Art Criticism - The State University of New York

erature the not very evocative works of painters who had never read much of
anything. As in Henry James or Proust, looking at pictures and sculptures is
merely an excuse for a strolling author's companionable witticisms and exquisite
insights, the art objects cringing in embarrassment at these clevernesses
rolling over them. Perhaps in the irascible surfaces of these silent dreamers we
can sense a regret of having handed over all explanations to the word men.
Beneath the hectic and yet austere vocabularies of painters like W.
deKooning do we detect a stifled yearning for the lush realism of the surrealists
(the wipe-out angry smear of a head turning too fast for us to see echoed
in F. Bacon), along with a fear that these temptations might take root? The
"club" siphoned off a lot of literary insights that might have enriched New York
expressionism but which were not being worn in those dogmatic years.
The worst melancholy comes from clearly seeing one's own and others'
mistakes and not being able to correct them. At least we may list them in
writing, we who have rarely bounded with words our amorphous urges, publish
or literally perish from our dammed-up gripes. But we blow our steam
unnoticed in the flood of other non-writers similarly relieving themselves of
iniquities' intolerable tensions.
American painters are only allowed by the wordsmiths to talk folksy,
like J. Marin. M. McCarthy said that she only wanted to hear painters talk
about their craft, their tools, not philosophize, and Mallarme told Degas sonnets
were written with words, not ideas. By sharpening their images on and off
the canvas, painters might achieve at least the stringency of a Whitman, or
failing that, lead prolix writers back to mute, pregnant forms worth at least a
dozen words, away from the hypnotic marketplace . .3uying art they don't really
like is the tribute the latecomers to the art "game" pay to the intellectuals, their
expert advisers who the speculators fear might have an answer to their discontents
almost as difficult as psychoanalysis. Why should our love of art, one of
our few sources of redemption from self-doubt, be made self-conscious by
these very pragmatic experts whose own esthetic revolution has not been
completely bloodless?
Doctors too close to the disease, these critics have only a few favored
patients, most of whom have only got collectors' greed.
Painters who are very conscious of the eyes of the painters of the
past are constantly on stage in a way that seems affected to those whose work
is not intended to be judged in this way. This veneer of sophistication delights
their bookish apologists who are not too conversant with the painter's view of
his tradition. We get muddled esthetic language from both ends. Both want a
synthesis that will put all in order, but neither takes the other's realm seriously
enough. What could be more literary than titling a non-objective potpourri
after Dylan Thomas? Or more sentimental than discovering a noble savage in
a tongue-tied paintslinger?
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Art Criticism