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Martyrs, Inc. The persecution complex that darkens, like a private rain cloud, the brows of most abstract expressionists can only be called subjective. On an objective level, the leaders of the movement have done quite well. The painters are sur rounded by adoring disciples. Their works have been showed and admired in a dozen American cities and also in London, Paris and Venice. The works of the eight painters on these pages hang in excellent Manhattan galleries, and more than 100 of them have been bought by museums at four-figure prices.
Abstract expressionism does not mean Easy Street to the artist, but neither does it mean martyrdom, unless the martyrdom is of the sort that Painter Mark Rothko bemoans. Rothko for a while was one of a group who carried privacy to the extreme of refusing to let their paintings be seen; ' even now he considers it "a risky act" to send a painting "out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!"
The advance guard is advancing in a number of different directions at once, and swiftly outrunning the abstract-expressionist formula. The variety of the paintings shown here—from De Kooning's gustiness to Guston's coolness—is in itself a strong indication of the movement's vitality. And even the uncaring observer will somehow prefer one picture lo another, which proves that they do project certain qualities—whether ugly or beautiful. None is a mere nothing.
Jack the Dripper. Adolph Gottlieb's Blue at Noon, for example, conveys a strong sense of light and dark skies and of lilting movement. Looking at it is rather like watching a snowstorm through a windowpane and remembering Thomas Nash's line: "Brightness falls from the air." Jackson Pollock's Scent is a heady specimen of what one worshiper calls his "personalized skywriting." More the product of brushwork than of Pollock's famed drip technique, it nevertheless aims to remind the observer of nothing except previous Pollocks, and quite succeeds in that modest design. All it says, in effect, is that Jack the Dripper, 44, still stands on his work.
Robert Motherwell's Western Air is cubism smashed flat and with a couple of sky-holes poked through it. It demonstrates how abstract expressionism can make violent use of yesterday's art furniture. Arshile Gorky's Garden in Sochi uses Miro-like amoeba shapes to express an infant memory.
Tricks & Skids. Willem de Kooning's Gotham News uses just about every trick in painting, except illusion, to create excitement. It is juicy à la Rubens, gaudy à la Delacroix, emphatic à la Vlaminck —and utterly ambiguous. Being too agitated for the purposes of either decoration or contemplation, De Kooning's canvas reaffirms the abstract-expressionist credo that the very effort of painting is what paintings should be about. The observer's glance is led to skid here and there in the calculated mess like brush strokes; looking at the picture is supposed to re-create the painting process.