Page 77 - Studio International - April 1968

New York commentary

Adolph Gottlieb at the Guggenheim
and Whitney Museums; Neo-Impres-
sionist paintings at the Guggenheim;
Philip McCracken at Willard; Mary
Frank at Zabriskie.
More than twenty years after the identification of historian's tools as comparisons and discussions of years old.) They state, often in a sentence or two,
Abstract Expressionism as a movement, Americans `influences'. They shrink from revealing the full the importance of these presences but they
are still caught in an Orpheus dilemma. There is measure of their youthful innocence and ignorance. invariably hesitate to cite specific instances.
a nagging impulse to turn back and look recent They are relieved when their critics begin not at Chroniclers of this period cannot be blamed too
history full in the face; and there is a correspond- the beginning, but at the beginning in which they much for their cursory habits. America has only
ingly strong desire to go on, as we usually have, show some measure of maturity and originality. recently become document-conscious (swerving off
lightly skimming the past and acting always as It is as though the exposure of the years that pre- course to a ridiculous extreme, as in the Pollock
though the beginning were now. ceded the kind of coalescence that came to be exhibition). In the old days, writers rarely bothered
These conflicting valences show up in a series of called a movement could in some way take away to record a running commentary on the lives of
one-man museum exhibitions during the past ten from the book-keeping of their ultimate achieve- young artists. Magazines were few, and largely
years or so, designed to document individual ments. reactionary. Critics were mostly hostile. And the
achievements within the movement. Specialists The museum exhibitions are gradually becoming artists themselves were caught up in more urgent
charged with sorting out the rather complicated fuller, but they still stop short of the real probing matters.
affairs of the Abstract Expressionists usually do try that could set these works within a coherent As a result, the contemporary historian is forced
to look back, but often they don't look very far and historical matrix. to rely on the faulty memories, often heavily edited,
they don't look very hard. For instance, catalogue writers dutifully recite a of the artists he is discussing. This is at best a
Their reluctance to probe the youthful formation few established circumstances, such as the Depres- hazardous technique of writing history. It is not
of each artist is due partly to the artists' own sion with its emergency art projects, its flourishing hard to understand why the critic or historian feels
reticence. Even though by quick American stan- mural teams, and the esprit de corps it sponsored safer when he begins not at the beginning, but only
dards a great deal of time has passed, many among artists. Also they always remark the fact at that point where there is an identifiable move-
surviving artists still feel traditional American that many Europeans, and more particularly the ment, the point being given usually as around 1940.
insecurity, secretly doubting what they read about Surrealists Masson, Breton, Ernst, Tanguy et al., This is what the GUGGENHEIM and WHITNEY
their real achievements. They worked for too long arrived in the United States at the outset of the MUSEUMS did in an unprecedented collaborative
in a harsh province to have the kind of assurance Second World War when the Abstract Expres- exhibition of the work of Adolph Gottlieb. The
their counterparts in Europe might have. Accord- sionist generation had about come of age. (Its Guggenheim Museum offered the 'early' work—
ingly, they are not happy with such indispensable members were then between twenty-five and forty that is, paintings from 1941 to the mid-1950s, and

Above Adolph Gottlieb Right Georges Seurat
Hidden image 1950 The model (Poseuse de face) 1890
oil on canvas oil on wood
42 x 54 in. 10++x 6f in.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. New York Museum, New York