Art Criticism - The State University of New York

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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? 34 Art Criticism
"Let us sing a new song" was the cry of American art in 1946. Then the erotic encyclopedists, slumming in art's undiscovered shantytown, overloaded a simple-hearted yea-saying with subleties worthy of the early Church. In the spirit of group iconoclasm we tolerated the most uncommunicable eccentricities of our fellow fighters. But a euphoria that is not selective debases all it touches, and a psychotic concocting of ever more intense poisons is worse than a waste of time. Therefore, sooner or later many were excommunicated from this jolly permissive monastery. Cynical old-timers chided overidealistic neophytes, structured the emotionality of millionaires bitten by the art bug, with the new rules of the game. The habit of looking nervously at Europe was broken and a lot of things were rendered unto Caesar. Since abstract expressionists were always violating the vows of non-objectivity, new bulls were published to cover these lapses. Admitting pre-"pop" artists like Rauschenberg and Johns with "their species of terror that activates the mystic, explorers, revolutionaries, scientists" (Rosenberg) brought in a divisive antiart, useful in humiliating all too masochistic and cooperative collectors, but as dangerous to build with as blocks of dynamite. How could a painting regimen that releases the vitriolic juices of self-debasement and shuns common referents ever be used to consecrate the compassion hidden in our shared despair? H. Rosenberg finds the same grim battle in Giacometti that he found in A. Gorki and W. deKooning. Instead of seeking insights that are inevitable, straight from heaven and set down without equivocation, he treasures these artists' mistakes in cramped palimpsests as a scholar would those of ancient manuscripts. Unrolling these brittle scrolls for us is a literary enthusiasm that isn't shared by most artists, who want the natural to appear whole, or if there i~ a struggle, would like to see the carnage removed from the battlefield. Apparent to the critical, the reality beneath the skin of the work of art is not accessible to most of us who want to see more communicable forms. Why should the paintings always remain unfinished? "Liberating himself from the habits of the eye ... the artist attains.an automatism that is the opposite ofletting gO."3 The promise of liberation of fleshed out excitements is what sparked abstract expressionism, not sequestering furtiveness. Ineptitude is not the tool with which unconscious insights are garnered. The salient quality of abstract expressionism was the laying of one's cards on the table. Once the recalcitrant forms are released from the preconscious mind (or wherever they hide) they are well-defined actors in a drama that is anything but melodramatic, yet perceptible enough not to need literary exegesis. The New York critics of the Partisan Review school, understandably sickened by the mickeymouse euphoria around them, insisted on searching for the tragic thread beneath-this was commendable. But to enlist a way of painting that was a promise of a new autonomy and beatitude, untouched by the grim cynicism of organizers for a united front, was to make painting a "handvol. 17, no. I 35
Page 1: Volume 17; Number I ART C.RIT1C1SM
Page 4 and 5: Art Department State University of
Page 6 and 7: 4 Art Criticism
Page 8 and 9: Breaking the Picture Plane: Reflect
Page 10 and 11: whale saga (more recently Hesse or
Page 12 and 13: and many of whom were born in Europ
Page 14 and 15: printed a bullet track fired into a
Page 16 and 17: music that (like the Mona Lisa) has
Page 18 and 19: causing by neglect a bitterness amo
Page 20 and 21: preserved some of the exuberance th
Page 22 and 23: which inspiration was stabilized. 5
Page 24 and 25: pain in the eyes of the cripple giv
Page 26 and 27: Bruckner did in his music) was not
Page 28 and 29: mortify into hard edges and mushy c
Page 30 and 31: with the sleep of reason. In the Am
Page 32 and 33: cent. Its fluidity of happy acciden
Page 34 and 35: And yet I can imagine these atrocit
Page 38 and 39: maiden" of Marxism (unless things g
Page 40 and 41: ic he realize that artists suddenly
Page 42 and 43: The little nonsense that wise men r
Page 44 and 45: desensitized by the imitated means
Page 46 and 47: symbolism? If the arts only exist t
Page 48 and 49: The Femme Fatale as seen in the wor
Page 50 and 51: Huysmans parallels the life of De R
Page 52 and 53: ask for the unreasonable and receiv
Page 54 and 55: ennui or physical distress leads th
Page 56 and 57: ences cited herein, the femme fatal
Page 58 and 59: period."2 He traced the tradition b
Page 60 and 61: suggestion to the artist and the po
Page 62 and 63: of Moreau's works is vague and myst
Page 64 and 65: ing her as the femme fatale, or sub
Page 66 and 67: The subtitle Satanic Decameron evok
Page 68 and 69: completely mythical. Coupled with a
Page 70 and 71: Moreau was very much a man of his t
Page 72 and 73: themes and images are often decaden
Page 74 and 75: p. 7-8; cited in Pierre Louis Mathi
Page 76 and 77: Between World War I and World War I
Page 78 and 79: shown distrust in the new styles. T
Page 80 and 81: These passages were meant to help g
Page 82 and 83: man public was voicing disapproval
Page 84 and 85: y old masters that were more suitab
Page 86 and 87:
Notes 1 Alfred Barr, "Art in the Th
Page 88 and 89:
From Diagnoses to Decadence: A Brie
Page 90 and 91:
ate effort to reproduce fully an im
Page 92 and 93:
patients. Charcot was often to be f
Page 94 and 95:
Breuer attributed the presence of A
Page 96 and 97:
still is traditionally associated w
Page 98 and 99:
is not always recognized as such. H
Page 100 and 101:
generation on which the multitude o
Page 102 and 103:
2 Elaine Showalter, The Female Mala
Page 104 and 105:
36 Freud and Breuer, 37. 37 Su'ch a
Page 106 and 107:
Recasting the Art History Survey: E
Page 108 and 109:
mode of self-consciousness that bes
Page 110 and 111:
student-as-Other "calls" us to teac
Page 112 and 113:
thesis of such descriptions into an
Page 114 and 115:
In this final section of the essay,
Page 116 and 117:
image-world, the picture opens up a
Page 118 and 119:
history must itself be rethought in
Page 120 and 121:
15 Two of the most prominent propon
Page 122 and 123:
power: from the premodern exercise
Page 124:
~fJed in the Unikd Smtc, .• 9 ~]~
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Art Criticism - The State University of New York

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