The Wild Ones

Advance-guard painting in America is hell-bent for outer space. It has rocketed right out of the realms of common sense and common experience. That does not necessarily make it bad. But it does leave the vast bulk of onlookers earthbound, with mouths agape and eyes reflecting a mixture of puzzlement, vexation, contempt. A cursory study of advance-guard painting gives rise to the conclusion that it consists, like the Mock Turtle's arithmetic, of "Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision." It is wild, woolly, willful. But nothing has only one side, and negatives cannot sum up America's newest painting. A good deal can be said for its positive qualities, once they have been set in the context of modern art history.

Turning the Mirror. The young pioneers reproduced on the following pages took their lead from such European moderns as Kandinsky, Picasso and Paul Klee, and from a slightly less exalted group-Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipschitz, Piet Mondrian, Andre Masson--who sat out World War II in New York. All brought essentially the same promise: instead of holding a mirror up to nature, art could mirror the inner world of the artist himself. The methods for doing this--abstraction and distortion--were as old as doddering modern art itself (i.e., almost a century), and had already been explored by older native sons from Arthur Dove to Stuart Davis (TIME, Feb. 13).

The bright young proconsuls of the advance guard, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, added to this pattern of approach a breathtaking fervency and single-mindedness. Following Clausewitz' formula for successful military attack, they concentrated all the forces they could muster on the smallest possible problem: to express what they happened to be feeling in the process of painting. The results were huge canvases excitedly smeared, spattered, daubed, dribbled and gobbed with color in the shape of freewheeling overall designs, as if the artists had been playing with paints and got carried away. They were not as formless and unconsidered as the quick glance suggests, however, and they aimed for styles coherent at least to the stylists.

The Pollock-De Kooning breakthrough soon found a following, and a label: abstract expressionism. Like most labels, this one has proved inadequate. It is used loosely to suggest merely the expression of strong feeling without any reference to objective reality. Young idealists in search of an ideal, and middle-aged casuists in search of a cause, alike sprang to the defense of abstract expressionism almost before it began to be attacked. And it was attacked, inevitably, for to believers in the classical concepts of beauty and truth to nature, it was an insult. This gave the advance guard a stimulating sense of unity and a debilitating sense of being persecuted, both of which it might otherwise have lacked.

Martyrs, Inc. The persecution complex that darkens, like a private rain cloud, the brows of most abstract expressionists can only be called subjective. On an objective level, the leaders of the movement have done quite well. The painters are sur rounded by adoring disciples. Their works have been showed and admired in a dozen American cities and also in London, Paris and Venice. The works of the eight painters on these pages hang in excellent Manhattan galleries, and more than 100 of them have been bought by museums at four-figure prices.

Abstract expressionism does not mean Easy Street to the artist, but neither does it mean martyrdom, unless the martyrdom is of the sort that Painter Mark Rothko bemoans. Rothko for a while was one of a group who carried privacy to the extreme of refusing to let their paintings be seen; ' even now he considers it "a risky act" to send a painting "out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!"

The advance guard is advancing in a number of different directions at once, and swiftly outrunning the abstract-expressionist formula. The variety of the paintings shown here--from De Kooning's gustiness to Guston's coolness--is in itself a strong indication of the movement's vitality. And even the uncaring observer will somehow prefer one picture lo another, which proves that they do project certain qualities--whether ugly or beautiful. None is a mere nothing.

Jack the Dripper. Adolph Gottlieb's Blue at Noon, for example, conveys a strong sense of light and dark skies and of lilting movement. Looking at it is rather like watching a snowstorm through a windowpane and remembering Thomas Nash's line: "Brightness falls from the air." Jackson Pollock's Scent is a heady specimen of what one worshiper calls his "personalized skywriting." More the product of brushwork than of Pollock's famed drip technique, it nevertheless aims to remind the observer of nothing except previous Pollocks, and quite succeeds in that modest design. All it says, in effect, is that Jack the Dripper, 44, still stands on his work.

Robert Motherwell's Western Air is cubism smashed flat and with a couple of sky-holes poked through it. It demonstrates how abstract expressionism can make violent use of yesterday's art furniture. Arshile Gorky's Garden in Sochi uses Miro-like amoeba shapes to express an infant memory.

