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Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 2

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Creating a new “American” Art

Before the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the American art scene after World War I was defined by two main currents. The first were what one might call the Regionalists (e.g. Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry) who used their own signature styles to portray the virtues of the hard-working rural American population. In the second group were the artists of Social Realism (e.g. Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera), whose work reflected urban life during the Great Depression, and reflected a preoccupation with international socialism.

Neither of these two schools was interested in abstract art. Despite the leftwing view of the social realists, both groups held rather conservative attitudes on figurative representation. Yet, even as these two styles dominated, the artists of the nascent New York School “met frequently at the legendary Cedar Bar, where they discussed their radical theses. They argued endlessly about the problems of art, about how to effect a total break with the art of the past, about the mission of creating an abstract art that no longer had anything to do with conventional techniques and motifs.”[i]

Spring in the Country by Grant Wood (1941)

The Museum of Modern Art did not yet exist; the Metropolitan Museum tended to “look down its WASP patrician nose at modernism”; and the Whitney favoured exactly the kind of American painting young Rothko most despised: scenic, provincial, anecdotal, and conservative.[ii] For a Jewish outsider like Rothko, who in 1970 declared that he would never feel entirely at home in a land to which he had been transplanted against his will, urban America was his America.

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Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 1

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The life and career of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko is a prototypical Jewish story that encapsulates a range of themes discussed at The Occidental Observer. Central to Rothko’s story is the political radicalism of eastern European Jewish migrants arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1920; the reflexive hostility of these migrants and their descendents to the traditional people and culture of their new homeland, and how this hostility was reflected in the artistic and intellectual currents that dominated Western societies during the twentieth century. Rothko’s story also exemplifies other familiar themes including: the force of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism in promoting Jewish interests, and the tendency for Jewish “genius” to be constructed by the Jewish intellectual establishment as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture.

With Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko has been accorded a leading place in the ranks of the Abstract Expressionists. If there is such a thing as a cult artist among the liberal Jewish intelligentsia, then Rothko is probably it. Important people stand in grave silence before his empty expanses with looks on their faces that bespeak lofty thoughts. As a critic for The Times noted:

Rothko evokes all that could be criticized as most pretentious, most clannish, most pseudish about his spectators. They stand there gravely perusing something that to the outsider probably looks more like a patch of half-stripped wallpaper than a picture and then declare themselves profoundly moved. And many outsiders will start to wonder if they are being duped, if this Modernist emperor actually has no clothes on and his fans are just the blind followers of some aesthetic faith. Read more

Stalin’s 1937 Counter-Revolution Against Trotskyism

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Glorious 1937! In that year Stalin finally came to understand that it was Zionism, not Communism, that was being built in the USSR and he destroyed it. After 1937, Suvorov and Kutuzov, Nakhimov and Ushakov, Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the “Knight in Tiger Skin” became the national symbols. And the Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians – all those whom the Zionists had destroyed and left to rot in prisons, labeled “nationalists” or “anti-Semites – returned. General Viktor Filatov[1]

In his book Myths and the Truth about 1937: Stalin’s Counter-Revolution (YAZA-PRESS, Moscow, 2010, 288 pp.), Andrei Burovsky assumes the role of devil’s advocate or apologist for the crimes committed by Josef Stalin during the time of  “The Great Purge.”

This is a highly revisionist point of view, so a bit of biographical information is in order. Burovsky was born in Taganrog in SW Russia in July 1955. He majored in history at the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical Institute, defended his Candidate’s Dissertation (The Historical and Cultural Stages of the Development of the Paleolithic Yenisei River) at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Archaeology in 1987, and defended his Doctoral Dissertation (Problematics in Anthropo-Ecology in 1996. He was made a professor in 1998 and since that time has had a position at Krasnoyarsk University.

Burovsky is a prolific author (see, e.g., here). Aside from Burovsky’s 12 books on Jewish topics (I previously reviewed his Empire of the Intellect for TOO), he has written on a variety of subjects, including  Noogenesis and the Formation of the Noosphere School, 1996; Anthropo-Ecosophia, 2009; Petersburg as a Geographic Phenomenon, 2003; Arian Ancestors, 2005;The Great Civil [sic] War, 1939-45, 2010; Russian Atlantis, 2007; The Novgorod Alternative: The True Capital of Rus; Peter the First: The Accursed Emperor, etc.

Burovsky’s view is that the events of 1937 did not represent the usual case in which the devil under indictment is accused of crimes against innocent victims, but rather a case in which the devil is alleged to have committed crimes against another devil of even greater evil; it was the war between Stalin and Trotsky. True, Stalin had succeeded in exiling his nemesis in 1929, but the spirit of Trotskyism, according to Burovsky, had permeated the entire communist establishment and the Red dictator was determined to eradicate it.
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What’s Up with Mel Gibson?

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Mel Gibson has announced that he will be involved in a movie about the revolt led by Judah Maccabee against the Greeks in 160 BC—the basis for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Patrick Goldstein in the LATimes (“Mel’s miracle: doing right by Maccabee” 9/10/11; apparently not available online) says that “Gibson is back in good standing in Hollywood, at least at Warner Bros., arguably the industry’s leading studio.” (On the other hand, Jim Caviezel says that his career has been damaged because he played Jesus in Gibson’s Passion which was widely detested by Jewish activists.)

Jewish activist organizations have expressed their displeasure with Gibson’s current venture. Abe Foxman called it a “travesty,” and the Simon Wiesenthal’s Marvin Hier said, among other things, that it would be like having “a White supremacist  trying to play Martin Luther King Jr. [!] It’s simply an insult to the Jews.” No surprise there.

