Criticism as an Abstract Art
Porter, Fairfield
Harold Rosenberg is a brilliant critic whose most telling perceptions derive more easily from an organizing of ideas than from observation and description. He invented the name "Action...
...To this `mind' Gorky brought accumulations of the hand that reveal him to be in fact the artist he had begun by inventing...
...He did not start from the Armory Show...
...Arshile Gorky was the pseudonym of Vosdanig Adoian, a Turkish-Armenian refugee who came to this country in 1920 at the age of fifteen, and set about to create his own being...
...Then ideas count, and criticism prevails over performance...
...The apparent ends of the PostImpressionists derived indeed from their professional French means, yet American artists, being provincials, did not have masterly enough control of their means to be able suddenly and radically to change without starting all over again from scratch...
...Action Painting marks a return to the unity of theory and practice...
...ends became split from means, and when, for instance, Bellows abandoned his natural skill of hand for a new look he lost his own form for a collection of notions...
...The painterly form that Sloan and Bellows gave up had its limitations, along with the important merit of deriving from the artist's means and material: it was an organic form...
...He did not separate understanding from action...
...He did not believe in any identity to be preserved and to express through art...
...First he was Cezanne, then Picasso, finally Miro...
...duces chaos, which, to be sure, is rationalized as order...
...The immigrant is a self-made man...
...In his talk and in his paintings he was a channel for the transmission of European art to American artists...
...Its effect was disastrous, like the effect of whiskey and gunpowder on savages...
...This is the art of the time between the wars when radical social ideas were likewise split from practice, as the means of Bolshevik Marxism had no connection with the ends in view, so that from Bolshevik practice and from the Marxian insistence on the unity of theory and practice was born the theory of Fascism...
...The first big impact of French PostImpressionism on American art came from the Armory show in 1913...
...He saw the new painting, and admiring it, set himself the task of becom ming himself such a painter...
...It was art itself, that meant to him culture, that he would learn as a way to acquiring identity...
...he abandoned no skill of hand to assimilate a new look...
...The Americans sought form in art and lost the form of art...
...art is a mine from which he extracts ideas...
...Like "impressionism" the name describes a movement as a whole much more accurately than any example...
...This chaos, called order, illustrates some system...
...Rosenberg is not a visual critic, and his specific descriptions do not evoke the appearance of the paintings...
...This book is not an introduction to Gorky's paintings, but concerned with the meaning and idea of Gorky's work...
...Making oneself (self-creation) is not, however, far distant from making oneself up (self-invention) and from make-up (self-disguise...
...Even art that illustrates ideas of art is prone to inorganic form, with means separate from ends...
...He contributed, much more than the Armory show, to the Frenchifying of American painting, and in this, his role for this country was similar to the role of Poussin in the Italianization of French art in the seventeenth century...
...He invented the name "Action Painting" for the currently fashionable American style that began after the war and now influences all painting from Indonesia to Warsaw and London...
...On his first sight of de Kooning's work on a visit to his studio, he remarked, " 'Aha, so you have ideas of your own.' 'Somehow,' de Kooning recalls, 'that didn't seem so good.' " With Gorky, "imitation was a learning to be as well as a learning to do...
...The PostImpressionist impact jolted American art in an inorganic direction...
...Art was the promised land, in which he sought his place...
...With Gorky, to be an artist counted far more than to be himself...
...When during the De what he is or might become...
...As a name it helps to determine style, giving it a place as an incarnation of American Pragmatism...
...Gorky through submission to a master, became the peer of his masters...
...The Americans who insisted on originality, even in adopting Cubism, remained provincial...
...He found himself by losing himself in another person...
...As a French Post-Impressionist in New York before the Second World War, Gorky influenced the possibilities of American painting through the example he set, first of surrender to Picasso, and secondly surrender to the activity of art...
...and his portrait of Gorky is an abstract portrait, with the logic of Picasso's Cubist portraits, whose scaffold formality gives you a complete and understandable form instead of suggestions of actual mysteries...
...With the passage of time, even in the early Cezannesgque paintings, his own individuality seems to emerge, as crimson paint will bleed through an overcoat of white...
...The life and work of Gorky contributed to this return...
...For if theory is practice, then Fascism is the practice of Leninism...
...A concern with "meaning" separates ends from means, denying paint and denying language...
...Later, in the 'forties, his paintings were thin, bright and runny, and resembled somewhat the abstract surrealism of Miro and Matta...
...The paintings that he showed in the late 'thirties looked like copies of Cezanne and imitations of Braque and Picasso, all in very thick paint, with an al most cement-like surface...
...He is a Post-Impressionist critic...
...Something similar happens as a result of the belief that art is orderly and nature chaotic, that is, this belief pro...
...If art is order and order is synthetic, then art is separated from its natural origin, the nature of its materials...
...Too many painters and sculptors gave up their acquired skill of hand for the radical ideas the new art seemed to imply...
Vol. 10 • January 1963 • No. 1
