Page 46 - Studio International - March 1968

Left Union 1967
acrylic on canvas, 85 x 98½ in.
Below Electric blue 1967
acrylic on canvas, 90½ x 104 in.

attempting to work towards is crucial for Moon. It is his reading of himself—but partly also by the traditions
crucial not only to the progress of individual paintings within which the artist is working.
but also to his whole position as a painter and specifically The English have never been amenable to Existentialist
to his relationship with the work of the American Post- aesthetics. There is something in our character which
painterly Abstractionists, Noland and Stella in particular. inhibits us from making creative statements which are
Despite the strongest of temptations to accept the 'once- self-revelatory and at the same time grand. It is perhaps
off' painting as an achievement, Moon went back to it, no coincidence that we have been made to feel most
applied several more coats of paint, and came that much insular in the context of twentieth-century art at moments
closer to the image he had conceived. For Kenneth when the most advanced art elsewhere was exuberant and
Noland, even more so for Jules Olitski I suspect, to have expressive: Bloomsbury in the shade of the Fauves, the
resumed work at that point would have been tantamount middle generation eclipsed by the Abstract Expres-
to a breach of faith. And anyway, I don't believe Noland sionists. It was under the banner of formal abstraction
or Olitski would think in terms of conceived images. that we so nearly reached the 'Promised Land' in the
But if Moon's first reference point, as a European thirties.
painter preoccupied with colour, is still Matisse, he is Younger generation painters in England are, I think,
also, as an artist committed to a very pure view of paint- very conscious that the supremacy of American painting
ing, very much involved with the American painting since the war has been in part due to its great openness
which followed from Pollock. This involves him again in and generosity, and they are thus anxious to avoid
two different concepts of what a painting can be. The excluding the possibility of a more direct, less inhibited
dilemma can be expressed very clearly. Does the artist, working process. Jeremy Moon has recently painted a
like Matisse, work for the formation of one certain image, one-coat painting—yellow on cotton duck—and left it
however long it may take to crystallize ;3 or does he, like like that. What is important is not that he may now
Pollock, and like Noland after him, just work, secure in the concentrate his energies in this direction (which I think
knowledge that being a painter he will produce occa- very unlikely) but that the possibility of once-off painting,
sional visual images which are true to himself, albeit of painting fast, will now always be present in his work.
these may be only a small percentage of his total output Part of the excitement of Moon's recent paintings results
of paintings. The choice is largely dictated by personality— from their relation to (rather than dependence on) the
the painter's priorities as an artist depend ultimately on best painting being done in America. The dialogue