Page 49 - Studio International - June 1968

ing ... but with art as such', and that 'Art degenerates as it approaches present Pollock's style in relation to Cubism, but in a more compli-
the conditions of theatre'44 are probably original. Fried's Green- cated and sensitive way and in a parallel with its relation to im-
bergian and rigid understanding of art only in purist media cate- pressionism and Surrealism. Miss Rose's account of American Art since
gories, and his inability to apprehend 'content' outside the material 190046 departs from the Greenberg vision in considering Surrealism,
form of painting and sculpture, result in his crude categorization of mixed-media activity by Johns, Rauschenberg, and John Cage, and
all media-mixtures and 'content' of general human sensibility into Pop art as serious aspects of American art; although she propagates
`theatre' : a category which he rightly sees as dangerous to his own some Greenberg fallacies in that book,47 she has since taken a more
too narrow concept of uncorrupted art. critical stand against 'formalist criticism'.48 Recently she attacked
The obvious dangers of swallowing Greenberg's philosophy without Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Fried for their Marxist vested-interest
criticism of it have done much to render irrelevant the determination in a linear evolutionary concept of history and in a formally 'purist'
of these Greenberg followers to write significantly, originally, and art, and for their partisan dogmas"; at the same time she made
influentially: a sad waste of concentrated intelligence, energy, and the positive suggestions that newcomers to criticism look to other
frequently excellent insights. For Krauss and Fried give an abund- models and consider art in terms of its 'horizontal' rather than 'verti-
ance of these, and Greenberg's pronouncements constantly embody cal' historic relationships."
insights which, if thought about critically, can provide a structure I would second these suggestions with an additional one: that
against which to build one's own artistic vision. critics try to abstract themselves from the hustle of contemporary
This is the way two other critics have reacted: both Barbara Rose history to spend more time thinking and feeling about what a parti-
and William Rubin have been influenced by Greenberg's criticism, cular artistic experience is all about before they begin relating it to
both approach art in terms of history, visual form, and style-epochs, anything. More open feeling about and listening to art and artists
but neither limits him/herself to Greenberg's vision of modern art. could sharpen every critic's ear when he hears his own voice in the
Rubin's essays on 'Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition'45 noisy world. And we are all critics. q

34 Paralleled in sculpture by a line between modified by later self-criticism, how dependent is Krauss' Harvard Ph.D. thesis. Louis, Noland,
collage, metal construction, David Smith, and his sense of style-history on the chronology of his Olitski, Stella, and Caro have also received
Anthony Caro. own confrontations with publicly exhibited art, repeated notice from them.
35 Were Louis and Noland so provincial in 1959 and how un-related are his style-epoch labels to 39 'Ronald Davis', Artforum, April 1967.
that, alone among artists along the Eastern sea- the real living history of art and artists. 40 Mrs Krauss assumes that one lecture by De
board, they did not go to New York to see 'The 37 After 1949 the paintings of the group known as Kooning on 'measurement' in the early 1950s,
New American Painting' exhibition on its trium- the 'Abstract Expressionists' (as discussed above, plus his formal relationship with Braque's and
phal return from Europe? If not, they would have note 36) have essentially nothing to do with cubist Picasso's Cubism Ca relationship Clement Green-
seen excellent work by Newman, Rothko, and compositional space fragmented by multiple planes berg was the first to point to...as immediate and
Still, and could have read statements by the artists related to the picture surface and to represented irrefutable', she says), is enough to have 'guaran-
in the accompanying catalogue (The New American objects: rather they are unified fields of space and teed that measurement would pre-occupy his
Painting, New York, Museum of Modern Art, colour in which no 'planes' can be measured by painting as it did theirs'. She proceeds to analyse
1959). And was Greenberg's influence on Louis geometric or representational standards, fields De Kooning's development in terms of Braque's
and Noland so slight at this time that they ignored whose space is established by the paintings as wholes concept of measurement, blithely ignoring De
the exhibition of Newman's work which he organ- rather than confined or manipulated within the Kooning's more immediate interest in Gorky's
ized for French & Co. in the same year? It's canvas frame (its shape or planar surface). Miro-Kandinsky-like paintings and the alterna-
doubtful. And if following Newman, Rothko, and This new form was developed by the Abstract tive side of De Kooning's interest in 'measurement'
Still is such 'safe' taste in 1962, why deny Noland Expressionists as direct, single, large, unequivocal as part of his search for order: his concern with
and Louis an early exercise of it? I suspect that it expressions of terror, tragedy, and ultimate har- the 'melodrama of vulgarity' in which he felt
is to support, again by implication, Greenberg's mony in confrontations with Man and His himself so 'wrapped' that 'Art never seems to make
notion of the historic art-spirit evolving inde- actions, particularly with their own inner selves me feel peaceful or pure'. (Cf. his statement on
pendently of artists and their real contact with and their activity as artists. Concern with this sort this in the 1951 Symposium on 'What Abstract
art. of content is constantly expressed in the artists' Art Means to Me' at the Museum of Modern Art
36 Newman, Still, and Rothko developed their statements, and it is related to their interest in the in New York, printed in their Bulletin, vol. 18,
characteristic styles in the late 1940s concurrently art, ritual, myth, and character of primitive and spring 1951, and in The New American Painting
and in close association with Pollock, De Kooning, pre-classical mankind. 1959.)
