Page 64 - Studio International - November 1971

effect of hues against white and black (p 179), Marx's fine sense of the real and imaginative modernism.
is very misleading because it introduces ideas grasp of historical process, we are nonetheless And yet Louis, in many ways a painter of
of the grey content of colours derived from brought to a bemused halt by an aesthetic great openness and clarity, is at the same time
Ostwald. Matthaei occasionally relates Goethe's position whose willing embrace of the ineffable mysterious, all the more so because of his
ideas to Gestalt theory, and insofar as there is a stops argument, and only just in time. Between seclusion and the absolute privacy of his
close relationship between the conclusions of the real and the absolute in this book are the experience. Perhaps no-one can be blamed for
Gestalt psychologists and the formal preferences paintings, to which Fried responds with such floating into unearthly realms when discussing
of Baroque painters and theorists, this is spacious passion that only a certain kind of him. One feels, as does Mr Fried, that his
inescapable; but, oddly, the only point where mysticism, one feels, can hope to link what is paintings 'give the impression of having come
they really meet (Theory §34) has nothing to do really there with what Mr Fried, as an into existence as if of their own accord, without
with colour. The basis of Goethe's psychology embattled aesthetician, would have us believe the intervention of the artist'. To err is human.
of vision is expressed most succinctly in his to be the real nature and purpose of the artistic Hence the feeling of unreality and strange
essay of 1805, The Eye: tradition he champions. That mysticism is not disappointment in front of a failed painting
`The eye sees no forms. It only sees that which lacking. (Louis died before cropping his oeuvre as he
differentiates itself through light and dark or Morris Louis was born in 1912, as was would have wished) such as the one in Kasmin's
through colour. In the infinitely delicate Jackson Pollock, and had been painting for last summer show, in which the marks of human
sensibility for shade-gradation of light and dark years before he met Kenneth Noland, twelve effort seemed all too apparent. Fried skips whole
as well as colour lies the possibility of painting.' years his junior, and subsequently had his areas of Louis's work for this reason, like this :
(p 197) famous encounter in 1953 with Helen `he seems to have spent the years 1955 and 1956,
It is a Berkeleian psychology which has been Frankenthaler and Clement Greenberg. This as well as part of 1957, making paintings whose
increasingly discredited by Gestalt psychologists book reproduces a number of early works, from figurative mode was close to that of Abstract
and by recent students of infant development. 1939 onwards, which haven't been seen before. Expressionism and all of which, except for a very
Matthaei also believes that Goethe's view that They look ordinary, of the not-bad variety, and few not in his possession at the time, he
the eye is created out of light is an anticipation are perhaps reminiscent of the contemporary subsequently destroyed', and again, at the
of recent biological discoveries that light is the work of Bradley Walker Tomlin and Ad same time as the Aleph series, 'Louis also
condition of its creation. These are not Reinhardt, among others. There is not much to painted many other pictures ... in which Louis,
identical ideas, and Goethe derived his direct say about them, and not much is said here. On perhaps partly in response to Newman, divided
from Plotinus, without the intervention of any the other hand, Mr Fried very properly pauses the canvas into clearly (though not rigidly)
experimental data. He had indeed little taste to discuss Louis's breakthrough, and suggests delimited areas of single colours'. It is a measure
for experiment, nor—contrary to what is both that breakthrough is a specifically modernist of Mr Fried's total persuasiveness about the
claimed here—any gift for analysis, although he phenomenon and that the term of apprenticeship quality of Louis's best paintings that we do not
was occasionally obliged to resort to both. His in modernist art may be an exceptionally long feel such treatment to be anything other than
Theory was, and remains nonetheless, the most one. He describes the visit from Washington to judicial, and in a way feel uncurious about how
comprehensive survey of the phenomenon of New York, the meeting with Greenberg and they might have looked; they are not illustrated
colour ever to be attempted. It is a pity it has Frankenthaler, the adoption of the stain here. Again, Louis seems outside art history after
been so poorly served in this edition. q technique and all it implied. In purely factual his breakthrough; following Greenberg, Fried
JOHN GAGE terms, we can see quite clearly what happened. relates Louis's paintings after the Veils to
As Louis said of Frankenthaler, 'she was a bridge Noland's, and sees in such a canvas as Hot Half
between Pollock and what was possible'; and (1962) that Louis would perhaps have moved
Mystery history
Fried analyses with great confidence the relations into shaping his canvases at the same time as
Morris Louis by Michael Fried. 220 pp with 177 between Louis's methods in the early Veils, Stella; but this seems not to matter very much,
illustrations, 72 in colour. Harry N. Abrams, Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea, and doesn't illuminate Louis in the same way that
New York. $25.00. Pollock's Duco enamel Number Three of 1951. Fried's hard looking at specific canvases does.
There can be no doubt, especially on Fried's For such reasons, the peroration is annoyingly
Morris Louis's marvellous paintings, reading, of Louis's immense artistic intelligence vague, invoking as it does the 'presentness' with
marvellously reproduced in Abrams's most at this point. which Fried rapidly finished off a previous essay,
sumptuous styling; a book to make one gasp. It Did he actually see Number Three, though ? and rewriting Mallarmé and Hart Crane into the
also has a brilliant and knotty essay by Michael History of this sort should surely separate amazing statement that such art, all the time, had
Fried, who introduces the work in challenging between artistry, knowledge, chance, intuition, been aspiring, not to the condition of music, but
and far-reaching fashion, asserting (among and hard work, or we will not know how things to the condition of painting. That is to say, the
much else) that 'Louis's very imagination strikes were done. Mr Fried does not have the space to painting of Louis, Noland, Olitski and Stella.
one as radically abstract in a way that not just write art history. His chosen form, here as Such talk requires substantiation, and I imagine
Pollock's but that of any other modernist painter elsewhere, is the essay, which seems not to give that the idea of 'presentness' needs more
before Louis, except perhaps Matisse, does not'. him enough room for explanation or large-scale explanation to those who cannot believe in
Louis's art clearly holds a commanding position thinking (and important assertions which really modernism as anything other than a historical
in the history of modernism, but the question demand expansion are often in footnotes), phenomenon. In any case, recentness of painting
now seems to be—perhaps because of the sheer though it's fine for the formal analysis he does so could do with less mystery to its history. q
and utter beauty of his work, its unlikeliness— well. Hence one tends to be put off by the TIM HILTON
more to do with what constitutes modernism brusque salaams to a modernist mythology
than with what constitutes his art. Mr Fried which constantly hovers on the transcendant The third Blake
begins his account with a quotation from Marx— plane, occasionally touching down on works of
`the forming of the five senses is a labour of the art at moments subsequently felt to be Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic edited by
entire history of the world down to the present'— appropriate. Louis's accomplishment was not David V. Erdman and John E. Grant. 476 pp,
and ends with a desperate gesture towards the his alone, it seems, for what happened was that with 113 monochrome and 8 colour illustrations.
aestheticism of Mallarmé. Such a cultural swing `painting itself broke through to its future'—as Princeton University Press. (London:
is appropriate to his intellectual style, and though untouched by human hand, propelled by Oxford University Press). £9.50.
perhaps to his subject. Deliberately reminded of a supra-human agency, the messianic zeitgeist of Blake's Illustrations to the Poems of Gray by

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