Page 31 - Studio International - April 1965

masses, but do so not for any emotional satisfaction, shock of pleasure—this would explain the appeal of
but merely to promote the sale of a periodical carrying painters like Larry Rivers, Kitaj, and Rauschenberg.
commercial advertisements. The whole range of such Such painters have a recognisable 'hand-writing' and
popular images is a by-product of competitive assemble their visual debris with sensitive feeling for
capitalism and as such does not exist in non-capitalist colour and composition. It may be doubted, however,
countries. whether these remnants of an aesthetic conscience are
I do not make such an observation with an ethical enough to rescue their works from final incoherence.
bias: art has always been indifferent to moral laws. It is It will be said that such aesthetic criteria are beside
conceivable that the visual images invented for the ex- the point: this is anti-art, not art, and aesthetics is a
ploitation of the public could be the subject-matter of a dirty word. The pop-artist is like those atheists who
genuine pictorial art, and the work of the American make a religion of their disbelief: he does not accept
painter, Stuart Davis, often claimed as a precursor of any standards of judgement. He does not address any
'pop-art', is an example of a genuine art of this kind. audience and does not represent any point of view. He
But in the paintings of Stuart Davis the images submit echoes Goethe's poem from which the nihilist Max
to an aesthetic discipline : they are composed as care- Stirner took his slogan : he has staked everything on
fully as the images in an academic painting—indeed nothingness :
Stuart Davis might be criticised for his academic use of Ich hab'mein sach' auf nichts gestellt.
Larry Rivers
Africa 1962-63 popular images. Occasionally a pop-artist may use this A philosophy of nihilism, of extreme egoism, is per-
Oil on canvas 112 3/4 x 133 in. material with an intellectual acuteness and com- missible, but it must be expressed coherently if it is to be
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery
New York positional skill that give the spectator a momentary taken seriously. And for all his scorn of moral and
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