ART CHRONICLE
anticipation in nineteenth-century Paris; it is in New York that it has
been completely fulfilled.
I would say that most of the best painting done in this country at the
moment does not reach the public eye, but remains west of Seventh
Avenue, stacked against the wall. It is not a case of the unknown genius
in a garret-there are very few geniuses-so much as that of the un–
known art in a social pocket. After all, the easel painting is on its way
out; abstract pictures rarely go with the furniture; and the canvas, even
when it measures ten feet by ten, has become a kind of private journal.
The master-current in the painting of our epoch is a paradox. We
know that it flows out of Cubism and Matisse and. through Mondrian
and Mir6--but in what direction does it flow since them? In France
high tradition means, for the latest generation, Matisse's color and
Picasso's drawing and composition. (Some, like Jean Dubuffet, may
escape the paralysis of culture via Klee and the deliberate surrender to
infantile experience, but they do little to vitalize tradition; Dubuffet is
a first-rate painter but he leaves nothing to the future of painting.)
Here in America there is also a general recognition among the most
advanced young painters that Matisse and Picasso are indispensable to
a great contemporary style but, in distinction to the French, they incline
to accept more of Matisse than of Picasso. In Greenwich Village the
attempt is being made to create a larger-scale easel art by expanding
Matisse's hot color, raised several degrees in intensity, into the bigger,
more simplified compositional schemes which he himself usually reserved
for blacks, grays, and blues-all this to be articulated and varied with
the help of Picasso's calligraphy.
There is a persistent urge, as persistent as it is largely unconscious,
to go beyond the cabinet picture, which is destined to occupy only a
spot on the wall, to a kind of picture that, without actually becoming
identified with the wall like a mural, would
spread
over it and acknow–
ledge its physical reality. I do not know whether there is anything in
modern architecture itself that explicitly invites this tendency. But it
is a fact that abstract painting shows a greater and greater reluctance
for the small, frame-enclosed format. Abstract painting, being flat,
needs a greater extension of surface on which to develop its ideas than
does the old three-dimensional easel painting, and it seems to become
trivial when confined within anything measuring less than two feet by
two. Thus, while the painter's relation to his art has become more private
than ever before because of a shrinking appreciation on the
public~s
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