Art Criticism - The State University of New York

printed a bullet track fired into a lithographic stone. This Duchamp-like prank is
no doubt considered an example of the humor that relieves the modern artist of
self-important tensions, but this kind of insane clarity betrays a sickness the
Americans rarely exhibited. The adolescent gruesomeness that is so typical of
surrealist painting is the darker side of the poetry that was a desperate device
to contain the European pre-war senselessness, make the unbearable somehow
life size. It is a regimen of insights easily parodied and debased, as we see
in many younger poets. But it is a tribute to the American painters' simpleheartedness
and sense of isolation from jaded ambivalence that their reaction
to Duchamp was probably "Why not yawn?"
There needed to be a sublimation of surrealism's lubricities into a
more wholesome folk magic that expressed the instability of elements revealed
in new tools like microphotography, a dread wonder and faith masking doubt in
the future of space technology. But the photographs were better than the
spooky black paintings that seemed to thrive in Europe but that, like words
which there have a sympathetic connotation, such as "pathetique, pauvre,
miserable," over here take on negative shadings. And the habit of taking things
out of context in order to see unfamiliar qualities in them is closer to the literary
sleuth of worldly insights than it is to the disjointed derelict from unity, aching
for ordcr through healing non-humanistic Nature.
It had become evident that this most painterly of schools in the U.S.A.
had not really caught on with writers, as had surrealism in Europe, where the
cross-pollinization was stifling. Here any interest by writers was due to the
artists being exotically unliterary, a little barbaric but amusing, and not challenging
the writers' graphic territory. The intention at first was not to
overpopularize it but to keep this pure product from being raided by the voracious
lower class taste. Perhaps painting and sculpture always have been this
kind of catalyst to the literary leaders, part of an enchanting game for those
who were able to abstract with facility witty opinions that dumbfounded inarticulate,
but needy, artists. But they should have realized that "literary" has
another less derogatory meaning, a possible painterly unfolding of a saga with
an entirely different kind of cast than the all-too-human puppets who, in the
Victorian era, made traditional illustration ridiculous. This application of a myth
saga could be a fuifillment of its promise when it was ready to emerge, free of
sponsors, with the kind of exact intuitions that only total revulsion against the
obscenity of war nourishes.
The victims of uncontrollable and perverse imaginations,
neurasthenics like Poe, who ignore the folk sources for the sake of their own
horrifying compulsions, achieve a popularity in a mass audience they usually
loathe; the need that they satisfy being of only that side of human nature that
is lustful, greedy, all-too-human, whereas Blake, Beethoven, Tolstoi give us a
beatitude of an almost childlike nature, simplicities unfashionable in our ago-
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Art Criticism