Page 36 - Studio International - April 1972

Boston

letter

Andrew Hudson

Each time I've visited Boston it's been to see an
exhibition that I've learned something from.
I remember vividly the 'Three American
Painters' exhibition organized at the Fogg
Museum by Michael Fried in 1965 —how it
marked the emergence of Olitski as a serious
rival to Kenneth Noland, offering a different
direction and a different kind of vision, and the
strange puzzle of discovering that I couldn't
enjoy both artist's work in the same look; I had
to stop and 'change wavelengths', as it were. I
remember the big Matisse show at the Boston
Museum in 1966, so much better installed than
at Chicago, the leisurely sequence of rooms and
chairs to sit down on, suiting Matisse's view of
the identity of art and life. And I remember in
1967 admiring for the first time the richness of
feeling in Louis's 1962 vertical stripe paintings,
in the large Morris Louis retrospective there.
This time, it was the opening of the Museum's magnificently in their own right not only in the might call their start from meeting Clement
new contemporary galleries with an exhibition exhibition itself (I carried away with me a very Greenberg relatively late in their painting lives
of Jack Bush that I went to see. What I got from strong impression of the more strictly geometric (Louis at 42, Bush at 48). How many superb
it was a confirmation and vindication of my paintings, Color Ladder of 1967 and This Time paintings we might now not have, if Greenberg
previous reactions to his work. It confirmed my Yellow of 1968, with their wonderful stillness had not introduced Louis (who seldom went to
view of him as an artist somewhat like Gottlieb, and authority), but also in the context of New York) to Frankenthaler's Mountains and
using drawing and placement in a traditional contemporary abstract painting, since there Sea which proved, as Louis later said, 'a bridge
way—indeed, the juxtaposition of paintings from were very fine paintings by Still, Gottlieb, between Pollock and what was possible'; if
1961 and 1971, Top Spin and Zip Red, showed Olitski, Noland and Louis hanging in the Greenberg had not insisted, in the face of Bush's
Bush picking up themes from earlier work (here, adjacent corridor and a room beyond. Next to disbelief, on the importance of Matisse, which
the use of scribble or texture, the contrast these artists, Bush's touch and colour-sense insistence led Bush to take another look at
Matisse's work.- While both of diem, -later on,
-
between this and flat, silhouetted shapes) in a stood out as distinctly his own.
way that Gottlieb has often done. It vindicated As I've written before, it's perhaps with benefited from having Greenberg and also
my assessment of him as an artist ranking among Louis that Bush's development as an artist can Noland as a sounding-board for their art, we
the finest of our time, for the paintings held up best be compared. Both of them got what we should not lose sight of their essential