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PARTISAN REVIEW
ments are well organized in most of the fine Renaissance paintings,
much more strongly than in the Inness landscape here reproduced.
And the old masters patterned the broad masses with considerable
feeling. The next step was the inevitable division of these masses
into their naturalistic components (a head does have to be attached
to a body after all, the shoulders must support long tubular appen–
dages that represent arms, and in a landscape the sky-unless
filled with airplanes, birds, or foliage, is hard to invest with
structural ribs comparable to those provided by the solid- forms
beneath). So it is that the concentration upon shape was bound to
lose its freedom. When everything has been added from fingers
to facial expressions, the spectator's eye usually becomes the prey
to localized activities and the painting no longer strikes with its
completely unified impact. (Perhaps my particular fondness for
unfinished and partially destroyed works by old masters, which
show the structural masses without the illustrational refinements,
can thus be accounted for,-such as the unfinished Leonardo in the
Uffizi, the ruined Cimabue at Assisi, not to mention the headless
and armless sculp.tures of antiquity.) However I never maintain,
as many modern artists have done, that naturalistic pictures may
not be deeply expJessive. I only say that what abstract art can
offer is something
different
and something particularly pertinent
to our time. We are surrounded by efforts to weld the two concep·
tions of painting into a single unit. For a time the attempt was
supported by a Strong tradition (Juan Gris, Picasso in his cubist
period, etc.) But the abstract impulse was not for long able to
stand appeasement; in the present period I do not find efforts at
straddling that satisfy. Conscious movements toward reincorporat–
ing literature (such as surrealism) are rarely able to hold on to
the internal qualities, and already a vulgarity and "fakeness"
permeates much of their paintings; a few on the border-line (Klee,
Mir6, Gonzalez) have remained rooted in the abstract conception,
with the naturalistic over-meanings playing a . small part through
the best of their work. An era of convulsion evidently requires of
artists that they restrict their horizons and close in upon a con–
sciously ordered world where every facet is completely under–
stood. The period so like our own which witnessed the break-up
of the Roman Empire produced the Byzantine mosaics; they are
perhaps the "quietest" and most stylized of any expressions before
twentieth century abstractions.
