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PARTISAN REVIEW
found in the work of these French leaders. And at the same time there
has been increasing regard paid to imagination and
to
allusionistic struc–
tures in painting, leaning more toward "literary" suggestion than toward
austere abstraction.
Such a trend was already evident in the work of Morris Graves
four years ago. A linearism was always the foundation of his com–
position-a seeming automatic, free-running line which wove endlessly
in and out, back and forth until a recognizable form grew out of it.
His color washes added the emotional overtone he wished for his subject,
which always embodied a subtle allusiveness, and usually took the shape
of a symbolic animal fantasy. This year at the Willard Gallery, Graves'
paintings were larger in scale and stronger in color. But there was that
same imaginative emphasis which gave his earlier work its appeal, ;.>er–
haps with an increase in subtlety in proportion to his increase in scale
and with an exchange of his earlier, more obvious animal symbolism
far
strange dead landscapes and lone visionary trees.
In Arshile Gorky's one man show at the Julien Levy Gallery there
was little trace of his old interest in following the Paris leaders or of the
stress on the abstract which used to mark his work. His latest oils,
products of last summer, were translations of natural forms along the
lines of the crayon studies he had brought back from Virginia the year
before; a transmutation of grass and flower forms into a pictorial world
of allusive ambiguity. His color was applied more freely than in his
painstaking emulations of Picasso and Miro several years ago and a new
vitality and spontaneity came with this independence.
Again, Jackson Pollock's work at Art of this Century marked a
similar advance--perhaps not so wide a step ahead of his last year's
work as Gorky's. Nevertheless, there was a more consistent achieve–
ment evident in it than in last year's-a greater confidence in the direc–
tion he is following and no loss of vitality in the imaginative com–
positions which he seems to draw out of the paint on the canvas through
a wild brushing rather than out of his own mind. Pollock's approach is
a new type of fevered automatism which, in his most successful works,
he succeeds in organizing into a compositional unity before the impasto
becomes too thick and too muddied.
And in Matta's latest work shown at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, not
only the greatest changes of approach of any of these young men .is
evident, but also the boldest reliance on suggestion and allusion in
subject matter. The ·Turneresque dream landscapes painted from a
palette dominated by "shocking pink" and the personalization of Du–
champ's influence in Matta's work of the last few years, has now given
way to monumental Rimbaudian graffiti, weirdly sulphuric in tone,
sexual or sadistic in representation-as "literary" and imaginative as
they are successful as painting, and disquieting.
JAMEs
J.
SwEENEY
