The Age of Experiment

Oswald Spengler. that grand and gloomy chronicler of The Decline of the West, once remarked that Edouard Manet (1832-83) was the last gasp of great Western painting. What Spengler failed to see was that Manet was not an end but a beginning. With a single picture, displayed at the Paris Salon of 1865, Manet fueled an artistic revolution that has shaped the course of modern art, for better or for worse, for nearly a century. At the core of the whole hurly-burly that rages through the art world today is the artistic proposition raised by Manet's saucy nude Olympia.

Naked Paint. When Manet sent his picture to the Salon, the model's nakedness was what seemed to shock the public. But the nakedness of the painting itself was what shocked Manet's fellow artists. Instead of presenting a suitably posed, blurred and idealized nude to the public gaze, Manet presented something like truth in the form of a naked French girl, nakedly translated into so many square inches of paint on canvas. As a straight representation of a scene. Olympia is obvious and commonplace. But as a composition in form and color, it is a masterpiece. With Manet, contemporary artists regained an all but forgotten viewpoint: that a picture can mean more than it represents, that a picture is an object to be judged by itself and not as a reference to something else.

This viewpoint holds for all the great French masters from Manet to Picasso, and still carries dynamite. It gives the artist the prerogative of subordinating the subject of his picture to the painting itself. It also opens the door to distortion and abstraction--the twin angels, or demons, of modern painting.

The Big Parade. In the U.S. the parade included the eight artists shown on this and the following pages. The U.S. pioneers all employed varying degrees of distortion and/or abstraction. But their similarity stops right there. Seeing the contrasts in their art, few would take them for countrymen, let alone contemporaries. Tobey's Transit, for example, relates to no objective visual experience at all, unless it be that of images swimming in the tight-shut eye. Hartley's German Officer deals with a mood, not a visual image. Davis' Eggbeater beats the eggbeater into unrecognizable shape. Hofmann's Red Trickle celebrates an activity rather than a perception. Dove's Abstraction is a generalization of nature, flat yet elusive. Feininger's Gelmeroda multiplies and rearranges what he saw to create an altogether new equation. O'Keeffe's From the Plains is emotion reduced to pattern, and Sheeler's Golden Gate distills design from objective reality.

P: Mark Tobay, 65, began his painting career by copying Satevepost covers, tried painting lamps, then moved to the Northwest and took up art teaching. A trip to China in 1934 turned Tobey from a follower into a force. Learning that Oriental art started with calligraphy, he has ever since been making determined stabs in the direction of ending Occidental art the same way. Tobey is today revered and reviled as the inventor of something called "white writing." Tobey's writing is, of course, quite illegible. Cast in loose, delicate swirls, it can soothe the restless eye as much as it may irritate the serene mind. Transit (at left) is a typical example. Speaking of such earnest, miasmal efforts, Tobey explains that "multiple space bounded by involved white lines symbolizes higher states of consciousness."

P: Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) liked to call himself "the painter from Maine." But he traveled considerably in Europe, appraised its art with a shrewd Yankee eye. Hartley was the first American to grasp the power of German expressionism, immediately adapted the experiments of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc to his own ends. His German Officer (opposite) is as tumultuous as anything painted before World War II, though not so bold as today's abstract expressionism.

Curiously enough, Hartley came to renounce expressionist painting. "Underlying all sensible works of art," he wrote in 1928, "there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problem understood. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression." Hartley's chief fame now rests on the cool, blunt, composed, deliberate Maine landscapes that occupied his last years.

P: Stuart Davis, 61, started as a pupil of Robert Henri, founder of the famed "Ashcan School." While obeying Henri's injunction to go out and paint what he saw on the streets, Davis found that his eye was particularly taken by the hard, jazzy, garish, kaleidoscopic aspects of city life. The Armory Show of 1913, in which modern European art first burst upon America, introduced Davis to abstractionism, and in 1927 he clamped onto it for good. He nailed an eggbeater, a rubber glove and an electric fan to a table and painted them over and over. "Through this concentration," he explains, "I focused on the logical elements. The result was the elimination of a number of particularized optical truths which I had formerly concerned myself with." Davis' Eggbeater No. 3 is clearly free of optical truths. Moreover, it is clean, sharp and surprising in design--three qualities that are typical of Davis' art.

