PARTISAN REVIEW
ment and of compensation for the hygienically destructive effects of
enlightenment, have ebbed away in Europe under the suction of events
and a declining bourgeois order. One has the impression-but only the
impression-that the immediate future of Western art, if it is to have
any immediate future, depends on what is done in this country. As dark
as the situation still is for us, American painting in its most advanced
aspects-that is, American abstract painting-has in the last several
years shown here and there a capacity for fresh content that does not
seem to be matched either in France or Great Britain. Yet the general
crisis does not spare us and, given the obstacles American art con–
tinues to face since the Civil War, the situation still opposes itself to
the individual artist with an unfriendliness that makes art life in Paris
or even London idyllic by comparison. With all our present relative
advantages, much more is still required of us in the way of exertion,
tenacity, and independence in order to make an important contribu–
.tion. The American artist has to embrace and content himself, almost,
with isolation, if he is to give the most of honesty, seriousness, and
ambition to his work. Isolation is, so to speak, the natural condition of
high art in America.
Yet it is precisely our more intimate and habitual acquaintance
with isolation that gives us our advantage at this moment. Isolation, or
rather the alienation that is its cause, is the truth-isolation, alienation,
naked and revealed unto itself, is the condition under which the true
reality of our age is experienced. And the experience of this true reality
is indispensable to any ambitious art.
Now when it comes to the Zeitgeist, we Americans arc the most
advanced people on earth, if only because we are the most industrialized.
The activity that
goes
on in Paris, the talk, the many literary and
art
magazines, the quick recognition, the tokens of reward, the crowded
openings-all these, which once were signs of life, have now become
a means of suppressing reality, a contradiction of reality, an evasion.
Whistling is perhaps as real aSI the dark but it is not as real as the fear
it dissembles. What is much more real at this moment is the shabby
studio on the fifth floor of a cold-water, walk-up tenement on Hudson
Street; the frantic scrabbling for money; the two or three fellow–
painters who admire your work; the neurosis of alienation that makes
you such a difficult person to get along with. The myth that is lived
out here is not a new one; it is as old as the Latin Quarter; but I do
not think it was ever lived out with so little
panache,
so few compen–
sations, and so much reality. The alienation of Bohemia was only an
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