Page 51 - Studio International - September 1968

facing page, left Tony Smith Free ride 1962 right Ellsworth Kelly White relief—Arch and its
steel 6ft 8in. x 6ft 8in. x 6ft 8in. shadow (Pont de la Tournelle, Paris) 1952-55
coil: David M. Pincus painted wood 64 48 in.
facing page, right Morris Louis Alpha Tau 1961 bottom right Barnett Newman Ulysses 1952
acrylic on canvas 8 ft 6 in. x 19 ft 6 in. oil on canvas 11 ft x 4 ft 2 in.
coll : City Art Museum of St. Louis coll: Mrs. Barnett Newman

Surely the memory of specific form and of specific which Goossen maintains is still the goal of his
experiences is never annulled in the temperamental artists, lies mainly in their scale, which leaves out a
paintings of Clyfford Still. And the memory of wealth of sculptural interest. David Smith, repre-
deep philosophical musings is somewhere behind sented here with a rare 1956 steel piece called
the tympani of Rothko's paintings. Just as Goossen Five units equal, could never have been quite so real.
can hint that Kelly's power stems from his extra- Granting that Tony Smith has a lot going for him
pictorial venturing, so it can be suggested that as a sculptor, I cannot see how Goossen can stretch
Rothko's and Still's derive from their inevitable his point of view far enough to speak of Kelly and
trespassing into the rich fields of metaphysics. Tony Smith in the same breath as early pioneers in
Their tendency, it is true, is toward the purist the real. Goossen points proudly to Smith's 1953-54
predilection for universalia. But we could not say series of modular paintings, the 'sleepers' in the
with certainty that of the two propositions— show. But the paintings themselves are feeble exer-
universalia sunt realia and universalia sunt nomina— cises, not particularly interesting as modular plays,
they would address themselves only to the first. and certainly not interesting as paintings. Perhaps
We could do that with young purists such as Sol within the native tradition Smith deserves a nod,
Lewitt whose work perfectly answers Goossen's but when seen in the light of Vasarely, who by 1953
description of the 'democratic ordering of similar was deep into modular techniques, and whose
parts brought together in a totality' in which painting was virtuoso, these panels shrink into
`hierarchical passions and dynamics are left be- the obscurity from whence they came.
hind and we are faced instead with self-evident, These, and other works, are no more 'real' than
crystalline structure, the objectively (instead of paintings in very different modes. What are 'real'
subjectively) real.' are the paintings that show evidence of real passion,
Divorcing thesis from show, I find a rather un- whether it be painterly sensuous passion, as in the
even and certainly not deterministic historical case of Louis, or more intellectualized passion, as
line, and as far as I am concerned, that is all to the in the case of Frank Stella. Either way, the purity
good. Take the case of the singular figure in the of intentions is somewhat sullied by the passion
generation following the good Abstract Expression- that overtakes the artist en route. Surely Stella's
ist fathers, Morris Louis. He is now regarded as a earlier work could not have given rise to the
father in his own right (although I believe he was quixotic fancies in his recent work had that ambiva-
exactly the same age as Pollock). A father of the lence not been there.
art of the real! And yet, his most beautiful paint- One of Goossen's most penetrating observations is
ings—yes, beautiful—of which one is represented in that the very means of art have been isolated and
the show, Alpha Tau, are not at all real in Goossen's exposed, forcing the spectator to perceive himself
sense (like a chunk of nature, a rock, a tree'), but in the process of his perception. 'The spectator is
are real in the ultimate painterly sense of illusion. not given symbols, but facts, to make of them what
What is real about Louis's so-called 'unfurleds' is he can.' But Goossen is cutting his argument too
not the raw canvas or their 'physical existence as short here. While it is true that roughly since
space-occupying objects' but their vast and com- Cezanne it is the means of art that have been
pelling illusion. Those coulisses of bright colours at admired, and then only by cognoscenti, it is not
the extreme edges define the nature of the experi- exactly accurate to turn those means into facts.
ence; they are dynamic proposals that we enter the One of the youngest artists in the exhibition,
infinite breadth of the central void; that we share Patricia Johanson shows a twenty-eight foot canvas
in an equisite spatial experience the artist had spanned by a single narrow strip of colour—blue
which was real, and at the same time, conveyed in punctuated with orange—which Goossen says asks
the only terms possible : illusion. us 'to cope with the irreducible facts physically
By contrast, Kenneth Noland's target-type paint- rather than intellectually'. But if this minimum of
ing of 1961 which does deal literally with the paint application has any meaning at all, it means
surface as the only object worth objectifying, seems quite simply that the strange appeal that traditional
a paltry and academic statement. And the late perspective exercises on us can be duplicated with
Paul Feeley's paintings, with their interchangeable, new perceptions. We could not possibly cope with
undulating shapes, are so lacking in energy as to this hyperbole as a physical fact. If we stand at one
fall out of the categories Goossen sets up, belonging end, the effect of diminishing perspective is simu-
neither to the precursors nor to the avant-gardists lated by our very own eyes, and we enter, willy-
of the real. nilly, the world of skidding and shifting illusion. If
One of the more puzzling cases in the exhibition we traverse, visually, the happy expanse of this
is that of Tony Smith, whose meteoric rise to fame canvas, we cannot possibly stay at a factual level.
is based largely on his sculptures, described by What becomes real is not the outsize canvas at all,
Goossen as examples of the amount of the 'real' but the diminishing trajectory of that line, and all
we can bear in art. Smith's blunt presentations of the sensuous spaces such illusion provides. The
the cube in steel, as represented by Die in the show, modern interest in the exposure of the painter's
have, it is true, an enormous capacity to suggest means inevitably backs up into the eternal fascina-
real objects. Certain of his works, still in their ply- tion illusion holds for us, and not in physical facts.
wood mockups, bear the impress of the real archi- The real art of the real, then, remains to be de-
tect, which Smith is, working with real structures fined, and that is as it should be.
functioning in real spaces. They are masculine and
straight-shooting works. But their uniqueness,