December 1970 - January 1971
The aim of criticism, it has always seemed to me, is to unearth through understanding the most direct possible interpretation of the achievements of painters, as with the specialists in any field. This does not mean that the critic should tell the painter how to be a good painter. It is even a liberty to assert, as it has been reported one well-known critic has, in response to a painter's accusation of bullying, " I don't tell you how to paint! Only how to proceed." It is also presumptuous to draw larger conclusions from the isolation of noninvolvement with the activity, and inform the painter that a particular view about the nature of space or matter, i.e., paint or canvas, cannot be correct because it has awkward metaphysical implications.
If, therefore, as Barbara Rose has said, criticism has run out of superlatives, this does not mean that quality hasn't been discernable. On the contrary, there is a consistent nodding agreement among peer practitioners about what is good painting. They are the ones who are acting it out and criticizing by doing, by declaring; as witness the recent Larry Poons exhibition at the Lawrence Rubin galleries.
It is perhaps too early to access the true essence, implications, and likely value of Poons's latest attempts, but one thing is certain: a short comparison with the exhibition of John Hoyland's recent work, shown at about the same time at the Emmerich galleries, reveals some of the differences being talked about and dealt with. Related to this, there prevails a general lack of understanding of Hans Hoffman, of what Hofmann achieved in one rectangle reaching across [sometimes several] others and echoing the extent to which the actual image carries vibrancy in terms of sheer color: The whole resounds in a sort of concertinaed burst, holding the surface so taut visually that one doesn't question its shallowness, hence its flatness. This idea does not work in any of Hoyland - the paint oozing all over, devoid of any structure or tension, bellied and sagged visually in a sort of messy collapse. Poons, on the other hand, is not playing at plastic surgery but, one suspects, seeking in the doing and seeing the expressive possibilities of the paint itself as it is related to the art of painting. The basic character of his pictures lies in the figurative event of paint moved - paint moving, having moved.
There has been a lot of talk about thick paint, but this is not really a new issue. It was going on in 19 th century Germany, and London had its so-called Bromberg School, dominated by Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossof. [We saw examples of Auerbach's works here at the Marlborough Gallery in September - October 1969.] In Sweden there is Evert Lundquist and his followers; in Paris there was De Stael, etc. The originality of Poons, however, is in his dealing with paint as visible paint possibilities - expressive, openly articulate as color and as force - and not with paint as building material - skin and / or bone equivalents, etc. He uses a process of not quite scooping or bailing out the water that separates from the heavy pigment settling; letting it drift, he oversees the internal volition rather like a hawk.
For what we have seen, Poons's handling is both subtle and delicately balanced. His sense of color braces this capacity so finely that it often strays over into slickness; however, the successful pictures are images of great power resulting almost entirely, one guesses, from his disciplined response to paint. The ability of paint to fluctuate and deal with fluid structures by piling up, drifting, etc. appears to be not a question of sculpture bas relief, and so on, nor of space [flatness, concave, convex, etc.], but an inherent character of the nature of paint as experienced by the painter.
References to science, philosophical description or other closed definitions of "paint" and "color" thus seem completely disconnected from the reality of paint as illustrated by Larry Poons. Walter Darby Bannard has written several essays on the problems that contemporary abstract color painters are confronting. In the March 1970 issue of Artforum ["Color Painting and the Map Problem"] he contends that for some geometrical reason one cannot, in the making of a map or a painting, place more than four different color areas adjacent to one another.
In trying his best to isolate one aspect, or unit, from the pictorial fullness of painting for our understanding, he ends up rendering it brittle and negative. The aspect or element I'm particularily referring to is structure. "All painting is relational" is one of those happy kinds of observations. Editors have a habit of discomfitting one with questions like "relational to what?" But never mind, perhaps explanation is not quite so steadfastly needed, after all that idea has been talked about. Bannard goes on to state, "But they [the pictorial units] may not interact ... they either stand alone or exhaust themselves on their immediate neighbor ... The wholeness of the picture is [thus] fractured and the structure gives in ..." This is stating the obvious. Extended substances, like particular bodies, don't move. By emphasizing the mathematics of the surface, Bannard dismisses the fact that the almost casual efficacy of a particular good painting implies, indeed constitutes, a certain kind of action.
