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With Guston's Summer, 1954, abstract expressionism becomes its own opposite: abstract impressionism. Guston, who once had a high reputation for academic art, does not think of his later paintings as pictures at all. Says he, "They are myself." In order to put himself into his canvases, Guston makes them close to his own size. For such self-consciously personal work, the results look strangely like blowups of Claude Monet's water-lily impressions.
William Baziotes' Pompeii is also a sophisticated vision rather than an outpouring of feeling: he saw something like it in his mind's eye. Rumpled, testy Mark Rothko produces pictures as smooth and calm as a cup of cambric tea. His Orange Over Yellow might make a handsome background for something, but this is not what he intended, any more than the makers of the medieval tapestries meant merely to adorn palaces. It seems highly doubtful that such art as Rothko's will some day seem as meaningful as the tapestries, yet it is possible. Such paintings may be as little as mere decoration or they may be as much as glimpses of a spiritual world awaiting an observer's ability to see them as such. It depends greatly on the sympathy of the observer.
Sympathy, in fact, is something the new advance guard demands. Far from wishing to needle the bourgeoisie, as did the School-of-Paris moderns half a century ago, the young pioneers of American painting crave appreciation. When it is not forthcoming, some of them sulk and some shrug. But none of them seems to laugh. "To refashion the fashioned, lest it stiffen into iron, means an endless vital activity," they argue with Goethe. They solemnly reiterate that since impressionism, cubism and abstractionism have proved meaningful over the years, abstract expressionism will, too. And curiously enough, this wishful argument-by-analogy does cow some critics and win over others.
Academy of the Left. Among those who have kept their sense of balance and humor in criticizing the advance guard is Worcester Art Museum Director Francis Henry Taylor. In his role of judge, the critic must, like any judge, rely very largely upon precedent, as Taylor does when he complains that the advance guard has ceased to communicate with ordinary men. "Not until the second quarter of the 20th century," he points out, "was the essential communicability of art ever denied . . . The one and only quality denied to a work of art throughout the ages is privacy. Unless participation is allowed the spectator, it becomes a hopeless riddle and ceases to be any work of art at all ... What the new Academy of the Left has yet to realize is that in their fanatic zeal they have not achieved freedom of movement for the modern artist. They have merely substituted the rubber girdle for the whalebone corset."
But the advance guard has some equally distinguished champions, notably Guggenheim Museum Director James Johnson Sweeney. Instead of passing judgment, Sweeney holds, the critic should try to "draw the attention of the public to something he has found worthy of attention and enjoyable—and to tempt the public also to enjoy it. He has to be humble in his approach if he is to get the most from his observation of art's constantly changing face."