In its
most radical aspect - in the works of Willem de Kooning and
Jackson Pollock - the new painting appears as an art of impulse
and chance. This does not mean that it is formless and
unconsidered; like any art, it aims at a coherent style. What I am
describing rather are qualities which make up the expressiveness
of this art; its physiognomic, so to speak. We see excited
movements, scattered spots and dashes, fervent streaking, an
explosive release. The strokes of paint exist for themselves on
the strongly marked plane of the canvas as tangible elements of
decided texture and relief; sometimes they appear as distinct
touches, sometimes they form dense complex crusts of interwoven,
built-up layers, sometimes they are drawn out as filaments,
entangled over the entire surface.
But all this
describes only a single kind of painting, the one that catches the
eye soonest and provokes the greatest astonishment or
exasperation. (To it corresponds, by the way, a method of
sculpture in which wires, rods, and small bits of metal are welded
or soldered together in intricate, open forms.) One can point also
to an opposite approach of the painter Mark Rothko, who builds
large canvases of a few big areas of colour in solemn contrast;
his bands or rectangles are finely softened at the edges and have
the air of filmy spectres, or after-effects of colour; generally
three or four tones make up the scheme of the whole, so that
beside the restless complexity of Pollock or de Kooning, Rothko's
painting seems inert and bare. Each seeks an absolute in which the
receptive viewer can lose himself, the one in compulsive movement,
the other an all-pervading, as if internalized, sensation of a
dominant colour. The result
in both is a painted world with a powerful, immediate impact; in
awareness of this goal, the artists have tended to work on a
larger and larger
scale - canvases as big as mural paintings are common in the shows
in New York and indeed are the ones which permit the artists to
realize their aims most effectively.
Between these
two poles lies a rich spectrum of styles of different emotional
tone. Ranging in the formal means from intricacy to amorphous
cloud-like massing, from a style of energy to a style of
passivity, they include also the taste for the balanced or
constructive in the rough black grids of Franz Kline which isolate
in a clear counterpoint the reserved spaces of the white ground.
All these styles are united in the common weighting of the stroke,
in the concreteness of the canvas surface as a material plane, and
in the freedom of composition realized through ambiguous or random
forms.
page
2 of Meyer Schapiro's critiques