Tricks & Skids. Willem de Kooning's Gotham News uses just about every trick in painting, except illusion, to create excitement. It is juicy `a la Rubens, gaudy `a la Delacroix, emphatic `a la Vlaminck --and utterly ambiguous. Being too agitated for the purposes of either decoration or contemplation, De Kooning's canvas reaffirms the abstract-expressionist credo that the very effort of painting is what paintings should be about. The observer's glance is led to skid here and there in the calculated mess like brush strokes; looking at the picture is supposed to re-create the painting process.

With Guston's Summer, 1954, abstract expressionism becomes its own opposite: abstract impressionism. Guston, who once had a high reputation for academic art, does not think of his later paintings as pictures at all. Says he, "They are myself." In order to put himself into his canvases, Guston makes them close to his own size. For such self-consciously personal work, the results look strangely like blowups of Claude Monet's water-lily impressions.

William Baziotes' Pompeii is also a sophisticated vision rather than an outpouring of feeling: he saw something like it in his mind's eye. Rumpled, testy Mark Rothko produces pictures as smooth and calm as a cup of cambric tea. His Orange Over Yellow might make a handsome background for something, but this is not what he intended, any more than the makers of the medieval tapestries meant merely to adorn palaces. It seems highly doubtful that such art as Rothko's will some day seem as meaningful as the tapestries, yet it is possible. Such paintings may be as little as mere decoration or they may be as much as glimpses of a spiritual world awaiting an observer's ability to see them as such. It depends greatly on the sympathy of the observer.

Sympathy, in fact, is something the new advance guard demands. Far from wishing to needle the bourgeoisie, as did the School-of-Paris moderns half a century ago, the young pioneers of American painting crave appreciation. When it is not forthcoming, some of them sulk and some shrug. But none of them seems to laugh. "To refashion the fashioned, lest it stiffen into iron, means an endless vital activity," they argue with Goethe. They solemnly reiterate that since impressionism, cubism and abstractionism have proved meaningful over the years, abstract expressionism will, too. And curiously enough, this wishful argument-by-analogy does cow some critics and win over others.

Academy of the Left. Among those who have kept their sense of balance and humor in criticizing the advance guard is Worcester Art Museum Director Francis Henry Taylor. In his role of judge, the critic must, like any judge, rely very largely upon precedent, as Taylor does when he complains that the advance guard has ceased to communicate with ordinary men. "Not until the second quarter of the 20th century," he points out, "was the essential communicability of art ever denied . . . The one and only quality denied to a work of art throughout the ages is privacy. Unless participation is allowed the spectator, it becomes a hopeless riddle and ceases to be any work of art at all ... What the new Academy of the Left has yet to realize is that in their fanatic zeal they have not achieved freedom of movement for the modern artist. They have merely substituted the rubber girdle for the whalebone corset."

But the advance guard has some equally distinguished champions, notably Guggenheim Museum Director James Johnson Sweeney. Instead of passing judgment, Sweeney holds, the critic should try to "draw the attention of the public to something he has found worthy of attention and enjoyable--and to tempt the public also to enjoy it. He has to be humble in his approach if he is to get the most from his observation of art's constantly changing face."

The Urge to Resist. Sweeney's viewpoint is a healthy reminder that man's natural resistance to new art forms tends to get in the way of appreciation. Sweeney's own enthusiasm for advance-guard painting leads him to argue that it is, in the best sense, conservative. Recognizable objects, he says, are only the surface of painting, mere vocabulary. Abstract composition is the basis of all painting--the syntax. Therefore, the young American pioneers are blazing a trail back to fundamentals. Since grammar is not poetry, that would seem to leave Taylor's basic question of communication up in the air. But Sweeney maintains that the prime function of art is simply "the communication of a sense of ordered parts within an all-embracing unity."

Despite their differences, Sweeney and Taylor agree in looking for both form and content in a work of art. Yet they point up the Form v. Content debate that has split contemporary painting down the middle. The Academy of the Left stands for form alone; the Academy of the Right stands for content alone. The layman can best refresh his eyes by turning to the great masters, who stood for both at once, and hope that art may once again grow meaningful and whole.

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