The Moderns [antikvár]

The Moderns: 1945-1975 This book deals with the Inst thirty yonrs in the history ol'pnintinK. Not world pninting, but painting in the European trnilition. However, the art of Europe has extended to all those lands where Europeans have gone. Australia, for example, has a magniiicent school of Impressionists and other painters of landscape and light. For several decades until the Second World War the capital of European art was Paris. After the war, the capital became New York, previously one of the most provincial and furthest-flung outposts of European art activity. There, most painters could only know the masters of the 'École de Paris' at second hand, from the accounts, perhaps, of the few early immigrants such as Hans Hofmann (Plate 15) or Willem de Kooning (Plates 2, 4, 14) who, as students, had enjoyed first-hand contact with artists in Europe. Then, dramatically, the situation changed. From 1933 onwards, many of those idols began to appear in the flesh, walking on the streets of New York, driven from Europe first by the Nazis and then by the War. Eminent names such as Albers, Chagall, Ernst, Feininger, Gabo (from 1946), Lipchitz, Léger, Masson and Mondrian were among those who now transferred their activities to the New World. The United States, now one of the most powerful nations on Earth, absorbed these talented artists and intellectuals as easily as it had absorbed countless generations of refugees from the beginnings of its history. American artists were quick to welcome and benefit from the new contact. They already had their own belief in individualism-the romantic notion of the individual's responsibility to himself- and now they learned from the Europeans a new confidence and seriousness. Gorky, with experience of both Old and New Worlds, was the first to arrive at a personal synthesis. Waterfall (Plate 1) shows his mature assimilation of Surrealism but this highly original painting also embodies Gorky's experience of the New England landscape. Waterfall introduces many ot the characteristic virtues of the later New York school; a respect for the quality of paint, which is allowed to run and dribble when it wants to; direct drawing with the brush, and the 'emergence' of imagery out of the dialogue between artist and medium. Young Americans, such as Pollock (Plates 5, 7) and Motherwell (Plates 12, 11), valued Surrealism for its processes which were intended to express and reveal personality at the deepest levels. For them the act of painting assumed more importance than ever before. In his large abstracts, Pollock's painting movements were rhythmic, balletic, and in a special, controlled sense, free - something which is never understood by those who think that Abstract Expressionism can be produced by anybody. The new direction removed the artist from questions of design. Instead of working inwards from the framing edges, he chose now an expanse of canvas which extended beyond his peripheral vision and of which the boundaries were determined, generated, finally by the painting activity. Starting with Impressionism, modem art had been chiefly small-scale. Now, on the contrary, American artists insisted on large canvases as the norm, sensibly exploiting the generous capacity of their 'loft' studios and reflecting the giant size of their native land. The paintings of Newman, Rothko and Still, unlike those of Gottlieb, Kline, Motherwell, Pollock and de Kooning, show no obvious evidence of 'gestural' activity. Why, then, are they included under the same group label of 'Abstract Expressionism' or even 'Action Painting' ? The answer is in two parts. First, Newman, Rothko and Still were colourists (Plates 8, 9, 17). We learn from Fauvism, the first great colour movement in the twentieth century, that for the colourist some degree of expressionism is virtually automatic; aU the leading Fauves - Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck -had stressed that the expression of feeling and emotion wm central to their art. Secondly, the New York colourists painted broadly and directly on large canvases without fiddling adjustment. Making the painting was less an act of fabrication, or manufacture, and more the acting out of a drama - an event. There is in he work of each a distinct mystical element which operates directly on the senses. In a catalogue note of 1947, Newman referred to Kwakiutl Indian art, which he described as 'directed by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding'. He intended his own art to function in the same way (Plate 3), as an 'idea-complex that makes contact with mystery - of life, of men, of nature, of the hard black chaos that is tragedy'. In Europe, too, art struck a serious note. Artists could not help reflecting the widespread anxiety left behind by the war and provoked by the grotesque nuclear threat. This was the nerve- raciking cold-war jieriod. The »uffering and isolation in Kranrin liacon's work, both then and later, expressed in forceful term« what most artist« were feeling (Plate 46). In 196;!, liacon told David Sylvester in an interview that 'man now realize» that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being'. Bacon's attitude to painting is well illustrated in a note he wrote on Matthew Smith for the Tate Gallery in 19,53. He could just as easily have been describing his own work or that of, for example, De Kooning; . . . every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shapt' and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance mysterious because the very substance of the paint can make such a direct assault on the nervous system; continuous because the medium is so fluid and subtle that every change that is made loses what is already there in the hope of making a fresh gain.