Art Criticism - The State University of New York

which inspiration was stabilized.
5. MORESOFlHELOCALEXPRESSIONISTS
Lighthearted enjoyment of their sudden fame's absurdity, a semibohemian
group bravado based on alcohol rather than imagist drugs, doing
things like old-fashioned dancing and softball with elegant style,
Hemingwayward, rarely risking pratfalls in the big business environment in
which they moved, these were some of the traits of the most prominent abstract
expressionists of the early nineteen-fifties. No one could complain of
their frightening eccentricities, yet they have become well-known as much
through their behavior as through their works, thanks to brilliant publicity,
mostly word-of-mouth. The surface tension of their paintings had weakened to
. such an extent that by the end of the decade they had lost most of their
followers, but their code of manners was still in effect as a defense against
lionization.
Their physicality and anti-literary bias found an unlikely symbiosis
with intellectuals who had been fighting sentimentalities with abstruse word
puzzles that held no interest for the artist, To head off a public that might show
too much interest in the seductions of surrealism, they pushed non-objectivity
in paint as the banner of the thinker. "What's good in the new art?" was
answered with "This is what we like." Eager to improve themselves, collectors
collaborated in aborting insights and fantasies typical of a European surrealism
too effeminate and decadent for the U.S.A
Silenced up to now by my realization that attempting to fill in some of
the blanks of that period would be called envy, I write down these sclerotic
gripes now in the hope that others in my position will agree with me, since they
know that because of our double allegiance to the art organization and our
superegos our ambivalences are tearing us apart to a degree that threatens our
careers. Excavations in paint that were intended to be later worked out in
completed form were truncated and exhibited in the craze for the unfinished
that dominated those years. (How many times have I been told to stop before
I wrecked the picture and later heard the same people remark that I had trouble
finishing my work!) Ever aware, however unconsciously, of decorative requirements,
we overestimated the importance of composition in our paintings, wellrehearsed
for their places on distant walls of collectors and dealers who suddenly
knew only too wen what they wanted. Instead of abstracting from reallife
objects, we were abstracting from the non-objective non-forms that were
our basic vocabulary against the crimes of abstraction (well-known to turn
good-hearted neighbors against each other) and to lead to a closed circuit in
art. Paintings were leaping from their walls a little too melodramatically; we
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Art Criticism