"Partial, Passionate, and Political"

...Rosenberg does, indeed, give us some further clues...

...Rosenberg seems willing to concede to Pop Art but not to gagart...

...There are also essays on general subjects which make important new distinctions between internationalism and globalism, between Pop and Gag ("Pop is art in being gag...

...Rosenberg will not follow those critics like Focillon and Malraux who, by detaching paintings from fixed social, aesthetic, or metaphysical objectives, basically redefine the profession of painting...

...At this juncture of form and self-examination he was able to forge a beginning of his own, loaded with both tradition and contemporaneity...

...The fashionable level exploited by Pop Art is one of "congenital superficiality," resulting in "a qualitative monotony that could cause interest in still another gag of this kind to vanish overnight...

...Or to describe his paintings as "impeccable decor...

...Rosenberg is fully aware of Newman's importance— of his great intelligence...

...But on the basis of this vanishing trick Mr...

...There is no such thing as an "aesthetics of impermanence," and the kind of excitement generated by "anything that lies at hand," is not even a stylistic device (a dignity which Mr...

...He will seek a new direction amidst the "unalleviated confusion" of our epoch...

...with Expressionism and even (via de Kooning and Hans Hofmann) with Action Painting, and to see Van Gogh brought forward among painters of `structure' by way, for example, of his color theories...

...Painting," de Kooning is quoted as saying, "is a way of living...

...Newman has carried abstraction beyond nature and decoration to a new metaphysical significance...

...Obviously Newman is an artist to respect— "a man of taste, a man of controversy, a man of spiritual grandeur...

...But then comes the paradox: "In the shared current, individuality, no longer sought for itself, is heightened...

...never have so many valid talents been so frequently men aced with extinction through burial in a category...

...Rosenberg is here saying, but not explicitly enough, is that experience only makes sense, or genius social significance, in so far as it achieves that perceptual coherence we call form, and that no art, lacking this coherence, can possibly have permanence...

...De Kooning, to whose work Mr...

...violate the passion for spontaneity and freedom inherent in modern creation...

...Rosenberg devotes two of his two most brilliant essays, is the hero of a new adventure in art...

...he would neither imitate masterpieces nor emulate the traditional image of the Artist...

...Unfortunately I do not know Newman's paintings well enough to add anything relevant to the artist's own notion of the abstract shape as "a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of awesome feelings...

...Art becomes a Way by which to avoid a Way...

...Rosenberg suggests that "the most extremely rational art of our century had been rationalized over the border of rationality and converted into a 'vehicle' for cosmic emotions...

...Rosenberg's apologia at this point is perhaps a little evasive...

...By their mutual indetermination, art and the artist support each other's openness to the multiplicity of experience...

...But is it necessary to call him a man of taste...

...Newman's own words...

...With Alice we might comment that we have often seen "a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat...

...Here de Kooning turned inside out the Romantic image of art and the artist, as exemplified, for instance, by the paintings and the personal life of his friend Gorky...

...Mr...

...I praised Harold Rosenberg's first volume of criticism (The Tradition of the New) for its variety: this new volume must be praised for its steady concentration on one subject, the crisis of society and of art...

...the abstract shape being therefore real...

...But perhaps the most exciting essay in the whole volume is the one on "Art Movements" which caused something like a sensation when it was first published a short time ago in The New Yorker...

...Rosenberg's intention is to restore objectivity to "the only remaining intellectual activity, not excluding theology, in which pre-Darwinian minds continue to affirm value systems dissociated from any observable phenomena...

...De Kooning discards all social roles in order to start with himself as he is, and all definitions of art in order to start with art as it might appear through him...

...art gag, that is—but whether Gagart is art need not concern the historian once he has a bin to put it in...

...That is where its form lies" (my italics...

...It is his concern for the metaphysical concepts of "Time and Value," so evident in this particular essay, that distinguishes the work of Harold Rosenberg and places him in the tradition of Baudelaire's creative criticism...

...The new note introduced into art criticism by Mr...

...Far from constricting the artist's imagination, the movement magnetizes under the motions of his hand insights and feelings from outside the self and perhaps beyond the consciousness...

