Page 60 - Studio International - October 1970

3
Edward Hopper Early Sunday Morning 1930
Oil on canvas 35 x 60 in.
Coll: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(Photograph, Geoffrey Clements Photography, NY)
4
Andrew Wyeth Christina's World 1948
Tempera on gesso panel 341 x 471 in.
Coll: Museum of Modern Art, New York
5
Jackson Pollock at work, reproduced from 'Jackson
Pollock' by Bryan Robertson. Harry N. Abrams,
New York, 1960
6
Jasper Johns Target with Four Faces 1955
Encaustic on newspaper over canvas, surmounted by
four plaster casts, 291 x 26 x 3+ in.
Coll: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of
Mr and Mrs Robert C. Skull

cate. The information I received in a deluge of painting derives ultimately from Monet blade of grass and yet remains essentially
prior to coming to Guelph, contained a break- and the French Impressionists and the archi- featureless. Magic Realism grew out of the
down of the population of Ontario into British, tecture is as sub-European as the brush- New Objectivity of artists like Otto Dix. The
Italian, German, French, Chinese and I work, but there are differences which make term, Magic Realism, was invented by a
forget what else, down to the last fraction of this a much more American work than say German critic of the twenties. The magic of
one percent who were classified as 'Others'. Whistler. The pattern of intersecting perpen- the American version is the negative magic of
In common parlance even the people who diculars which forms the basis of American emptiness, of failure of communication.
have been here longer than anybody can city planning is here re-discovered in the Christina is not even allowed contact with the
remember, are nominally attributed like the facades of the buildings across the street and spectator who identifies from his own separate
city in the snow to India. integrates them with the larger containing world of isolation.
The road to London is unusual in that it rectangle of the picture itself. For Lawrence In 1877, the foremost English critic of the day
actually goes somewhere. In England roads Gowing,2 the rectilinear patterns of American accused the foremost American artist of
traditionally link places between which people clapboard houses seemed to extend beyond throwing a pot of paint in the public's face.
want to go. Big roads link big places between the buildings themselves into the very air of Whistler sued Ruskin, but then Whistler had
which a lot of people want to go, lesser roads America. If such structures are rare in older been thoroughly Europeanized in Paris and
link lesser places, and so on. This is not always American painting, perhaps that is why this London. American art declared its indepen-
the case in North America. Roads serve a painting looks so much more American than dence when Jackson Pollock actually did
function much closer to Walter de Maria's the others. It is one of the most frequently throw a pot of paint. He just threw a pot of
line in the desert. In the absence presumably illustrated works in the general surveys. The paint at the canvas. This was not altogether a
of places to want to go, they were planned as a title establishes another dimension, that of demonstration of the positive aspect of the
rectilinear grid to make the no-places measur- time. desert metaphor. In the critical period of the
able. Eventually some of the no-places became Impressionism has been interpreted retrospec- 40s, the first pot of paint was thrown in a
quite large but they retained their original tively as the art of a single moment of experi- tangled net of crises and disillusionments. The
pattern of roads and with it their aura of ence, but the identification of that moment is myth of Pollock himself represents a desperate
measurable no-placeness. North American rarely as precise as this. Indeed vagueness is a man.
cities are not places but systems of co- more constant characteristic and something American critic Harold Rosenberg saw in
ordinates. In London one meets people in of it is implied in the name. Monet's painting Action Painting a shift from art as an externa-
Piccadilly Circus, in Toronto one meets the which gave its label to the movement, Im- lization of a mentally conceived image to art
same sort of people at the corner of Bloor and pression, Sunrise, was so named on account of as a record of an encounter between the
Yonge. In some American cities like Washing- its very vagueness. The day of the week and artist and his materials. The stress is on the
ton, the statistical way of life is still more evi- the hour on which Monet painted his view at action involved. English critic Lawrence
dent. One-way streets have numbers, the Le Havre may be known to historians, but Gowing holds a view of American art which
others letters. The order of life and even the they obviously were not important to Monet. shifts the emphasis. Even more pervasive than
disorder of life adjust accordingly. At one They were important to Edward Hopper. the clapboarding of the houses was the colour
time up to 14 was white, but now up to 18 is Had it been any other day there might have white with which they were painted. Kan-
black. The edge is as hard as the paintings. been more people about. We do not know, dinsky, in one of the most influential theoretical
The Art of North America was initially like Hopper only painted scenes like this, tense treatises of European Modern Art, speculates
the Surrealist geography of Ontario, an art with the anxiety of emptiness. on the general meaning of white : `... white,
of borrowed names and manners, yet just as Another frequent plate in the surveys is although often considered as no colour... is a
self-conscious. Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. A crippled symbol of a world from which all colours as
Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning repre- girl drags herself painfully around a land- attributes have disappeared. This world is too
sents the culmination of a tradition. The mode scape which is detailed down to the last far above us for its structure to touch our souls.