Art Criticism - The State University of New York

But the paint-slingers of today, because of the Zeitgeist of upset, would not
risk the scorn of their fellows by defecting to naturalism.
From this inevitably too companionable matrix, many artists soon
broke away to make styles of their own, which displeased founding pioneers
like Ad Reinhardt, who in one of his cartoons has an over-happy artist pointing
to a picture and saying "That's me! That's my style!" (W.S. Hayter, in his
class at San Francisco, told us we should submerge our individualities in a
common expression as had been done in Byzantine and Gothic art, but I believe
the style he suggested was his own.)
It seemed that the only style around that could absorb individuals,
united only by the faith of abstraction, was the international constructivist
hard edge of reason-it peacefully contained architects and designers didn't
it? But it seemed that some of these rebels preferred soft edges with hard
centers. The worst solecism one could commit in those years was to look for
recognizable elements in the non-objective flux. Leonardo's advice to search
for recognizable things in wall stains was taken to imply only organic nonobjectivity.
One artist said he found inspiration in the foam on the side of his
beer glass. He was exasperated when a collector triumphantly saw "three little
pickaninnies upside down" in one of his paintings. But the vigilance necessary
to make sure these forms did not creep in could make the work less than
spontaneous. We must realize that surrealism was a dirty word in America at
that time, being equated with the European Gotterdammerung. Yet, to me at
least, the most effective of these new American works were those that hinted at
some totemistic figuration. Because the Jungian depths here were scary, we
can understand why so many of the painters later accommodated themselves
to the sunny dolce far niente of Matisse and Bonnard.
For some reason I wish to associate this intuitional chance-taking
with the feminine element in our psyches. Yet just as important was the masculine
sense of thereness of the canvases; the huge, wetly flung impasto slabs
had almost magical presences, like totemic tikis. From their beseeching atavistic
incoherencies was to be forged an entirely unique language, which had a
chance to be applicable to all the species of painting that up to now it had
ignored, forbidden genres of the past, whose challenges almost none were to
accept.
World War II had caused a change of heart to occur in the younger
painters of America who were striving for recognition in 1950.1 A movement
that wanted to dispose of the European accumulation of artistic dogmas of
modern art probably was to be expected after the upheaval. But that there
should be so much resentment against dadaism and surrealism is surprising,
given the political bitterness of the average GI artist and the growing acceptance
of these iconoclasms. True, J. Miro, a surrealist, had been an influence
on some of the older artists (few of whom, incidentally, had served in the war
vol. 17, no. 1 9