Verse
Murphy, Sister Ellen
painting became the center of world painting in 'the work of artists like Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and the others of the so-called New York School, the self-creating seeking for a...
...5 August 1977:504...
...Not exactly the thing-itself but so carefully crafted as to seem the very thing n o t a sign of the thing...
...Interwoven with the belief in the secular Kingdom of God is the vision of America, the American landscape, the American city, the American painter as a New Man, self-creating as the direct work of Nature or Nature's God...
...Instead of culture handed along or revealed religion remembered ( " I n that time . . ."), America chooses direct religion (revelation here, miracle now...
...Mark Rothko said, "Pictures must be miraculous...
...If one can tease out any thin and tattered moral from America as art, it is that many American painters accept as fully as the Pilgrim fathers or the Captains of Industry, the view that the Heavenly City is at hand in this country...
...Those blackclothed dissenters who were bold enough to settle the landscape with towns from the Holy Land: Salem, Jericho, Zion, would understand the austere rejection of image and the desire not to reflect upon New Jerusalem, but to create it here and now...
...The "meaning" of modern art is a perennial problem and this is hardly the place to discuss such a weighty question, but "meaning" in American art has a special twist...
...An Annunciation in any style is about that event, but Hanson's Lady 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 SISTER ELLEN MURPHY is just there and refers to nothing...
...With hearts as with bodies it is grace that wins every contest...
...To that end, Still will justify his great splashes of somber black on somber brown by quoting Blake: The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my Vision's Greatest Enemy: Thine is the friend of all Mankind Mine speaks in parables to the Blind . , . It may seem a far cry from the dour Pilgrims who formed the Plymouth settlement to the fashionable chic of the New York art world, but the Puritan sentiment remains...
...This rather extraordinary turn in history may be noted for its accomplishments (in deed and art) or for its hubris, but if certain souls seek salvain American galleries rather than American churches, no American should be surprised...
...De Kooning could declare in an echo of Ruskin, "Style is a fraud, I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns...
...I try to let it come through...
...The city is to be pure, God's very kingdom...
...To the American painters, painting does not depict religious events at second hand, it is a religious event...
...There is no Revelation in the foreground, no sages under the trees, to point a moral...
...The painter need not be learned and refer to holy events (Biblical stories or the Ramayana) because the holy is everpresent if one will open his eyes to nature at-hand or to the painter's own act of creation at-hand...
...To the extent that American painters eschew style or historical theme (a favorite topic of much of world art), there is no reference...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 WATCHING THE OLYMPICS They show us in slow motion how in the perfect action each movement is ever righting itself in respect to the other, in respect to the earth and the space and their laws from balance to point of balance the enduring bones leap, the muscles remember the rules of flexible elegance, integrity, grace...
...fluid, enduring...
...It has been pointed out that landscape art is a late development in Western painting and that it is the first "abstract" a r t - - p u r e landscape (Turner not Claude) tells no story...
...that survives judgment day in and day out as when two persons (or nations) long pledged to each other in marriage or friendship learn to move freely together forever achieving their balance...
...the painting is to be purged, a present miracle...
...The new painting rejects the figurative with as much emotion as the naturalists yearned for it, but the underlying rationale is similar...
...The American experience (in deed and in art) might well be seen as a contrast to traditional European experience...
...The aim of this rejection of style, academic technique and comfortable symbol was to liberate the imagination not for fantasy but, as Taylor remarks about Clifford Still's work, to discover "the reflection of that mystic source that is home to the soul...
...Pollock proclaims a rejection of selfconscious art which would have horrified Mrs...
...If meaning in art connects to reference, "what is this painting about?," then there is a peculiar sense in which American painting lacks reference...
...Frederick Church's Rock just "is," Rothko's horizons of Promise have no theology...
...We do not discourse with rocks, or metaphysical sunsets anymore than with the Lady at Table...
...Trollope, "When I am tn my painting, I'm not aware of what I am doing . . . the painting has a life of its own...
...painting became the center of world painting in 'the work of artists like Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and the others of the so-called New York School, the self-creating seeking for a "religious" sentiment endured...
...What does it mean to be confronted by Warhol's soup can or a gigantic Kline calligraph...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 16
