Page 66 - Studio International - July/August 1967

Left Below Bottom
Helen Frankenthaler Friedel Dzubas Kenneth Noland
Blue Jump 1966 Beyond 1966 Slope shadow 1966
acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas
114 x 47 in. 27+ x 165 in. 63 x 190 in.

in an expanding society. (Think of the bad art that individual and native roots. The artists associated growth of a mass audience has stimulated the
came out of nineteenth-century France; New York in the term—there was never a movement—were desire for a reproducible art, where the multiples
in the mid-twentieth century is like a dozen personalities. Abstract Expressionism was a denial are the exact duplicates of the prototypes. Indus-
Parises.) Today's standards are not expressed in of the group effect in art. What was shared was an trial techniques and materials, adaptable to the
polarities or sharp alternatives. Those who believe attitude, a posture, that called for individualism on visual arts, already exist to meet this demand.
in the future of some present mode are apt to pro- a heroic scale. Nothing could have been much Within the new frame of reference the artist finds
pagandize for it, ignoring or perhaps denouncing more American, much more in the grand native his primary function as conceptualizer, not as
what lies outside its immediate concern; they see tradition of nineteenth-century Romanticism, than maker.
the art they prefer as the culmination of the his- the work of such artists as Pollock, Still, Newman, In short, the new art reflects more and more the
torical process, the only vehicle to the future, not Rothko, and de Kooning. Rendered uninteresting size, scale, energy, ideal of efficiency, and technical
as one more factor out of which the future will be at one stroke were imitations of European art, the sophistication of industrialized America.
made. In the United States, where the art scene is quasi-political modes of the social realists, and Sometimes one has to get out of New York to see
stimulated, like almost everything else, by relativ- local-colour-and-folklorist chic. One has to look to what American art is really about, to see what the
ism, pragmatism, and pluralism, art criticism tends American literature of the nineteenth century— to taste has become. The Thirtieth Biennal Exhibi-
to be categorical and absolute. But this absolutism Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, and Melville— tion of American Painting, held this Spring at the
has little to do with values; these remain prag- for a spiritual analogue to the revolution in CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART, Washington, D.C.,
matic. In the United States, critical absolutism is American painting of the 1940s. offered a valuable insight. The exhibition was in
only another weapon in an arsenal of promotional What this revolution has meant in America is not two parts, an Invited Section and an Open Com-
techniques. always discernible. In the dazzle and clamour of petition Section. Ninety-seven paintings were
Of course, art has a continuing development that market place one doesn't readily see how pro- shown, representing 21 artists in each category.
within its idiom, variously modified by social pres- foundly American taste has been affected. Still less The Invited Section was selected by the museum
sures. Art is reactive; it stimulates art. Technical is one apt to notice that the twenty-five-year-old director; the Open Competition produced, at the
or formal solutions induce new ways of seeing and withdrawal from Europe of the Abstract Expres- first stage, three and a half thousand slides sub-
make possible the shift in artistic attack likely to be sionists and their pursuit of sublimity has resulted mitted from every state except Mississippi, Idaho,
called progress. Art is progress; that is to say, one in the establishment of what must be called an and South Dakota. A staff committee examined
development in art leads almost inevitably to American artistic scale. Whatever its apparent these and asked 96 competitors to send work. From
another. Sometimes the movement re-emphasizes subject matter, whatever its means, contemporary these 96 entries, 21 were chosen for hanging by a
an earlier mode. This, too, may be progress. In American art essays the grand manner, but within jury consisting of the directors of the Addison
fact, the development of art is an unending dia- a simplified and even impersonal language, avoid- Gallery of American Art, the Wadsworth Athen-
lectic on the subject of visual reality. ing rhetoric. Intimacy is largely gone from Ameri- eum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This
But such linkage as I am suggesting is intricate. can painting and sculpture. The current movement same jury awarded the Corcoran prizes (medals
For example, one might say that American Ab- is toward an art that is public and environmental, plus cash) to four of the invited artists. In order of
stract Expressionism proposed views and proce- that is fundamental and undemonstrative, exploit- distinction, these were Jules Olitski, Paul Jenkins,
dures that were a workable alternative to the ing presence rather than process. John McLaughlin, and Kenneth Noland.
then-dominant assumptions of the School of Paris. A recent development has been the attack upon The quality of the exhibition was reasonably
But, also, this great breakthrough of the 1940s had the notion of the uniqueness of the art object. The high. Possibly this was the best of such shows at
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