The
object of art is ... more passionately than ever before, the
occasion of spontaneity or intense feeling. The painting
symbolizes an individual who realizes freedom and deep engagement
of the self within his work. It is addressed to others who will
cherish it, if it gives them joy, and who will recognize in it an
irreplaceable quality and will be attentive to every mark of the
maker's imagination and feeling.
The
consciousness of the personal and spontaneous in the painting and
sculpture stimulates the artist to invent devices of handling,
processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the
aspect of the freely made. Hence the great importance of the mark,
the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of
the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas
as a texture and field of operation - all signs of the artist's
active presence. The work of art is an ordered world of its own
kind in which we are aware, at every point, of its becoming.
All these
qualities of painting may be regarded as a means of affirming the
individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary
experience of working and doing.
I need not speak in detail about this new manner, which appears in
figurative as well as abstract art; but I think it is worth
observing that in many ways it is a break with the kind of
painting that was most important in the 1920s. After the First
World War, in works like those of Léger, abstraction in art was
affected by the taste for industry, technology, and science, and
assumed the qualities of the machine-made, the impersonal and
reproducible, with an air of coolness and mechanical control,
intellectualized to some degree. The artist's power of creation
seems analogous here to the designer's and engineer's. That art,
in turn, avowed its sympathy with mechanism and industry in an
optimistic mood as progressive elements in everyday life, and as
examples of strength and precision in production which painters
admired as a model for art itself. But the experiences of the last
twenty-five years have made such confidence in the values of
technology less interesting and even distasteful.
In
abstraction we may distinguish those forms, like the square and
circle, which have object character and those which do not. The
first are closed shapes, distinct within their field and set off
against a definite ground. They build up a space which has often
elements of gravity, with a clear difference between above and
below, the ground and the background, the near and far. But the
art of the last fifteen years tends more often to work with forms
which are open, fluid, or mobile; they are directed strokes or
they are endless tangles and irregular curves, self-involved lines
which impress us as possessing the qualities not so much of things
as of impulses, of excited movements emerging and changing before
our eyes.
The impulse,
which is most often not readily visible in its pattern, becomes
tangible and definite on the surface of a canvas through the
painted mark. We see, as it were, the track of emotion, its
obstruction, persistence, or extinction. But all these elements of
impulse which seem at first so aimless on the canvas are built up
into a whole characterized by firmness, often by elegance and
beauty of shapes and colors. A whole emerges with a compelling,
sometimes insistent quality of form, with a resonance of the main
idea throughout the work. And possessing an extraordinary
tangibility and force, often being so large that it covers the
space of a wall and therefore competing boldly with the
environment, the canvas can command our attention fully like
monumental painting in the past.
It is also
worth remarking that as the details of form become complicated and
free and therefore hard to follow in their relation to one
another, the painting tends to be more centered and compact -
different in this respect from the type of abstraction in which
the painting seems to be a balanced segment of a larger whole. The
artist places himself in the focus of your space.
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to page 1 of Meyer Schapiro's critiques