P:Hans Hofmann, 75, was trained as an academic painter in Germany, later chummed with Paris' cubists. He made his name as a teacher, opened his own art school in Manhattan in 1934. Five years later he produced Red Trickle, which Dealer Sam Kootz calls the first application of the drip technique to painting. His art and thought have done as much as any man's to shape today's abstract expressionism, though never did an elderly, experienced and serious-minded teacher manage to seem so untaught.

P:Arthur Dove (1880-1946) was a magazine illustrator who saved his money for a pilgrimage to Paris in 1907. What he saw of the Fauves and cubists caused him to put off artistic facility and take on a lonely, lifetime mission. Dove returned to the U.S. and joined the stable of Photographer-Dealer Alfred Stieglitz, the first man in America to back modern art. Dove, painting on a Connecticut farm, soon earned a first of his own; he was the first to dispense altogether with representation. Yet Abstraction No. 2, done in 1910, is imbued with the qualities of nature. Few representational landscapes carry more sense of sun and shade, stone and tree.

P: Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), like most modern pioneers, matured slowly, did not find his own way as an artist until he was past 40. Although he spent more than half of his life in Germany, his painting owes little to German expressionism. Its technique is borrowed from Paris cubism; its architectonic spirit relates to Gothic churches and Bach fugues; its cool severity seems a personal reflection of modern engineering. Says U.C.L.A. Art Gallery Director Frederick Wight: Feininger "unlearned the last century's concept of [space as] a three-dimensional void. Instead, he gradually makes a clearing around the object through a series of projections. Feininger's object--with which he begins--grows outward; it grows as a crystal grows, organizing space according to its own nature."

P: Georgia O'Keeffe, 68, is an austere daughter of the American prairie and, next to Mary Cassatt, the best woman painter that the U.S. has produced. After working at commerical art in Chicago and teaching in Texas, O'Keeffe one day locked herself in a room and "held a private exhibition of everything I had painted. I noticed which paintings had been influenced by this painter, which by that one. Then I determined which . . . represented me alone. From that moment forward, I knew exactly what kind of work I wanted to do."

What O'Keeffe wanted to do included huge bee's-eye views of blossoms, asphalt cityscapes, white skulls and pelves set against hard blue Southwestern skies, and --lately--such stark, sun-filled abstractions as From the Plains. Under the sheltering cape of Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married, O'Keeffe developed a diamond-hard pride and a head-on style. Both helped her become one of the strongest, though not deepest, individualists in American painting.

P: Charles Sheeler, 72, learned painting from a flamboyant academician named William Merritt Chase, relearned it from looking at Piero della Francesca's art and practicing photography. Piero taught him that art needs no gestures, that it can be pure, precise and silent as a frozen birdbath and still live forever. Photography taught him, as he says, that "light is the great designer." He developed a "growing belief that pictures realistically conceived might have an underlying abstract structure." That belief did not become a certainty until middle age; once arrived at, it led him to do great things.

A spry, wry, spindly man who is at once gentle and unyielding, diffident and daring, Sheeler is a splendid paradox in American art. Neither realists nor abstractionists can claim him, for he merges their domains. More successfully, perhaps, than any other painter, he provides a steady look through highly polished spectacles at the works of modern man.

The Middle Ground. Do the results of the experimental pioneers justify their vast efforts? Modern art being as resolutely individual as it is, the answers are likely to be almost as numerous as the audience. Some see in it a new and vital means of human expression; others, while granting the decorative merits of the moderns, argue that they fail in the essential function of any art form: to communicate from artist to audience.

But now, compared to their younger contemporaries (who will be shown in TIME next week), the earlier generation is beginning to find a middle ground. With the shock value of their experiments wearing off, they are seen to be merely transitions to still newer (though not necessarily better) ways of painting. Their art wins a surprising amount of praise, though no large body of critics will yet agree that any one of them is a "master." Mastery, of course, has nothing to do with trends or experiments, only with individual achievement. Every master in the history of art stands alone on the rock of his own time.

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