Page 32 - Studio International - November 1967

Morris Louis
Winged hue 1959
acrylic on cotton duck
x 99 in.
Coll: R. A. Rowan,
Los Angeles
Kasmin Ltd, London

Partly because it was in competition with Parisian much more curtailed, but also more humanly organic
painting, partly because there now opened up an un- and personalized. Eventually Louis and Kenneth Noland
expected historical opportunity, Abstract Expressionism became the practitioners of painting of sudden bursts of
could wallow in the narcissicism of painterly handling inspiration, in which conception and execution were
as the sudden generator of content itself. It is sufficient to collapsed into one unity. Noland, not long ago on tele-
observe the palpitating sense of the paint matter itself in vision, came to refer to this as 'one shot art', meaning
Guston, the resonance of an irrevocably veiled colour- that an image was materialized by a single action, which
light in Rothko, to grasp what it meant to liberate all the could not be modified once initiated. He could also have
energies of the brush for the celebration of a pleasure added concomittantly, that the picture itself, as in his
which was at once exclusive and refined. chevron or diamond paintings, or Louis"pillars', had to
Developments since then seem almost to have carica- be apprehended all at once, in one fell swoop.
tured this pleasure, blowing it up to an overwhelming In our McLuhan era, everyone is familiar with the
fragrance, as in the floral series of Morris Louis. Here motto: 'The medium is the message.' It refers, of course,
the aristocratic base of the image almost turns itself inside to the changes wreaked upon our lives by those extensions
out into a new ferocity. The tension between crisis morals of our nervous systems, the communications media.
and, say, colour purity, which characterized an aspect According to McLuhan, we are all being 're-tribalized',
of Abstract Expressionism, here dissolves into diaphanous often unknowingly, by the sensory-tactile properties of
vision remarkably Art Nouveau, and hence extravagant, electronic media, whose grains and meshes have far more
in style. The previously conservationist nature of abstract art impact than the narrations with which they are ostensibly
changes into a kind of combustion-like impulse. It makes concerned. But what else is McLuhan's epigram than a
what once looked like an effulgent hedonism appear re-formulation of Clive Bell's 'significant form' hypo-