Art Criticism - The State University of New York

whale saga (more recently Hesse or Tolkien). Now if these new artists expected
our weary eyes to follow the coastlines of their continents of paint with no aid
from references to familiar objects, we must regard them as very serious moralists,
not out to merely delight us with felicitous discoveries, but to instruct us
by metaphoric contours in a geography only a trusted faith tells us really
exists.
No wonder so many art patrons fell back into Matisse's welcoming
armchair. (Perhaps the sparks emitted from the new painting had led them to
fear they were being ushered to an electric chair.) Since paint can never equal
the splendor of a sunset, does it follow that the painting must represent only
itself? Without content it tends to become decoration. Those who say it must
first be a decoration before it tells its story are the opposite of these artists who
have no wish to sugarcoat any "literary" pill, who want the forms to be the
whole story.
The positive spirit in modern art, as opposed to the spirit of our times
that seems unhealthy to us, is an open laying down of one's candid vitality,
unfettered by sickness' emotion. As in Scriabin's'''Poem of Ecstasy" or "The
Rites of Spring", this mindlessness overwhelms us with a force of sexuality
that breaks all rules. Picasso's shock and delight are not poetic in the sense
that surrealism is. We may feel ashamed of these excesses later, but while in
their grip they were everything to us. Wasn't abstract expressionism a return
to this intoxication after an era of furtive escape from superego influence?
Although the artists who surfaced after World War II in New York
have been called alcoholically subjective, autistically solipsistic and even "marsupial
troglodytes" (J. Varda), their work, as compared with the morbidly subjective
Surrealism of Europe, seems simple-hearted, exuberant. Nor did they
intend to abstract from Nature, deforming objects as did Picasso. They preferred
to be called "non-objective", allying themselves with the Mondrianesque
American pioneers of the Thirties. M. Rothko, in a lecture in San Francisco in
1948, said he would rather paint eyes on a rock than abstract from the human
body.
If they were seduced by the felicities of observed nature it was not
evidenced directly in the painting. Instead of duplicating objects of contemplation,
they wanted the canvas itself to be the object of contemplation. Moreover,
the canvases were the record of a sort of dance the painter had executed
with his loose paint, using when possible large free arm movements instead of
hand finger dexterity necessary for verisimilitude. This led to such things as
the "one-shot painting" in which chance was at a premium, the canvas either a
success or wiped out-the act of wiping out creating some happy accidents
for a new try. For this courage, I've heard these painters commend such artists
as Velasquez, Magnasco, Bonington, Sorolla, Turner, Monet; painters whose
paint brio produced shattered forms more important than the subject matter.
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Art Criticism