Goldstein thinks it’s just fine for Gibson to be involved, noting the parallels of the Maccabee story with Gibson’s signature movie role in Braveheart: An embattled warrior fighting for his people. He expects that Gibson will produce a properly heroic depiction because he “must surely realize that a film from him that in any way undercuts the heroism of Maccabee would be a career killer of the highest order. But it would be almost as bad if he were doing the film as an act of penance for his sins, since dutiful acts of penance rarely lend themselves to great artistry.”

If Gibson is doing this as penance, it would represent groveling taken to a new low. Read more

The Southern Point: Bardic Dynamic

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The Forty-Niners - G. Harvey

After many and long attempts to analyze complex problems by the aid of the method of analogies, you feel the uselessness of all your efforts; you feel that you are walking alongside a wall. And then you begin to experience simply a hatred and aversion for analogies, and you find it necessary to search in the direct way which leads you where you need to go.

–P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, pp.68

White Americans generally do not utilize the innate legendary potential of their historical experience to its fullest. They should. The epic material is available in spades. We love heroes and have many great examples of our own which might inspire us to dare the extraordinary, despite any odds.  In fact, all that is left for this generation and the next is the conscious assumption of the mantle and the active realization of the native mythos…or not. Failure to do so is optional and will eventually result in our racial dissolution and displacement. No more bad men behind blue eyes. But why go there when we don’t have to? The Irresistible Forces cannot continue their onslaught if they encounter an Immoveable Body. The buck stops here.

MLK: Hero of the Eastern Establishment

Before we can amplify, however, there must be some cleavage. There are two essential versions of the American story which, while on the surface may seem similar, in fact do not quite line up with the vanilla platforms of the primary political parties and the color-coded delineation of Red State/Blue State America, though these divisions are useful for general purposes and at a certain distance. Of course, these are broad strokes which are underscored by perennial injections of a youthful revolutionary zeal that tends to defy all attempts at categorization as well as a recognized trait in the White American character towards radical maverick individualism which challenges any comfortable establishment or bullying mentality and always loves an underdog. Read more

The Republican Party Is Doomed

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A consequence of the anti-White revolution wrought by immigration is the racialization of American politics.  Richard Spencer’s talk at the recent National Policy Institute Conference (now the featured TOO video) is an excellent summary of the case that the the Republican Party is doomed unless it switches to a pro-majority strategy—a topic discussed several times here as well. The basic fact is that around 90% of the votes of the Republican Party are from Whites. Non-Whites—even well-off non-Whites (including Jews)—tend to vote strongly Democrat, while the Republican base is now made up of  Whites of all social classes.   But as Whites become a decreasing percentage of the population, the Republican Party will inevitably become a permanent minority party as its constituents become a minority of Americans.

The video below features Pat Buchanan and Ron Brownstein discussing this issue with Cenk Uygur, a Turkish-American who seems quite gleeful that the Republican Party is “heading over a cliff.” (It doesn’t take long for non-Whites to see what the game is in American politics.) Again the same depressing statistics on White displacement, along with the projection that Obama could win Georgia with only 25% of the White vote and the point that Obama’s ads are featuring young non-Whites—the soon-to-be majority. Whites are expected to vote even more overwhelmingly Republican in 2012, which could mean that they win some states they didn’t win before. But, as Buchanan says, the Republican Party is doomed in the long run. And,as he notes, it doesn’t make sense for the Republicans to try to recruit Latinos because Latinos want lots of big government programs (not to mention bringing more people like themselves to the U.S., legalizing the illegals, etc).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw66AD21Hvo&feature=fvsr Read more

Dmitry Rogozin: A Russian Nationalist Re-enters the Political Arena

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Many of us have experienced the Cold War and identify Russia with communism and authoritarianism, or at least as an ‘Eastern power’ instead of a potential ally of the West. But we should not forget that it was the Swedish Viking-leader Rurik who united the Slavic tribes east of Poland under a dynasty which would last until the Revolution of 1917. It was Czar Ivan IV (the Terrible) who in the 16th century finally broke the Muslim-Mongol power which had been a threat for Europe since the hordes of Ögödei Khan’s arrived in the 13th century. In the following centuries the Russians expanded beyond the Ural mountains which led to the conquest of a large part of the Eurasian landmass and the White dominance over it. It was not until the defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905 that the Russian expansion was checked.

The Russian colonization of the northern part of the Eurasian landmass can only be compared to the Anglo-Saxon colonization of North-America in terms of historical significance for the rise of the White race. Both expansions have secured sufficient land mass for Whites beyond the European peninsula to develop a sizeable population to persist. Nowadays, the Russians are as much in demographic and to some extent cultural decay as their Anglo-Saxon brethren on the other side of the Bering Straits. The birthrates are dropping under the replacement level and the lands are prone to immigration from non-Whites. In the case of Russia the threat is twofold – from the Causasian and Central-Asian Muslims and the Chinese. Although Russia has a strong cultural and ethnic awareness, the leadership is not always reflecting popular sentiment.

Lately Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, has vowed his return to Russian politics. This is very interesting because he was actually ‘exiled’ as an ambassador because the Putinist faction feared his rising popularity among the Russians. Rogozin was the leading man of the nationalist Congress of Russian Communities, which was founded by the deceased general Lebed.

Dmitry Rogozin

Rogozin has noticed similarities between immigration in the West and the East:

Like the West, Russia has come under unprecedented immigration pressure. Our immigration is not justified in terms of the economy and is extremely dangerous politically and socially. Read more