Page 19 - Studio International - July 1965

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ready for the seeds of a reaction. To quote again:
'We angrily resented the sentimental pessimistic
humanism which occupied literature and the fine arts
in the Fifties, when misery was a fashionable conven­
tion. We despised the thin-blooded melancholic
aestheticism of the surviving artists of the middle
generation. We recognised the authentic interprete1·s of
the Forties: Wols, Hartung, Fautrier, Michaux, Pollock
and De Kooning; but we did not feel any need to
assume their position. We opposed them as soon as
their existential experience and its expression were
turned into ... a handy spiritual convenience·.
This is the definition of a point of view in negative.
What then was left? Rejecting the joys of the 'economic
miracle' and the consolations of intellectual despair, the
two were left in what Piene calls the absurd position of
optimism, the 'positive attitude'. This he defines as:
'trying to change things from bad to good. darkness to
light, decay to life, ugliness to beauty, stagnation to
movement, illustration to pulsation, intellect to integra­
tion, drama to sensibility, obscurity to purity, naturalism

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