Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

there is a continuity of bothreality and meaning betweenthe outer and inner worlds ofour experience. Such ambiguitiescan also be observed in hispurely nonrepresentationalworks, which sometimes recallanatomical parts freed fromtheir familiar figural context,densely compacted within hispictures so that they are continually,dynamically interactingwith each other within a kind ofeternal becoming that weavesacross the picture surface.The Color-Field PaintersThe formal problems ofthe color-field painters withinthe New York School were, ina way, more difficult than thoseof the gesture painters. Theywanted to maximize the visualimpact of specific colors andfound that, to do so, they had tosimplify or eliminate any otherFigure 17. Willem de Kooning. Woman on Bicycle.1952–1953. Oil on canvas. WhitneyMuseum of American Art, New Yorkfigures or symbols and apply the colors in large expanses that would saturatethe eye. Most of them also found it necessary to suppress any evidenceof their own autobiographical process or painting activity. But then howwere they to avoid formlessness? This was a more radical abandonmentof the familiar structural basis of existing Western art, that is, of the use ofmodulated dark and light values to produce the illusion of mass in space.Their solution was to find ways to adjust the colored areas to create a unifiedand contained field, each zone of which is of equal chromatic intensityand value. The surface of the painting was treated as an active ”field” witha unified texture for an allover, “single image” effect.Some observers seemed to grasp landscape sensations within colorfieldpaintings, but the artists themselves had something different and morevisionary in mind, which they might have termed the “abstract sublime.”129