Art: Low Pain

Hell-for-leather abstractionists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning have kept Manhattan art circles spinning all season. Their swirls, blobs and blizzards of paint, most of them too haphazard for analytical discussion, drew cheers and jeers, started scores of cocktail-party tiffs.

A California critic named Jules Langsner finally capped the argument with a shrewd belch, in the current Arts & Architecture magazine. Reviewing a traveling show including such abstractions, he observed that they "evoke all kinds of muffled after-sensations, but not individuated images in the mind's eye. It is as...

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