Page 55 - Studio International - October 1970

warrants the preservation of the two-dimen-
sionality. A plastic approach which is incom-
plete conceptually will destroy the two-
dimensionality, and being incomplete in
concept, the creation will be inadequate.'
It is precisely this abhorrence for the incom-
plete, the partial, not shared by Pollock, which
ultimately limits the scope of Hofmann's art.
For no art experience which is at any parti-
cular moment true to the artist's vision can by
definition be complete. As always, Pollock
had the shrewdness to shake free of this
noose. With an intelligence altogether more
nimble than Hofmann's, and with an open
world of art in view, he saw that the dark
side of the mind must also find a place in the
pictorial schema, and that tonal-painting, no
less impure in its way than Hofmann's 'pure
colour' structure, could be re-constituted to
yield fresh vistas for painting. Pollock pro-
duced a novel flatness by reversing the tradi-
tional hierarchy both of texture and tonality,
so that broad markings form the 'background'
and are seen through microscopic detail, and
recessive 'spatial' colour is superimposed on
solid frontal colour. 'Background' and 'fore-
ground' appear as shadows of one another, a
1
positive-negative ambivalence. Indeed, some slogan put about briefly in England in 1961 Jackson Pollock
of Pollock's most spectacular departures from by Lawrence Alloway and the Cohens. If Yellow Islands 1952
Oil on canvas
traditional modes of perception in painting there has to be a European movement to 564 x 72 in.
came both by exaggeration of and by inversion rival, why not Fauvism, Byzantinism, Schato- The Tate Gallery, London
of processes which had formerly been used to logism! There is, however, a reason for the
establish pictorial coherence by familiarity to associations which American painting of the
the habits of normal looking. His 'all-over' fifties and sixties seem to forge with Impres-
form allowed for scrutiny both locally and in sionism. Apart from important structural and
depth, as the traditional picture had, only by formal differences, it is primarily a matter of
an exaggeration of the amount one was an affinity of feeling in relation to colour.
capable of seeing, isolating, and being aware Matisse referred to two mutually exclusive
of isolating, the notion of the separate life of ways of conceiving colour relationships in
fragments, the notion of the formal arbitrari- painting, the one considering colour as warm
ness of contiguities, which philosophers had or cool, as Impressionism had, the other seek-
much earlier raised, became for the first time ing light through the opposition of colours, as
felt as a fact of experience. While at the same he developed it in his own work, from the
time, the traditional canon of graspability of simultaneous contrast of complementaries,
the wholeness of an aesthetic experience in a and as taken up in another form by Op Art.3
moment of consciousness, the point of aes- Gauguin's conception of colour harmonies
thetic realization, was challenged literally, shared with Impressionism a warm/cool
not only by the size and complexity of the approach to colour. His theoretical abhor-
painting's form, but by the sheer quantity rence for black was the result of a specific
and sensual richness of its embodiment. mode of feeling in relation to colour. It is
Louis, Noland and Olitski have each in interesting to compare the mellow autumnal
different ways taken up these aspects of exoticism of colour in paintings such as
Pollock's innovation. It is more than simply a Picking Fruit, 1899, or The White Horse, 1898,
question of size in relation to detail, though it with a range of paintings by Clyfford Still.
is true that the smallness of most impressionist I think one can begin to see from such a com-
and post-impressionist painting was integral parison just how much recent American art
to the desire for a dynamic aesthetic of relies on a mode of feeling which sees the
gestalt-realization, which American painting spectrum as a warm/cool continuum, and
has abandoned. (Remember Impressionism which, as a result, withdraws from the abrupt-
followed a period of large-scale painting in ness which a dynamic of extreme colour
France. The dynamics of Pollock's painting contrasts would bring.
probably echoes Delacroix if it does that of American colour painters, with the exception
any European painter.) Darby Bannard's of Pollock, see black not as extremely opposed
recent hymn to the immanent dawn of a great to white, as it is, for example, in the great
new school of American colourists to rival European colourists, Matisse and Leger, but
Impressionism2 sounds as pathetic as its as a series of gradations eliding from the
earlier echo, the Abstract-Impressionism darkest warm browns through to the darkest