Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
the masses (of workers or citizens) but individuals; their goal, as Meyer Schapiro
pointed out in a penetrating essay of 1957, is not communication (like the majority
of contemporary media), but to offer an experience of “contemplativeness and
communion with the work of another human being.” 23 Combining mural scale
with the individual address of the easel painting, their meaningfulness rests on
the assumed significance of the artist’s preoccupations and artistic procedures.
The drama of the painter’s creative struggle to make his work (I will come back,
once again, to the artist’s sex) and the painting’s location in the ongoing history of
art must by themselves provide the “interior movement” Greenberg looked for
on a scale sufficient to animate a wall-sized picture. Such a painting, Schapiro
observed, can compete with its environment, and “command our attention fully
like monumental painting in the past.” 24 If it is seen as wallpaper, as subject to
repetition or as decorative, this means either the failure of the work or the failure
of the viewer to grasp its autonomous significance.
Pollock’s fellow-artists Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb had attempted a
preemptive strike at such readings or misreadings in a public statement of 1943.
“We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal,” they
wrote. Professing “spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art” they asserted
that their work “must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration.”
25 In 1950, nevertheless, Vogue published a photograph of a Rothko
painting (again at the Betty Parsons Gallery) in an article entitled “Make up
your mind: one-picture wall or many-picture wall” (April 14, 1950). The story
contrasted the large-format Rothko with a “wall space used for a composite stilllife
of small prints, paintings, and objects” arranged in “an abstract pattern.”
The Rothko was similarly described as “a single still-life composed of abstract
gradations of line and color.” Despite the apparent differences, the article
insisted, “the wall spaces in these two photographs come from the same
impulse—the use of a variety of shapes and colors to make a simple design.”
Abstraction and representation alike serve as “still lifes” of design elements, as
decoration for a wall. Gone is the impact of the unequivocal, the primitive and
mythic content. In its stead we have interior decoration, a setting—in the case of
the Beaton pictures—for the New Soft Look of the new decade. In Pollock’s
ideal museum, the living figure is a spectator of the space-dominating work of
art; in Vogue’s version, the work of art is a backdrop for the figure who is herself
(again, sex will have to be discussed) the focus of attention.
It is not size per se, therefore, that renders Pollock’s drip pictures perfect backdrops
for the ball gowns in Beaton’s illustrations. The use of art as prop is
common enough in Vogue and similar magazines. Fernand Fonssagrives shot
23 Meyer Schapiro, “Recent abstract painting,” in idem, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. Selected
Papers (New York George Braziller, 1978), p. 224. See the interesting discussion in de Chassey,
La Peinture efficace, pp. 240 ff.
24 Ibid., p. 219.
25 Chipp, Theories, p. 545.
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