...one of the mysteries of the movements, as of the great 'periods' in the art of earlier times, is the creative assurance which they confer on previously commonplace talents...

...What Mr...

...Rosenberg might be called a relevant wit—not satire, much less irony (always a rare commodity in the literature of the United States), but an aptness of phrasing, if necessary of neologizing ("globalism," ..gagart"" the art of ice-cream sodas, seven-foot toothpaste tubes, movie marquees") that give a consistent liveliness to a text that is nevertheless quite savagely serious...

...This gnomic utterance Mr...

...Spontaneity and freedom are, of course, illusions: "Never before this era of movements that deny themselves have so many utterly self-inspired personalities produced canvasses so difficult to tell apart...

...It ought no longer to be necessary to point out that every valid artist is both...

...The crisis is not a new one—it has been with us for more than a hundred years and Baudelaire was its anxious prognosticator...

...I draw to the end of my space and have not yet discussed some of the most interesting of the essays in this volume—those on Hans Hofmann (an artist almost unknown outside America, in spite of his European origin), Jasper Johns and Arshile Gorky...

...Rosenberg affirms that de Kooning is "the foremost painter of the postwar world"—an opinion I am not inclined to challenge, but there must be something more to it than a fetish that de parts to leave the artist "scattered...

...This is not yet a defense of the social relevance of an abstract style...

...We are told that as far back as 1946 this foraging artist came to explore a point in art between Cubism and the late works of Cezanne—"an interval when painting intersected with Symbolist poetry and the methodological experiments of Mallarme with form, analogy and chance...

...He points out, very rightly, that the usual reliance on Cezanne for "a rationale of structure" is merely a question of emphasis —"one would like to see Cezanne associated for a change...

...A pretty vague formula, one might suppose, for discovering the form of art...

...This was an intellectual focus "exactly suited to de Kooning's passion for an art of all-inclusive experience...

...all of his subsequent paintings, as well as a good deal of the art of others, arose out of this synthesis...

...The argument now becomes somewhat solipsistic...

...But by naw the form has assumed the character of a fetish by which the artist's personality is ruled in the act of painting, "but which leaves him scattered when it departs"—rather Iike the grin of the vanishing cat in Alice, which remained some time after the rest of the animal had gone...

...Rosenberg acquires a philosophical stature rare among art crit ics of our period...

...The phenomena may be observed at different levels...

...Baudelaire is barely mentioned in The Anxious Object, but I think of him as I read this new book: it makes the same demand for a criticism that should be "partial, passionate and political"— and, to make the comparison still more exact, "amusing and poetic...

...By contrast the Abstract Expressionism it would displace "may well be still the newest in terms of potential originality and depth...

...Here Mr...

...For then "the function of art is no longer to satisfy wants, including intellectual wants, but to serve as a stimulus to further creation...

...All this is made clear in the essay on Barnett Newman, though mainly in Mr...

...After all, historical continuity depends on the facets chosen for emphasis, and nothing could be more misleading than the bifurcation of the history of modern art into Formalist and Expressionist limbs...

...This makes Barnett Newman's paintings another variety of religious experience (perhaps another kind of fetish) but I prefer to regard them as a variety of visual experience, in spite of the metaphysical titles with which the artist himself sometimes endows them...

...He has to deal with the apparent contradiction that exists today between the fact that art movements still make possible a continuity of style (a fact demonstrated, he points out, by the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of "Americans 1963" where "every single item . . . bore the unmistakeable stamp of its origin in some worldwide art movement") and the no less evident fact that such "overt forms of solidarity...

...Rejecting the old ideologies, the artist will henceforth rely on the intuitions that arise in the course of his creative activity...

...Since, for de Kooning, art must discover its form in the actuality of the artist's life, it cannot impose itself upon its practitioner as other professions do upon theirs...

...Rosenberg interprets as meaning that while art derives from life, which is the general doctrine of Romanticism, in de Kooning's view "neither the artist nor the painting has a character that pre-exists their encounter...

...This comparison is only to be sustained by defending the social relevance of Abstract Expressionism, or, not to avoid the issue, of what Marxist critics like to call Formalism...