Art Criticism - The State University of New York

ences of the divinity of straight-edged order, inviolate. Straight lines are what
nature does with too much difficulty and man with too much ease. These
inaccurate ejaculations are gambled on reproductions of the electricity behind
Nature's observed turbulence or serenity, given only enough order to communicate
within the limits of paint. Three-dimensionality is not an enemy to it,
though it, too, must obey the canvas's laws in order to be an object of beauty.
As opera gives even its villains lyrical soliloquies, a painting can give
an ugly landscape a timbre and glamour beyond most devout photographs.
And as a picture of an accident or sexual act can sometimes shock us more than
the real event, the painter composting horror into an absorbent panorama
thrills us more than raw life can.
Alban Berg was able to forge his unmelodic and harsh music into a
vehicle for the transformation of squalor and misery in an almost ennobling
pessimism. In this endeavor recognizable melody might be a liability-any hint
of well-being had to be hard-earned under these new spartan rules-all of the
complacencies ofthe past were to be demolished as Marx and Freud had done.
Ironical insights of the lonely anti-heroes, however, do not give us much satis,,:
factions except that of utter honesty. Can we compare atonality to the atomization
of forms in cubist painting? What would remain after recognizable clues
had been excised would be something like a ghost of a familiar gesture that
would reassure us in this no-mans-Iand of total reconstruction, If we could
conceive of these operas being applied to folk music and legend, under a new
banner as in Brecht and Weill communisms the public might be educated to like
the bitter medicine. Likewise, the acerbic and desiccated regime of cubism,
instead of being replaced by the tyrannic antidote of hedonistic license, as in
Matisse and Bonnard (leading to an excess of silly Epicureanism) could become
a "way" of painting so eclectic as to be more than novelty, an ascetic
religious satisfaction.
Saper Vedere: to know how to see-was Leonardo's definition of the
use of painting. To know not only how to look at other paintings but at the
whole world (in Aix we see with Cezanne's eye, in ArIes with Van Gogh's; on
the Thames, Whistler's). More, it teaches us to be patient so that we learn by
contemplation to sense in these details the presence of the Creators whom we
must assume possesses the kind of love and serenity we feel when in Art's
quiet intoxication.
Expandable brevity in a painting's compacted forms differs from K.
Burke's synechdoche (taking the part for the whole), which is the weakness of
most abstraction. In distillations to high intensities all of the properties of the
large entity contemplated are preserved as a sun's are in a dwarf star or the
genetic code in a cell nucleus. We get an inkling of this imperceptible metamorphosis
in that instant when the painting we've struggled with seems to finish
itself, automatic and inevitable, without error, a sublimated fury, the fuel by
vol. 17, no. 1 19