson Pollock’s reception and his influence on the artists that were to come. Her project is well-known and involves both reinterpreting and providing a historical corrective on Pollock, questioning how and why his approach to painting became a lynchpin in the unfolding canon of art.

Throughout the 1960s, artistic movements emerged which did not share Abstract Expressionism’s emphasis on the purity of optical experience or insist on the flatness of a painted canvas but instead bled outward into sculpture, installation, and an “expanded field” of artistic experience. In reconsidering the impression Pollack left on subsequent artists and artistic movements, Krauss emphasizes the vertical and horizontal as ideological devices. In Optical Unconscious, she rehearses Benjamin’s arguments on the pugnacious quality of vertical experience, this time applying the logic to that of painting rather than writing.

“It was a vertical, bounded plane, an object that stood before the viewer’s own vertical body, facing off against it,” she writes. Her description emphasizes an image of viewer and painting as opponents deadlocked in combat, two fighters in the boxing ring or committed rivals considering one another in a standoff. There is also a nod to constraints, the “bounded plane” of the painting and the painting as a physical “object.”

This sense of resisting constraints is central to Krauss’ argument against her own opponent, the earlier critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg hailed Pollock’s drip technique as “hallucinated literalness,” positioning him at the pinnacle of a succession of artists working within the ideal of painting as a non-objective, non-representational, and fully optical pursuit. The reevaluation of abstract practices from their untidy process of creation (on the easel, upon the floor, within an expanded environment) to their reception on the wall is striking, especially in Pollock’s case. Even at the height of his acclaim, Pollock’s paintings were ridiculed: “a child’s contour map,” “a mass of tangled hair,” dribblings and droolings. And yet Greenberg succeeded in transmuting Pollock’s paintings into the work of “the greatest living painter in the United States,” as Life Magazine wrote in 1949.

Krauss describes it in religious terms: “the raising of the work from off its knees and onto the grace of the wall in one unbroken benediction, the denial of wild heedlessness in order to clear a space for the look.” Greenberg’s benediction denied that heedlessness in Pollock’s paintings in order to make them respectable, uncontaminated, and controlled.

The passage recalls Mary Douglas’ definition of dirt as “matter out of place.” Greenberg elevates the contaminated disarray of Pollock’s drips and spatters. He endows them with art historical value by putting them “in place.”

Instead, Krauss positions Pollock’s paintings as a deterioration of pure form, a break with traditional verticality and an exploration of the horizontal friezes of painting. By working large, he breaks with easel painting. By dripping paint, he breaks with painting’s traditional techniques. And by working with the aid of gravity across the horizontal plane, he transforms painting from a “pure” pursuit into an elastic and often violent act of creation, one that prefigured Cy Twombly’s marks that etch and excavate the surface of his canvases, Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique, and Carl Heidenreich’s use of both stains and drip-like effects.

Krauss reads volumes into Pollock’s unfiltered comeback, “I’d rather stand on my paintings”: a denial of stuffy and upright formality by a blunt and practical action painter. This sort of positioning of Pollock is one we often identify with him, and not just because of Hans Namuth’s iconic photographs of Pollock in motion, stepping across his canvas to place a drip in the right place. He is a provocateur, or else a juvenile running rampant. His unfettered expressionism is an argument for the notion of absolute freedom. It exhibits freedom as soft power, as American exceptionalism in war times. But for Krauss, it also positions his work outside of Benjamin’s “dictatorial perpendicular,” resonating with artistic practices to come which sought to break with the past in numerous ways.

Jackson Pollock painting in his studio on Long Island, New York, 1950. © Hans Namuth. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Carl Heidenreich, Alaska Series No. 5, 1962. Watercolor. Collection of Richard M. Buxbaum. — Carl Heidenreich, *Alaska Series No. 5,* 1962. Watercolor. Collection of Richard M. Buxbaum.

Although Heidenreich’s abstractions evoke a very different pace than the swirling rhythms and chaos of Pollock’s drip paintings, he too invokes a kind of freedom from restraints through horizontality. In Alaska Series No. 5, there is likely the most obvious echo of Pollock’s peevish retort (a footprint). However, there is something more: a commitment to the free movement embedded in horizontality.

Painted in 1962, Alaska Series No. 5 comes out of a period in which Heidenreich’s paintings are no longer the vertical, bounded plane of small apartment windows, vision scratched out or covered over. Instead, they spread organically, open up fissures, offer limitless territories. The media themselves, a combination of watercolor, gouache, and other media are more inclined to seep, bleed, and permeate the substrate. In No. 5, the footprint breaks the illusion of the painting as a vision or portal (optical literalness) and returns it to its materiality. A layer of white paint is peeled up by the shoe’s sole, revealing strata of paint applied underneath.

To let Krauss’ argument guide us through Heidenreich’s landscapes, we could say that the Alaska Series begins to work away at the optical plane or “wall” of literalist Abstract Expressionism. It melts the architecture of his paintings as he composed them elsewhere, shifts away from portraiture and figuration, and delves instead into a territory founded on light, open space, the spirals of nebulae, and the organic forms of nature.

Carl Heidenreich, Winter, 1962. Alaska Series. Oil on wove rice paper mounted to paperboard. Corcoran Collection (Gift of Dr. Henry Buxbaum). — Carl Heidenreich, *Winter,* 1962. Alaska Series. Oil on wove rice paper mounted to paperboard. Corcoran Collection (Gift of Dr. Henry Buxbaum).

