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This thesis studies a unique development in modernist painting in the United States of America during the 1950s; the shift away from abstract expressionism, most vividly distilled in the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. In the context of the early Cold War, the appearance of Louis' first Veil series and Noland's Circle Paintings is no coincidence. They mark the onset of a new mood taking hold of the country in the years following World War II. Yet, if these colorful and deeply sensuous images seem to speak to a new optimism, to possibilities opened up, and to freedoms renewed, we would be missing the point. In fact, they are founded on a theory of expression that is not only critical of the surrounding culture, but stakes out the most pessimistic of positions possible in that culture. This thesis is an attempt to develop a series of hermeneutic frames for reading modernist abstraction in this negative light. In order to unpack these images I take recourse in the art criticism of Clement Greenberg; specifically his notion of the decorative, a kind of unity and immediacy of surface, which I implicate in a number of wide-ranging dialogues emerging around the modern subject. It is especially toward structuralist trends in American psychiatry and social psychology, that I turn my attention. For in effect, my interpretative operation hinges on a dismantling Of the decorative as a metaphor of the transformative or constitutive moment of the subject. That is, I break down the seamlessness of the decorative into a set of semantic components or fragments significant in the individual biography, yet silenced by the totalizing, intra-textual imperative of expressivity. What one finds in these paintings is that despite all attempts at expurgating intention in order to distill the aesthetic, an intentional structure can be found lying just under the surface, bound to the individual life lived, and functioning on a metonymic or associative level. It is toward the sobering question of materialism that I continually return. For if Greenberg's interest in Sullivanian Interpersonal Psychiatry provides an initial framework for addressing the problems of painting after abstract expressionism, it also provides an entrance to more specific questions about the transformative which Pollock entertained in terms of Jungian therapy and Gestalt psychology, which Louis' fascination with Rorschach Psychodiagnostics summoned, arid that Noland's stake in Reichian therapy amounted to. Undoubtedly the point is, that the aesthetic, if an image of plenitude, if a bearer of the Utopian impulse, is always paradoxically inscribed by the trace of a material history that precedes it, that renders it utterly contingent.

This thesis is concerned with art and culture in America from 1948 to 1955, primarily a period bound shift in the aesthetic practice of modernism which would result in the stain painting of Morris Louis. The purpose of this thesis is to trace the shift in cultural values which would promote the emergence and development of this new paradigm, that is to link a wider social and cultural progenesis of change to its formal articulation upon a highly aestheticized abstract canvas. Clement Greenberg's position in these negotiations is crucial. For him, the formal qualities of stain painting resonated and were linked to the larger cultural field of a vital and prospering new order. Intense color, "openness", and their implication of anonymity, united to become the signification of a particular kind of potential, translated as optimism, which he felt the moment possessed. This investigation will focus on the formal properties of stain painting as the elements of a project closely related to the politics of Greenberg himself; that indeed a generative stylistics for stain painting, specifically Louis' 1954 "Veil" series, is coupled to a distinct political culture at that time being elaborated. The historically specific framework of this thesis attempts to reconcile some of the inconsistencies in the reception of stain painting -- its lack thereof in the early 1950s, and its ultimate acceptance and critical acclaim by the 1960s. This thesis contends that the formal qualities of stain painting were a vection for the politics of a core group of Cold War intellectuals involved in an affirmative project for capitalism. That is any meaning — and hence too wider success — impersonality might have had, gained resonance only as the politics of this core of intellectuals themselves gained in power. To investigate these issues this study probes the complexities and the key position in the debate on popular culture. In an America of heightened consummerism and Cold War tensions what emerges as crucial is a reconception of the individual, of avant garde practice and of modernity itself.