Since Bannard claims that the "mutual isolation" of picture units weakens a painting, we are forced to assume in terms of absolute abstract relatedness that all nonrelational paintings --made and not - fall into the same bag. Yet "painting a canvas all one color, or ... leaving it [the canvas] blank" are surely two different things, for painting is painting and the proof of quality is in painting." Leaving it [the canvas] blank" is decidedly not painting.
Bannard's essay seems to block the appearance of two equivalents. The first being the natural connection between the two-dimensional structure of the stretched canvas, and the "orderly system of parallels and meridians" and the grid/systems of most comprehensive maps. Second, the organic nature of shapes which masses take on - water, land, soft, hard, and so on - very much like the fluid structure of paint itself as it forms up and delivers. Given that these are equivalents through the actual formal existences inherent in both things, however superficial, the fact of various differences through action could be taken as understood from the existing evidence. There is all the difference of action, as it pertains to painting, on an actual woven, absorbent-like canvas, in that on this molecular, or porous surface, if we block the pores we get opacity; if not, we get something which, if not quite opposite, is pretty near to it. Whereas the degree of subservience of an actual map's [the sort readily at hand] ability to go through the same process proves an insoluble barrier.
[PICTURE]
Jasper Johns, Map [ Based on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Airocean World[1967]. encaustic and collage on canvas. 186" x 396". [dimensions can vary]
[PICTURE]
Larry Rivers, Africa 11 [1962-63], oil on canvas, 113" x 133".
The point that "pictorial units have an automatic or forced relationship," though correct, limits the consideration to a space problem and puts a halter around the vulnerable fact that what is being discussed is rigid as opposed to fluid structures. Emphasis is on limitation, not on freedom of paint ability.
Rand McNally World Atlas, 1967, states, "... a map is merely an orderly system of parallels and meridians on which a flat map can be drawn ..." Most projections are disguised to preserve on the flat map some particular property of the sphere. By varying the systematic arrangement of the latitude or longitude lines a projection can be made either equal area or conformal. Although most projections are derived from mathematical formulas some are easier to 'visualize' if thought of as projected upon a plane, or upon a cone or a cylinder which is then unrolled into a plane surface, and thus are classified plane [Azinuthal], conic or cylindrical ..." Much of this is closer to the fact of painting as process, with its constant drive to reiterate and assert flatness, as opposed to the serial implication of topology, which would accept flatness as a given in needing no assertion. Carrying this further, a more precise rendering of near-equivalents with painting as we know it through Cezanne and Mondrian would be difficult to equal. Bannard himself tells us that Jackson Pollock's work, blossoming from Cubism "...took the line and threw out the form it enclosed."
There is a continued, deepening threat of negative importance essential to Bannard's position. "Recently ... the best paintings have been in terms of color rather than space ... Artists often reduced space variety or the importance of space variety..." could be taken as an observation from a sensibility with "a highly developed sense of fact," in Clement Greenberg's words. The trouble is that what follows [i.e., " ...painting in terms of color brings up special problems of isolation and interaction ... Many colors spread at random on ... a flat surface become mutually isolated because each color can interact only with those colors sharing its borders"] is not good enough because of the self-evident a priori limitation; also the language implies once again that what is being touched on is space. Coming as Bannard does out of that era when "hard-edge" painting was the dominant issue, it is not, perhaps, surprising to find that these utterances turn out to be a rather academic view of color; but there are other points about color besides these comparatively well known abstract ones.
[PICTURE]
Paul Cezanne, Mt. St. Victoire [1905], 14" x 29".
[PICTURE]
Jasper Johns, map [1963]. 60" x 93".