Carl Heidenreich, Summer, 1961-1962. Alaska Series. Oil with graphite on wove paper mounted to paperboard. Corcoran Collection (Gift of Dr. Henry Buxbaum). — Carl Heidenreich, *Summer*, 1961-1962. Alaska Series. Oil with graphite on wove paper mounted to paperboard. Corcoran Collection (Gift of Dr. Henry Buxbaum).

Heidenreich traveled alone to Alaska at the beginning of the 1960s and to Mexico earlier with a friend, around 1958. The experiences of natural settings spurred the creation of an impressive oeuvre of landscapes late in his life.

For an artist whose experience of travel had so often been dictated by political circumstance, journeying beyond the contiguous borders of the United States for the simple pleasure of it would have been a novel experience. The work he produced following the two trips has a mythic quality, devoid of figures or objects.

In addition, these paintings are not landscapes seen in a traditional manner (vertically or “faced off” against). Instead, Heidenreich’s paintings in the 1960s fluctuate between abstraction and landscape, immediacy and distance.

Take for example Landscape with Water from 1961, an oil painting whose pitted surface mirrors Pollock’s drip technique. Beneath the top layer of paint, subtler stains, hues, and shadows overlap one another. The composition appears frozen at a standstill, caught in the process of transforming from one state of matter to another. You could almost be looking at the icy surface of a frozen pond or a satellite image of the earth. Here, it’s easy to imagine how a painting hanging vertically on the wall evokes the expansive distances of Krauss’ horizontality through the “wild heedlessness” of nature. In Landscape with Water, Heidenreich depicts landscape as texture. It’s a surface, a topography, or a skin across which cool grays, phthalo blues, icy whites, and creamy yellows flow.

Carl Heidenreich, Landscape with Water, 1961. Oil. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez. — Carl Heidenreich, *Landscape with Water,* 1961. Oil. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez.

As Gabreile Saure points out, the paintings in the Alaska Series have a “cartographical character,” evoking geological form, landmasses, and the icy atmosphere and light of the Alaskan tundra. For Saure, the series evokes a bird’s-eye perspective, a glimpse of the land seen from above or even from an airplane, although she is quick to note that the paintings likely do not represent landscape as seen from a single distinct point of view. Instead, they often fluctuate between overlapping understandings of space, holding onto multiple aspects of mass, space, and atmosphere. It is, as Saure writes, a “landscape that extends almost without limit and need not be constrained by framework and contour.” The limitless horizontality of Heidenreich’s Alaska Series engages the sublime interaction of landscape and light.

The art historian Peter Selz, too, saw in the Alaska Series the suggestion of ice floes, rivers, deltas, and “incalculable distances.” In Alaska Series No. 3, a scarred and pitted monolithic form is layered with trenchant lines, drips of white and veils of pink. The all-over technique of abstract expressionism is applied to the texturing of the form, which fills the canvas, exceeding it in some places. However, unlike other painters of the time, Heidenreich here creates a distinct form with evident, organic borders. The substrate does not determine the composition, instead cleaving off the edges of the central form in some places, giving room for it to lengthen in others. The idiosyncrasy of the forms is partly why allusions to nature seem so apt. Topography, landmasses, and geology share the composition’s crumbling edges and rough geometry. These paintings are excavations, cross sections of terrain, broken fragments of continents.

Carl Heidenreich, Alaska Series No. 3, 1961. Watercolor. Private Collection. — Carl Heidenreich, *Alaska Series No. 3*, 1961. Watercolor. Private Collection.

Hannah Arendt noted the relationship between Heidenreich’s painting and the tradition of German Romanticism. These vast, monochrome landscapes swallow up the viewer. As with Caspar David Friedrich, they transcend the human scale of painting—despite their often small size—to offer an overwhelming, emotional experience. Immensity sits alongside intimacy.

In Blue Watercolor, an archipelago of blues, grays, and white watercolors stain and dapple the surface of the painting. In the lower third of the painting, patchy white blotches fade, almost indistinguishable from the background. Meanwhile, island-like, gray and blue marks are ringed with a nimbus of deeper blue like the foxing of antique paper. Almost topographical, the distance and scale of forms is difficult to parse.

Carl Heidenreich, Blue Watercolor, 1964. Watercolor on paper. 35 3/8 x 24 in. Whitney Museum of American Art. — Carl Heidenreich, *Blue Watercolor,* 1964. Watercolor on paper. 35 3/8 x 24 in. Whitney Museum of American Art.

Across the center band of the painting, larger forms are laid again and again over one another. Their textured surfaces punctuate the foreground of the painting, while simultaneously receding into the distance to form a horizon.

The luminous quality of the cooler tones is offset by a dark blotch in the upper right. Heavy and muddied with reddish browns, it contaminates the otherwise pristine composition. Extending beneath the upper layers, it peeks out toward the top right and again on the right hand side. Similarly, the yellowing oils of watercolor and oil paint mediums seep from beneath the edges of certain forms, an inescapable tarnish offsetting the natural beauty of the landscape.

Still, these reminders of fraught and blemished landscapes are subsumed in an overall daze of color, light, and form in which the gaze, wandering, can lose itself in infinity. It is as if, in journeying to Alaska, the German émigré found at last the promise of freedom. There is a quiet lull present in the horizontality of his compositions of these natural landscapes, which formulate a kind of escape, or pause, from the city, from modernity, and from Benjamin’s “dictatorial perpendicular.”