Art Criticism - The State University of New York

offend someone. When critics disagree, does the artist die?
For me the message of abstract expressionism was: give up technological
complexities and amenities for that half-forgotten paradise of your collective
unconscious, that smelly, ragged farm where the man of nature, surrounded
by. wives, children livestock, sinks back into the untended vegetation
and oblivion without regret. (I think ofH. Hoffman, D. Smith, F. Farr as such
tellurians.) Now, fed up with the sterile paintings that reacted against the sloppy
largesse of this beatitude, we are able to understand that that paint was a
reaffirmation of what good painters always have wanted paintings to domake
concrete the transitory fulminations of nature.
4. MACHINES AND "MACHINES"
In 1951 I was puzzled by some large canvases stained with simple
stripes that F. Lobdell, back from a year in Paris, unfurled. "They're flags," he
stated. There is a big difference between going to a painting for solace and
insight and using it as a symbol for loyalty. In the liberating "push-pull" sideways
tension of H. Hofmann's paintings, there was an effort to create a nonillusionistic
space by avoiding the habit of perspective's depth. This seems
like the stop and return action of a reciprocating engine as opposed to the
smooth revolution of a turbine. And as machines have been known to shake
apart because of vibrating harmonics at critical speeds that must be avoided,
perhaps the somewhat incestuous harmonies of this group, echoing the jittery
tensions of paintings searching for a messages caused it to self-destruct around
1960s at which time the "pop" artists and their aides stepped onto the stage
with "machines" in the French sense oflarge shockers. And from this time on
the dealers and museum directors became more influential than the critics.
When one is blessed with an unsolicited spell of feeling good just
being alive seems enough to ask but later in depression we cannot imagine that
we could ever have had that joy. So these bucolic nature distillations, simple
and haphazardly correct, did not wish to risk thought's complications, but
were glad to be humble talismans of possible universal well-being. Later, chastened
with the chill premonition of a coming swift, tragic cauterization, we
would see the paintings as untenable simplifications-with their spendthrift
colors and atomized undirected forms that must be abandoned now for work
that would show our saddened maturity and would not seem to erase themselves
as these lucky, fragile gratuities had. Saying that we should trust only
our intuitions implies that all have equal talent buried beneath their inhibitions
and that unearthing this is our only duty. But as the manic phase is eclipsed
and the necessary, inevitable "penseroso" emerges with its almost welcome
grimness, have we saved any of the hope from our childlike moments that will
help forge our tragic, subjective mood into something durable, that will have
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