Page 35 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

Andy Warhol and Ad Reinhardt: 2 Andy Warhol
Ad Reinhardt
A Set of Six Self-Portraits 1966
The Great Accepter Polymer silk-screened on canvas
6 panels, each 22 X 22 in.
and the Great Demurrer Coll: Sydney and Harriet Janis, gift to Museum of
Modern Art, New York

Max Kozloff

During the sixties two groups within American The fifties had not known this schism. In mechanized and the mass-produced in
art fought to a draw a polemical battle which dominating the scene, the Action Painters not American society. But even those artists for
only superficially resembles the classical conflict only established a united front stylistically, but whom touch was not the prime aesthetic factor
between representational art and abstraction. they were unanimous in their devotion to a were possessed by a proud humanism. Whether
The issues involved the embrace as opposed to continuity of 'high' art. De Kooning, despite his in swashbuckling stroke, or monolithic colour
the rejection of popular culture, the tradition of contemporaneity, his awareness and expression field, artistic sentiments everywhere
purity versus impurity in art, and a of the flashy hysteria of the American surround, materialized in upper-case, as if to symbolize
responsiveness to the present as compared with was no less a traditionalist than the 'sublime' that the creator himself was masterfully in
an appeal to the timeless. This wrestle over Barnett Newman. In both these painters, the charge, and mythically present, in the almost
content had moral overtones. In it, the old personal will of the artist, his sense of extra-historical shaping of materials.
art-life controversy came irresolutely to the responsibility to his own metaphors, an intact No one such myth can be seen to have
surface, and with it, the urge to conserve and vision of an ideal order, all these were overarched more recent art. How odd that in the
restrict artistic energy met head-on the impulse uppermost, living features of their minds. Art fifties, a period fraught with the agit-prop of
to expend and dissolve that same energy. It was was lofty then. It was also avant-garde, a phrase struggle, there could have been, by and large,
not necessary or even desirable that the fight that had not yet come to mean far-out. In 1957, such a holistic view of the creative act; while in
should have been decided in favour of one side the art historian Meyer Schapiro considered the the sixties, an era virtually torn assunder with
over another. For what was at stake was an manual prerequisites of an unfettered touch competing and diverse idioms, the rhetorical
almost dialectical tension, of form surely, but of (processed in its very attack on 'procedure'), to tone could be so cool and matter of fact. The
attitude as well, which insured the decade's be the distinguishing, valourizing quality of an fifties remind me of the poet John Ashbery's
artistic vitality. embattled art, everywhere threatened by the lament : 'Oh, for the happy days when we were

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