PARTISAN REVIEW
part, the architectural and, presumably, social location for which he
destines his product has become, in inverse ratio, more public. This
is the paradox, the contradiction, in the master-current of painting.
Perhaps the contradiction between the architectural destination of
abstract art and the very, very private atmosphere in which it is
produced will kill ambitious painting in the end. As it is, this contra–
diction, whose ultimate causes lie outside the autonomy of art, defines
specifically the crisis in which painting now finds itself. (It is worth
pointing out that the surviving old masters of our time, except for
Matisse, appear to have reacted to this crisis in a conservative way.
The best work of Picasso and Chagall in the last twenty years, and of
Mir6 in the last five, has been in black and white and in reduced format;
the etchings and pen-and-ink drawings of the first and the etchings and
lithographs of the latter two, as a rule, surpass by far their recent oils.
Their genius, if not their consciousness, recognizes the demise of the
easel picture and, with only two destinations left for pictorial art-the
wall area and the page-they have chosen the latter, for which they
find at least precedent. They are too old by now to venture on any–
thing so unprecedented as a genre of painting located halfway between
the easel and the mural.)
The only solution to the crisis would be an increasing acceptance
by the public of advanced painting, and at the same time an increasing
rejection of all other kinds. "Destructiveness" towards what we now
possess as American art becomes a positive and creative factor when it
is coupled with a real longing for genuinely high art, a longing that
will not be deceived into satisfaction with anything less than the genuine,
and which is protected against such deception precisely because it goes
hand in.hand with the courage to reject and to continue rejecting.
Clement Greenberg
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