Advance-guard painting in America is hell-bent for outer space. It has rocketed right out of the realms of common sense and common experience. That does not necessarily make it bad. But it does leave the vast bulk of onlookers earthbound, with mouths agape and eyes reflecting a mixture of puzzlement, vexation, contempt. A cursory study of advance-guard painting gives rise to the conclusion that it consists, like the Mock Turtle's arithmetic, of "Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision." It is wild, woolly, willful. But nothing has only one side, and negatives cannot sum up America's newest painting. A good deal can be said for its positive qualities, once they have been set in the context of modern art history.
Turning the Mirror. The young pioneers reproduced on the following pages took their lead from such European moderns as Kandinsky, Picasso and Paul Klee, and from a slightly less exalted group-Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipschitz, Piet Mondrian, André Masson—who sat out World War II in New York. All brought essentially the same promise: instead of holding a mirror up to nature, art could mirror the inner world of the artist himself. The methods for doing this—abstraction and distortion—were as old as doddering modern art itself (i.e., almost a century), and had already been explored by older native sons from Arthur Dove to Stuart Davis (TIME, Feb. 13).
The bright young proconsuls of the advance guard, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, added to this pattern of approach a breathtaking fervency and single-mindedness. Following Clausewitz' formula for successful military attack, they concentrated all the forces they could muster on the smallest possible problem: to express what they happened to be feeling in the process of painting. The results were huge canvases excitedly smeared, spattered, daubed, dribbled and gobbed with color in the shape of freewheeling overall designs, as if the artists had been playing with paints and got carried away. They were not as formless and unconsidered as the quick glance suggests, however, and they aimed for styles coherent at least to the stylists.
The Pollock-De Kooning breakthrough soon found a following, and a label: abstract expressionism. Like most labels, this one has proved inadequate. It is used loosely to suggest merely the expression of strong feeling without any reference to objective reality. Young idealists in search of an ideal, and middle-aged casuists in search of a cause, alike sprang to the defense of abstract expressionism almost before it began to be attacked. And it was attacked, inevitably, for to believers in the classical concepts of beauty and truth to nature, it was an insult. This gave the advance guard a stimulating sense of unity and a debilitating sense of being persecuted, both of which it might otherwise have lacked.