Page 33 - Studio International - February 1974

some extent Braque-like and which brought the stripes, I also allowed vertical and horizontal like this Black Painting, therefore, colour was
figurative element into the paintings: but bands and stripes to overlap and interpenetrate quite literally determining the form or shape of
the colour was totally unlike Braque; Braque was in the same canvas. A painting like Red Ground: all the shapes or areas in the picture. The shape
a grave tonalist. However by 1955-1956 the May 1957 shows something of the results of of colour, at this moment in my painting, was
figurative grid of drawing fell away, leaving me this — a sort of fractured tartan: it is a canvas something I arrived at by allowing differing
only with a patchwork of floating, ragged , composed entirely of the fragments of vertical quantities of colour, of the liquid pigment itself,
islanded colour-areas : each area being created or horizontal bands caught, as it were, at the to expand and contract, to swim with or against
by, and identified with, a single movement of a moment of floating apart. There is a suggestion one another under the tutelage of a swiftly
fluent brushstroke. My exhibition of 1956 was that the soft-edged squares originated at the moving soft blunt brush, nudging, scribbling,
categorized tachist. But in my case the strokes, point where horizontal and vertical bands of gliding, pushing or pulling the paint across the
or taches, increasingly assumed a vertical colour overlap — as in a tartan. Before long, surface. Originally this Black Painting was
direction, so that each canvas, in the end, however, these soft-edged squares were to chock-a-block with soft round-cornered squares
consisted solely of large isolated vertical replace the bands and stripes entirely, as the or lozenge-shapes or irregular discs : but
brushstrokes. In early 1957, feeling I think that predominant units of composition in my work; gradually the flattening tide of matt black rose
the allover emphasis and the uniform looseness and, in fact, between 1959 and 1963 I did little and obliterated island after island until it had
and the too-mechanical scribbles of what the else but juggle with them, sometimes filling the pushed its way across two-thirds of the surface.
French called tachism and the Americans entire picture-area with them, sometimes Those remaining islands sought the edge. And
action painting needed to be harnessed slightly whittling them down to one — a single soft always in my painting, at all periods, the edges
more rigidly again to the edges of the canvas, I square floating in, rather than on, a huge ground : of the canvas have been all-important. In 1959,
allowed my arm to extend a number of these either edging up into one of the corners or an American critic who believed at the time
vertical brushstrokes until they made contact moving, almost invisibly, along one of the only in the centralized, symmetrical format,
with the top and the bottom edges of the canvas. canvas's edges as if drawn by a magnet. And it complained ofjust this characteristic in my
Scarlet Verticals: March 1957 is an example. In was at this time that something first happened work : why did I 'reach for the edges' ? I had to
this painting four of five of these rigid vertical which I see has gone on happening, at intervals, point out to him the importance of the edges: I
brushstrokes succeed in connecting with the ever since : namely, the sweeping or sucking to had to explain that the four sides of a canvas are
top and bottom edges, and in so doing achieve one side of the canvas of all the individual the first four formal statements in the painting
the character of stripes or bands. formal units so that they end up clustered concerned; and that pictorial activity becomes
It was therefore a natural step — and a very along, or piled against, the right-hand edge, more intense in the areas adjacent to the
short one — to proceed from this painting to leaving three-quarters of the picture-area painting's physical edges.3 In other paintings
canvases whose total image consisted solely of empty of incident. Black Painting — Red, Brown, at this time I did allow, as I've indicated, the
these long vertical strokes, in differing colours, Olive:July 1959 is one of the first instances of tidal wave of a single colour to sweep away all
all reaching more or less from top to bottom of this — that is, of the orientation of all the but one small round-cornered square (or
the picture format. It was during this same separately recognizable elements towards the squarified disc). I remember resisting the logic
month, March 1957, that I therefore arrived at right-hand edge of the canvas. To quote once of letting that last square sink also under the
the first of a series of paintings which were later more from 'Colour in my Painting : 1969', flood of a single colour — which would have left
to be known as colour-stripe paintings; one of I said `. . the reason why the stripes sufficed, as one with a painting consisting of a single
these was Vertical Light: March 19S7. Although the formal vehicle of the colour, was precisely colour-plane only. But after American
these were the first stripe paintings to be that they were so very uncomplicated as shapes. painting of the early Fifties, with its
painted anywhere, I was unaware at the time of I realized that the emptier the general format emphasis on emptiness, I felt the urgent need
having invented a new pictorial formula : was, the more exclusive the concentration upon for a move towards 'the re-complication of the
something called 'colour-stripe painting' did not the experience of colour itself. With stripes one picture surface'. Years later, in an article
exist at the time, even as a concept. My canvases was free to deal with the interaction between entitled 'The ascendancy of London in the
like Vertical Light were simply paintings to me, varying quantities of varied colours, measured as sixties', published by Studio International in
and paintings which seemed to differ only expanses or areas.' I also said `. . I used to feel December 1966, I said, writing of the first
slightly from their immediate predecessors in that I was not "designing" a canvas so much as generation New York painters, that :
my own development. At this time, I may say, allowing varied quantities of colour to come to `. . (they) never really advanced beyond the
we knew nothing in England of Barnett terms with each other. The soft-edged colour- formats which each had arrived at by 195o:
Newman, who had been omitted from the areas existed not so much in their own right, as instead, they seem to have 'gone into
first famous appearance, at the Tate in January formal shapes; instead, they came into being (or production' . . . Perhaps this absence of
1956, of the first generation New York painters. so it seemed) in order to accommodate colour as development was inevitable, given the special
But Newman's division of a very opaque ground such: I had the feeling that "colour determines nature of their revolutionary style: their great
by one or two very rigid, hard-edged bands or the actual shapes, or areas, which balance one innovations were, after all, connected with a
strips is in any case far removed from my own another . . . in my painting".' sweeping away of detail and of all complex
far more numerous and brilliantly coloured That last phrase comes from the 1962 divisions of the picture-surface — that is to say,
stripes, strung out in clusters of twenty or statement; at that time it was literally true that their discoveries involved a systematic advance
thirty, and occupying the entire format from the pushing around, with a big brush, of a towards the extremes of flatness, emptiness and
edge to edge — or from top to bottom, because certain quantity of a colour, was the means I bigness. Since they achieved these extremes,
my horizontal stripe paintings first came in the used for arriving at the so-called shapes. One almost at a bound, and since they were
following month, April, 1957. physically moved the rival areas of colour in unwilling to reverse engines and go in the only
I said earlier on that there is always a rivalry relation to each other — and the big brush moved direction left open to them (i.e. towards some
between sensation and concept. Because I rapidly — until they met and collided : colour- sort of re-complication of the picture-surface),
always want, in my paintings, to probe visual areas thus mutually defined one another by they have had to stand still. It fell to us British
sensation, to extend sensation, and to rescue my edging into each other physically: the to begin the trek back into pictorial complexity
work from crystallizing into concepts (however expansion or contraction of adjacent areas was and away from that arid 'openness' which, in
good), I hope always to keep it on the move. the mode or the means whereby one eventually two generations of Americans . . has become
During 1957, in addition to measuring colour arrived at the final configuration — the total at last an academic emptiness.'
against colour in the very basic format of the image which was itself the painting. In pictures Continuing, in this same article, on the role of
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