Page 23 - Studio International - October1968

The critic Clement Greenberg has been widely its own accord on the wings of tortuous style. Is there
criticised recently for making highly subjective perhaps an archetype in this?) And as I have said I
quality judgements in isolated statements, uncon- feel the spirit in question to belong very much to the
nected by any general critical argument save that of turn of the century. The art of Mondrian seems to me
the overall tenor of his critical pronouncements and to be much more typical of twentieth-century aspira-
taste preferences exemplified in thirty years of writing tions, and his ideas still point the way to the future of
about art. Leaving aside the question of whether this art in a very general sense, and in different directions.
is a legitimate tool for a major critic to employ, I even though the austerity of his own sensibility will
will simply say that it seems to me to be the only preclude the form which subsequent developments
means of critical expression open to a practising take from being easily recognizable as originating in
artist at any rate, and that the character of that him.
artist's work may be taken to stand in as background Contemporaneity (not novelty) as formulated by
Baudelaire is always a pressing need and a burden on
Apropos of evidence of pedigree and prejudice for those who feel artists, and is at once the greatest stimulus and the
the need to have aphoristic judgements backed up in
wider terms of reference. greatest obstacle to the achievement of quality in the
some recent My suspicion is that argument is not in fact the art of this century in particular. I do not foresee a
logical structure adequate to the clear expression of fruitful assimilation of the spirit of Matisse's art,
exhibitions critical judgement. It merely serves to act grammatic- except in the most general and intangible of ways, in
line in fact with the way he seems to have wished it
ally as a beguiling fabric designed to disguise the
true source of the writer's judgement which I think to be and demonstrated it in teaching. In particular,
in London lies in the area of desire, longing or love for certain the organization of colour apart, I am not in sympathy
types of experience. with the idea of the structure of painting as a motif-
I think I speak for all the artists I know when I say analogue of experience of the visual world. The
that we have long since given up hope of reading a problem for contemporary painting is to find an
set of judgements linked by a consistent viewpoint alternative idea of the way in which painting may be
Alan Gouk from any of our resident British critics. Our present day structured, and of course there is already considerable
critics are all too wary of making any statement posi- precedent for an attempt of this kind. The fact that it
tive enough to expose the roots of their preferences. is a difficult and dangerous enterprise can be seen
It is of course axiomatic that any statement of prefer- by the number of failures currently on exhibition in
ence is a revelation of 'self', and in all cases that I the leading galleries of the world, and amongst them
know of, the 'selves' in question are perhaps better the work of some of the most successful and highly
left unexposed to the light of day. regarded artists too. Matisse had of course himself
The latter half of the nineteenth century in France discovered a way in his apotheosis of collage, The
will in time become increasingly recognised as one of snail.
the high peaks of achievement in the arts, the equal Baudelaire accepted abstraction as a valid mode of
in all-round creative splendour of any of the other artistic response to contemporary life ; indeed he made
'flowerings' or 'renaissances' marked out by his- extensive use of it. Symbolist poetry is abstract
torians. The twin streams of invention in poetry and poetry, for though a word picture may be painted, it
painting stemming from Baudelaire and Manet and does not picture the world of experience, but is a
culminating in the fusion of the arts, ideal of symbo- symbol of another world, the world of beauty. This is
list aesthetics, in the intense beauty of the Mallarmé- also true of Matisse's use of elements of the given
Debussy coincidence, took art to such a trembling visual world in the construction of a painting. The
pinnacle of beauty that it will be a long time before we painting is not a picture or image of a re-constructed
can gather ourselves up again for such an onslaught world, but a symbol of another world of beauty
on the infinite. created by the artist. Matisse hints at this as the
Matisse is the third prong to this trident of desire. existential status of his painting from within the
He belongs in spirit to this turn-of-the-century painting itself, by the repeated play with mirror
greatness, as I believe he himself was well aware. It images (in which an impossible reflection often
seems to me that the actual historical dating of occurs), and by the artist-model-work-of-art rela-
Matisse's work is of little significance in elucidating tionship commented on poetically in many paintings.
the unfolding spirit of his art, which if anything These ideas are used somehow more abstractly in
spirals backwards in time against the current of devel- Matisse than in Picasso.
opment in the painting of this century to come to rest Every painter worth his salt has recognized the
alongside /'Après-midi d'un faune. The series of existential ambivalence of painting. Enough hog-
drawings he did related to poems of Mallarmé are wash has been written about what is in fact the non-
not a by-product of his art but central to it, and existent problem of objecthood. (Robert Morris has
brought him face to face with the 'meaning' of his commented aptly on this recently in his article
own work. (Matisse's art is also the sublime and 'Antiform', in Artforum). Either Olitski's paintings are
tempered realization of the ideals and aspirations of pieces of canvas impregnated with paint, in which
Van Gogh, whose painting at its greatest and calmest case they are merely more bits of material, or else they
overshadows that of Matisse in intensity, if not in are allusive analogies for landscapes done in paint,
complexity of organization of colour.) The critical in which case Daubigny does it better, to name but
label 'expressionist' does no justice to the expressive one at random, and throws in trees and clouds for
range of Van Gogh, who himself wrote more good measure. To tell us that they are both is simply a
revealingly about his work than any subsequent truism applicable to all referential painting. The whole
writer save Artaud.) dilemma of painting lies in the fact that pigment has
When a summit of such grandeur has been reached, the property of insistently referring to the real or to
and as long ago too, it would be foolhardy to imagine some imaginary but visualizable world. This is the
that future artists should seek to follow directly in the inelectable fascination of the medium. The only way
same spiritual footsteps. The course of art is devious to control this fact of perception is by means of a
and circumlocutory, and not at all dialectic. I do not constructed space. The more amorphous the form of
accept the view which sees the trident as thrown a painting, the more readily and allusively it can be
across the Atlantic into the eager hands of Americans. seen as referring. Pure pictorial space outside of
It seems rather to have scattered in numerous pieces, geometry and controlled perspective is in my view
one or two of which are in England. thank God. (An impossible. (Collage has its own geometry.) To ask
image of the artist as hero, climbing a mountain to us to see Olitski's paintings as having their own non-
plunge a pronged instrument into the voluptuous referential space is to ask us to ignore the natural
under-belly of the absolute seems to have crept in of propensities of vision, that is, to close our eyes to