Motherwell, Gottlieb, Tomlin, and (later) Kline; It was the Surrealists who were examples to the Unlike Greenberg and Krauss, De Kooning has
they did not previously paint in interlaced drips or Abstract Expressionists in these interests in myth, not replaced the struggle with himself by an easy,
body-gestured slashings characteristic of the mor- ritual, primitive art, and painting directly expres- rigid 'order'. His recent paintings show this; and
phological form of the others' paintings. Also, they sive of one's inner, subconscious self. The idea if Krauss' ideas of 'measurement' are not there,
exhibited at the same galleries, contributed to the behind their technique of 'automatism' was passion still is: and that is what should be discussed
same 'little magazines', participated in the teach- important, in controlled forms, to all the Abstract critically.
ing and Friday lectures at the 'Subject of the Expressionists. Barnett Newman's drawn 'lines' 41 'Lichtenstein's Sculpture', Artforum, January
Artist' school founded by Motherwell, Rothko, are as much a personal, gestural expression of his 1968. This essay is really a criticism of Lichten-
Baziotes and David Hare, collaborated on the 1951 own interior self (a self more structured, intellec- stein's autumn 1967 exhibition of 'Modern Art' at
letter of 'The Irrascible 18' protesting at the tual, and philosophical than Pollock's) as Pollock's the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.
policies of the Metropolitan Museum, and thus dripped lines are of his more physiologically 42 Artforum, summer 1967. It was this essay which
must be considered as much a part of the group of turbulent mysticism. drew witty criticism from Allan Kaprow and
artists known as 'Abstract Expressionists' as This sort of insight requires an openness to con- Robert Smithson (cited in note 1, May issue).
Pollock, De Kooning, Baziotes, Motherwell, Gott- tent, Surrealism, and the uniqueness of the paint- 43 Fried notes that 'minimalist' is Greenberg's
lieb, Kline, or Tomlin. ings, painters, and their inter-relationships; term and he himself prefers 'literalist'. After isolat-
But Greenberg did not seem to know their work superficially morphological descriptions of the ing this type of art from 'modernist' painting and
well in the late 1940s; he only 'discovered' Barnett group style in relation to Cubism at best lead away sculpture (for which his examples are, naturally,
Newman in print two years after Newman's first from the powerful, personal statements of Abstract Noland, Stella, Olitski, Smith and Caro), Fried
one-man show at Betty Parsons' in 1950 (cf. his Expressionist paintings. describes its salient features according to Green-
`Feeling is All', Partisan Review, January—Febru- 38 The almost incestuous territorializing of David berg as presenting or embodying the condition of
ary, 1952). His distinction of the style of Rothko, Smith is a case in point: Fried has written about `non-art' (a condition re-labelled by Fried as
Newman and Still from that of the 'painterly him, of course; Jane Harrison Cone organized an `objecthood') in a 'presence' which 'Greenberg
abstraction' of Abstract Expressionism shows how exhibition of his work at Harvard's Fogg Museum was the first to analyse, is basically a theatrical
tied is his style-label to his 1940s enthusiasms un- in 1966; and Smith is now the subject of Rosalind effect or quality—a kind of stage presence'.