Page 31 - Studio International - November 1967

Top right Mark Rothko No, 7 1960
oil on canvas, 105 x 93 in.
Collection: the artist

Bottom right Philip Guston Duo 1961
oil on canvas, 721 x 68 in.
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York

Below Larry Poons Tamper red 1966
acrylic on canvas, 130 x 90 in.
The Whitney Museum of American Art

been striving to bridge the gap between the physical facts rhythms of the picture. Of course, the sheer radiance and
of their work, and its potential social meaning by scale of Poons' work reflects the current situation in
polemics that seem somewhat hollow, in retrospect. And American abstract painting. Far more than in Mondrian,
now, suddenly, none of this seems necessary. he conveys by colour alone the aerated and buoyant
When we look at a painting created by Larry Poons, we bounce of lights flipping off and on in space. Almost
confront a work whose author feels no need to verbally despite itself, his work embodies a childish, glittering
justify the basis of his activity. For Poons, art consists of glamour, an almost neon excitement. But the surfaces
effecting so many calculations, and ordering measurable are dry, and the formal vocabulary is so reduced as to be
processes. And in this he typifies the majority of abstrac- even without the aid of Mondrian's orienting grid. With
tionists today. Piquantly enough, Poons owes a great Poons, one has a kind of Puritan-Roccoco.
deal to the late Mondrian, especially of the Boogie- It was not always such in American art. One has to go
Woogie series, in which something so specific as the actual back to the fifties to see in operation a vision whose aim
tempo of New York is invoked by the structure and colour was an almost total and certainly unashamed sensuality.
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