Page 21 - Studio International - January 1973

Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky had of
course worked with synthetic-cubist 'interior'
space some ten years earlier, and their
paintings of the mid thirties provide a key point
of transition between the work of the Europeans
and that of the Americans. Gorky had come to
America in 1920 from Armenia, Hofmann in
1933 from Munich.
Gorky's conviction of the significance of the
four great Europeans, Miró, Matisse, Picasso
and Leger, certainly seems to have predated
that of his contemporaries de Kooning,
Gottlieb, Newman, Rothko and Still (they
were all six born between 1903 and 1905) and
of the younger men, Pollock, Motherwell and
Kline (born between 1910 and 1915); but he
served a long apprenticeship in styles of late
Cubism and of Surrealism, whereas the
development of the Americans through
gamuts of twentieth-century European
concerns was astonishingly rapid once it had
been begun in the early forties. It was not until
1947, the year before his suicide, the year that
Picasso, The Studio, 1927-28. Oil on canvas, 59 91 in. MOMA, New York

more locally, Stuart Davis, became compatible
to the American painters as 'source material'
in the context of their usage of the 'enlarged
box' space of Synthetic Cubism. The chief
characteristics of such paintings are an
abandonment of 'naturalistic' illumination and
of modulated relationships between forms in
favour of flat forms, usually relatively hard-
edged, deployed in spatial relationships,
usually strongly conditioned by colour
relationships, in the context of a composition
which only allows reading of a 'consistent'
space when that space is enclosed; the space is
either entirely filled by forms and planes (as in
the Leger), or it refers to an actual box-like
space (as in the Picasso and Miró interiors) or it
is identified with the canvas surface itself — and
is thus prevented from functioning as reference
to a particular 'real' space — through the
application of an all-over soft but opaque
painted ground (as in the Matisse and in many
Mires of the twenties and thirties).
Around 1942-4, several of the American
painters, however distinct and dissimilar their
subjects, disposed them in an essentially
synthetic-cubist 'enclosed' space: Motherwell
(Pancho Villa dead and alive 1943), de Kooning
(untitled painting c. 1944, Eastman Collection),
Pollock (Male and Female 1942, Guardians of the
Secret 1943), Baziotes (The Parachutists 1944),
Tomlin (Burial 1943). The significant
variation is between a method of ordering
dependent upon the push-and-pull of flat
'post-collage' forms (Tomlin at one extreme)
and an intense disordering of this in the name of
a 'post-Surrealist' automatism (Pollock at the
other). Some of Gottlieb's early 'pictographic'
paintings of the later forties also recall late-
cubist space, though flattened by the influence
of Torres-Garçia's compartmentalized
paintings of the late twenties and early thirties
and of Paul Klee's own pictographs. Joan Miro, Dutch Interior 1928. Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 X 28 3/4 in. MOMA, New York
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