Art Criticism - The State University of New York

are the only colors we can afford now.
Our right hands are often happily surprised by what our left hands
have done. Only after a painting has been finished can its intention be described
by the artist-if what he had planned had come to pass there would
have been a painting not worth describing. As long as the puzzled layman can
ask "is he out to shock, out to comfort us or out of his mind?" there is still hope
for the painting or sculpture, and it's almost certain that it took its own direction
apart from the artist's intention or mood. He tells himself: I would like to
combine the humanism of Rembrandt with the absurd wit of Klee, as Hugo
Wolf stands between Wagner and Satie, but ends up painting another portrait
of those three flighty Spring sisters, April, May and June.
"You tried too hard." What a strange thing to say to a painter who, if
he had tried just a little harder could have released the full flow of his unmined
genius, inhibited by fashionable esthetics. So would we all amaze ourselves if
we were to will ourselves to capture the beaten-down talent that is in each of us
equally as our share ofthe "Godhead", the universal energy,
If a painter sees more than surfaces perhaps he is not being true to the
fructifying limits of his vocation. Wisdom in art lies in not being wise; this is
how we were cured of psychosomatic disorders, by looking away from the
wound. But how often the artist is prey to the very sicknesses he has healed in
others with his work. An art strong enough to also cure its practitioners has
not yet evolved and will not evolve if we keep speeding up the highway to
Apocalypsia.
Perhaps a fertile period in art can afford to be retroactive, to rewrite
history, as well as being alert for expected mutations that will shape its future
the way it wants to. I can imagine something like Chopin's Nocturne, Op. 27,
No.2 galvanizing an intelligentsia in the 1840s toward a new tenderness once
called flacidity by a harsher age that could not afford industrialism's luxuries of
compassion. In our time art's pieties are toward a cauterization beyond a love
betrayed and sentimentalized by the mass id.
Bela Bartok's continued fidelity to dissonance and shock as he grew
older like Adrian Leverkuhn's in T. Mann's "Dr. Faustus" endeared him to the
younger iconoclasts. Today he might have second thoughts, confronted with
his disciples' nihilisms lackinghis spirituality that allowed him to roam carelessly
into realms of incongruity all too congruous now. "Manic" excitement
must give way to recuperative depression as the hangover warns the euphoric
drinker into temperance. If an artist turns up who uses his gifts best in an
anachronistic framework, why should he be responsible to those who only
know the intoxication of nowness? They have not seized their day correctly
and won't let him be heard. They who don't have tricky intelligences must
muddle through with inept love, hoping for mercy from those who re-write
history.
vol. 17, no. 1 39