Page 48 - Studio International - February 1968

NEW YORK

commentary by Dore Ashton

Stella at Castelli; Noland at André
Emmerich; 'Homage to Marilyn Monroe'
at Sidney Janis; 'Pollymorphous Images'
at Cordier Ekstrom
'We are very knowing bastards

And what we kn ow is . . . ? Not even Ronald
Kitaj, the author of the phrase is quite sure, unlike
T. S. Eliot. In his ruminative half-thoughts, pub-
lished by the University of California recently as a
catalogue for an exhibition, Kitaj seems to be
circling the central problem in most painters'
minds: Can the tradition of abstract art be sus-
tained ?
The question is becoming urgent. Not too long
ago, I read a quotation from Malraux which
alarmed the French so much that they have
launched an enquête to refute or verify him. 'Ab-
straction,' he said, 'has represented the greatest
possible freedom for the painter. But it is a school.
It will cease like all schools.'
If, in the mid twentieth century, abstraction is
what we know, and if it has become a conven-
tionalized language with no issue possible, then
Malraux as prophet may well be confirmed. The
ways of thinking about the problem are very
troubled indeed. One way emerges in Kitaj's text:
`What is to be made of the attractive thesis that
abstraction compensates as a corrective to material-
ism? Shades of years ago . . . a confrontation be-
tween Eastern stasis and Western dynamism and
a concomitant allegiance to abstract forms
arranged or not arranged in a decorative pattern
recalls those early years of modernism like a lost
peace when the seductive powers that used to
attach to Eastern stasis stalked abroad . . . when modernism didn't count and hadn't yet come to as free as Malraux suggests the abstract artist is.
modernism didn't count and hadn't yet come to terms with established procedure.' Self-conscious Moreover, it is almost certain that reflections on
terms with established procedure ... ' as were the early abstract artists about the new the original assumptions of modern art become
Kitaj here raises two questions that recur in spirit and the revolutionary change in painting, it more and more narrow as the years pass, since
serious discussions about painting. The one con- is quite true that modernism hadn't yet become an more and more territory has been charted and
cerns the spiritual values that all the early pioneers institution. If it has now become a household fix- definitely explored. In a commonsense view, there
in the abstract idiom—whether expressionist like ture (what woman doesn't pride herself on her are only so many variations that can be stated
Kandinsky or formal like Mondrian, or both, like modernism?) and if it is an unquestioned aspect of after, let's say, de Stijl, and there are only so many
Klee—insisted were basic to the abstract mode. our existence, then Kitaj and Malraux are both basic principles that can be isolated and expostu-
They didn't think at all that abstract forms were fairly accurate barometers. And modernism is one lated. After, it becomes a matter of seeking new
merely decorative patterns, though they may have of the things we knowing bastards know like the combinations of old ideas, or of setting out in some
had some secondary thought about 'Eastern stasis.' back of our hands. other direction entirely. (I am not rich in common
As Kitaj rightly suggests, they had in mind a There is no question that the painting of pictures sense, so my own view is that the strenuous effort
spiritual conquest of Western materialism. Their and their subsequent journeys to art galleries and to purge abstraction of its pretensions to other
works, although abstract, were rooted in the con- thence to museums has become a routinized and meanings is responsible for the visible confusion
viction that something other, something untrans- modern procedure. If an artist has managed to get and slackening of quality in abstract painting. If
latable into words but meaningful would be trans- on the circuit, his routine is pre-established. He a painting is only an object to give visual pleasure,
mitted. Something, in fact, that would express a works large; he cannot help but bear the gallery in or rather, if it is intended to be an object that gives
philosophical view of the cosmos. They were that mind, and he takes it for granted that, ultimately, visual pleasure and nothing more, then of course
grand in their aspirations. his work—if successful in the worldly sense—belongs that is what it will be, which is not enough.)
The second point in Kitaj's text both raises the on the wall of some institution. It is a rare artist I think a host of perturbing contradictions were
question and secretes the answer:
. . when who can screen out all of these procedures and be already deposited in modern art, abstract art, in its
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