Rhapsody In Blue... and Red and Yellow

The paint in Bruce Anderson's Lover's Embrace is so thick that it's probably still drying, even though the Mankato-born artist completed it more than 15 years ago. Layers of sea green and orange coalesce on top of each other, protruding from the center of the eleven-by-six-foot canvas like chunks of papier-mâché. In the top left-hand corner, a glob of dark-blue paint--maybe four tubes' worth--creates a bubbling mass that resembles a decayed human organ.

Colors and swirls intertwine with one another, but nothing about Anderson's work conjures mental images of the post-coital cuddle suggested in the title. Instead, paint is splattered on the edge of the canvas like remnants from the artist's emotional vomit. Thick coats of green, white, and orange look like guts smeared all over its center. The sloppy, beautiful mess looks like it has been ulcerating inside Anderson for years, only to finally mushroom out of his fingertips. You can almost see him scraping on the paint with a palette knife and trowel, feeling more pissed off with each giant stroke of his heavy arm.

Like the 31 other pieces featured in the Minnesota Museum of American Art's "Abstract Painting: Selected Works 1930 to the Present," Lover's Embrace highlights the emotional intensity created by a quiet group of independent artists. Minnesota's first abstract painters were connected through artist Cameron Booth, a onetime landscape artist who taught at the St. Paul School of Art from 1929 to 1942 and joined the University of Minnesota in 1948. But many of those who met through Booth weren't openly engaged in any pedantic dialogue about what the movement meant.

"It was a complex village with streets unnamed and unmarked," says Aribert Munzner, who moved to Minnesota from Germany in 1955 and taught painting at the Minneapolis School of Art (now MCAD) from 1955 to 1993. He talks about the nature of art and existence in long thought spirals that loop back and repeat themselves, much like the themes in the paintings themselves. But though Munzner speaks passionately, he's also careful with his words, making sure to define terms like "scene" and "dialogue" with quotation marks, even when he's talking a mile a minute.

During the 1950s, he says, the Twin Cities' art community was divided like two countries on different sides of the river. "People were working. They didn't try to classify themselves. Nobody talked about it. It was as it was everywhere in the world, a human search for their own observations."

In New York, the abstract movement was a "scene," propelled by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem De Kooning; jazz clubs; and acclaimed art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg, a curmudgeonly elitist to say the least, nevertheless brought abstract art to the forefront by exploring it as process, the result of sensations and impulses instead of a reliance on images. He started out at The Nation, but later became a devout anticommunist, which affected how he viewed the images. His later conceit was that the free-form gestural paintings depicted the individual freedom of expression represented by democracy and capitalism.

Though the Minnesota movement drew from the New York scene, its regionalism mostly protected it from being misappropriated as a jingoistic expression during the McCarthy era. And when some artists moved from New York or other parts of the world to Minnesota, they brought new reflections on local life with them. They were influenced more by the Minnesota experience and abstract art's original teachings about technique than the celebratory Americanism that later put New York at the center of the movement.

Take, for instance, Cameron Booth's Summer Solstice. Here, the rich reds jump off the canvas and the yellow horizontal lines recede into the painting. Booth uses space and color--dark abstract shapes in the painting's center and light-colored linear brush strokes that extend across the entire work--to give the painting depth and the appearance of a foreground. While in Europe in the 1920s, Booth was a student of German-born abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, who also taught Lee Krasner, among other New York artists. One of the most important artists of the movement, Hofmann used paint drips way before Pollock, and stressed the importance of using dramatic colors--reds, pinks, yellows--to evoke a vivid experience. His influence is deeply evident in Summer Solstice, which renders nature in the abstract and uses rich colors and interlocking nonrepresentational images to convey the emotional symbiotic relationship between nature and man.