Page 21 - Studio International - January 1966

individual increasingly obsolete, they felt the need to
assert their uniqueness and humanity quite strongly. It
is no wonder, then, that they found it hard to resist
the liberating impulses provided by the Surrealists
exiled in New York during the 1940's. The Americans
received psychological cues as well as stylistic
ones. They developed an attitude of mind that sought
refuge within the individual psyche rather than in the
physical world. Their works revealed their desperate
attempts to call forth a new world of their own invention
—pre-logical, pre-mythic, non-rational. Their individual
gesture and decision were invested with sacrosanct
value. They wanted to be regarded as creators, not
ciphers, in a world that had gone mad about them.
Motherwell summed up the attitude of a generation
when he said : 'I feel most real to myself in the studio.'
By the 1950's, the avant-garde was profoundly
engaged in mining its thoughts and feelings for
translation into physical energy that would ripple
through arms and finger tips before being caught by the
welcoming canvas. Art-making, with better artists never
a mindless gesture nor merely the mark of an operation,
was, as the sculptor Ibram Lassaw said succinctly,
. . a process started by the artist.' Or, as William
Baziotes explained : 'Whereas certain people start with
a recollection of an experience and paint that experi-
ence, to some of us the act of doing it becomes the
experience.' Both men would certainly have agreed
with Willem de Kooning when he said : 'I'm always
in the picture somewhere.'
To be the picture's maker as well as its subject
demanded great strength (perhaps desperation is a
better word) of purpose. The artist had to rely entirely
on himself, operating durationally and simultaneously
within a time continuum outside history. Clyfford Still
got to the very heart of the matter when he noted :
'We are now committed to an unqualified act, not
Above Below illustrating out-worn myths or contemporary alibis. One
Richard Diebenkorn Clyfford Still must accept total responsibility for what one executes.'
Woman in a Window 1957 1957-D No. 1 1957
59 x 56 in. 113 x 159 in. The 'one' to whom Still referred was both a person
Albright-Knox Art Gallery Albright-Knox Art Gallery and an artist. If the source of a painting was '. . . the
Buffalo, New York Buffalo, New York
Gift of Seymour H. Knox Gift of Seymour H. Knox Unconscious,' as Pollock 'the person' would say, there
invariably arrived the moment when, as Guston 'the
artist' would say, '. . . the air of the arbitrary vanished
and the paint fell into positions that felt destined.' If a
number of paintings might look similar, it was not
necessarily because the artist wanted to repeat himself
or paint by formula. Rather, he probably believed with
Clyfford Still that 'no painting stops with itself, is
complete of itself. It is a continuation of previous paint-
ings and is renewed in successive ones.'
Although it is true that, when compared to Surrealism,
American Abstract Expressionism revealed the artist's
physical gesture more often than his psychical state,
the gesture and motivating impetus were entirely
personal. This left the artist naked before the world.
'There is no more forthright declaration, and no shorter
path to man's richness, nakedness and poverty than
the painting he does,' James Brooks said. 'Nothing
can be hidden on its flat surface—the least private as
well as the most personal of worlds.'
What does the artist feel, then, when his painting goes
out into the world ? Mark Rothko perhaps best summed
up the profound feelings the Abstract Expressionist
would have: 'A picture lives by companionship,
expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive
observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a
risky act to send it out into the world. How often it