A lot of color painting going back to the mid-1960's with Jules Olitski, which seemed to refer to Monet's work as the particular location which springboarded the present dialogue, is really more properly located in the discoveries of Cezanne and the Cubists; a sort of re-connecting to the object world to leave the painting free to define itself as painting. I think that William Rubin is right in suggesting, rather stating, that the earliest fully realized paintings of Frank Stella [the "black paintings"], which seemed a long time to refer to Jackson Pollock, were much closer in time and directly connected to what Jasper Johns was doing. Seen now with the perspective of hindsight to be a contention of objectness and Cezanne's juncture, operating not as separating lines but as guides to the next open space, the oft-repeated assertion that the space in Cezanne "looks" as if one could walk into it is really about a kind of "blindness." There is an anxious, groping certainty/uncertainty as the marks stutter across the surface until they are built up in an increasingly sure but always perplexed march to the edge, which nevertheless has an uncanny magnet of drawing one back into the midst of the image. This is what grips one in an incredible tension very like Old Master painting, where one tends to forget what one is looking at. It is quite unlike Monet's Impressionism, which attempts to catch the "fugitive effects" of nature.
In the hands of Cezanne, the color structure discoveries of the Impressionists became a mark-making guide to the next space , rather like a seeing-eye dog. In this sense it could be said that Frank Stella took up one of the things, more accurately one of the aspects, the Cubists discarded. This could be read several ways. I think the proper one is, simply, that it didn't apply because it was too difficult. It came too close to decoration, and Matisse was the only person able to cope with decoration, but then Matisse was never a Cubist. It is interesting that Matisse, who used to map out his work in the sense that his cut-outs were constantly being re-arranged in a kind of charting in search of balance, is never mentioned in connection with any of the known users of maps such as Johns and Rivers.
In Sam Hunter's recent book on Larry Rivers, for example, no mention is made of the almost compulsive attachment of this artist to specifying, much as this penchant is turned loose by the artist to the point of being vague. Rivers' use of map can only be said to be vague in the sense that the use to which the appearance of a map is put is indicative only of something else; not painting but something in or about a work. Like his use of Abstract Expressionist painting attitudes, vacillating between "plain" figuration and fragmentary allusions to figuration, Rivers' use of maps suffers from a lack of worry . Though employed literally [Africa, Boston Massacre, Russian Revolution], they serve to depict some thing or place outside the work itself. Max Kozloff in his book on Jasper Johns spends much greater energy in discussing where the paintings don't fit into a concept of Apollonian aspirations through structure, rather than on the structures themselves. Of the map done in 1961 and now in the Museum of Modern Art, Kozloff says Johns "...betrays such an indifference to geography that the United States are swamped in shrill yellows and reds and light blues, without any compensating adjustment of stroke to image. It is an unravelled, acrimonious picture." The wholly literary and emotional connotations around the three map paintings are, one suspects, hardly Jasper Johns. What one sees after, and in, connection with False Start [1959] is the demand of mobile paint structures. Linear space or plane structures, which lend to a one-to-one color articulation, become considerably undermined when color is busier, more natural, more fluid. If the control of False Start is direct and intuitive, the maps with their "stepped" but natural up-and-down, left-and-right, right-and-left, stuttered diagonal drifts, looping bellying lines, demand [within the rectangle] a certain kind of order that Johns seems unwilling to pursue.
Kozloff is right that the map done in 1963 is the better of the three paintings, but the most successful work using "map" as a springboard into the making of an image is the print of Two Maps. The reason for this is that the one-to-one demand is being satisfied by linear space repetition. Whereas in every painting Johns seems incapable of dealing with the left-hand corner, where California juts out into the ocean, and the curved drift implied by that shape, finds no echo anywhere else. In fact it is badly disrupted by a completely different set of curves around Florida. The lack of natural rhythms at the borders, both left and lower right, of these pictures makes the comparative order and seductive colorism in the middle appear overdone and confused. The "stamped" stencil supports, but only to emphasize device. Missing is the understanding found in Cezanne and Mondrian, and suggested by Rand McNally.
Because painting can be so decorative in the worst sense, a quality inherent in the works of artists like Johns and Rivers, there is a kind of existential touch that makes the liberties they take with objects sustain themselves in the facture of that tension, that plight of risk. Color painting, or more properly abstract color painting is only the most recent example of that which gambles with the absolute hazards of collapsing through being decorative.