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PARTISAN REVIEW
can be found in the older master's figure compositions. On second view
I began to suspect that the final rightness which I thought to miss in
the Susanna picture had been there at least originally. The trouble is
not in the way in which Susanna's undulating silhouctte is fitted into
the background, as I wrote last month; it's in the wattled wall that runs
diagonally into depth across the left center of the canvas. This, it appears
to me, has been darkened by time so that it now makes a more or less
blank hole where it must originally have provided a livelier transitional
passage in different shades of brown. Titian would have insured him–
self better against such an eventuality.
But enough of comparisons. They are dangerous to make on the
basis of the relatively few works by which Titian and Tintoretto are
represented in the Vienna show. A visit to Venice may cause me to
reconsider my judgments again-and in a more embarrassing way than
this time.
In the work of certain contemporary artists we tend at first to notice
chiefly, or exclusively, that which it has in common with the work of
other artists. As a result we think of these artists as un-original and
derivative and too dependent on influences from outside, and we class
them with the great unimportant host of imitators. Then, as their work
becomes more familiar, it slowly becomes apparent that the resemblances
that used to bulk so large havc somehow-incomprehensibly-shrunk
and lost their scope and importance, and tha t the main point of the
art in question has become precisely that which is individual about it.
This, rather than the resemblances, is now all we can notice.
The late Arshile Gorky, who died in the summer of 1948, was an
artist who had the misfortune to belong to this category. H e was not an
innovator, but he was at the very least original by mere virtue of his
gifts. They were such as no other painter's in this country could equal.
And he also had a ra ther original temperament, but one that required
time to make itself felt, especially since the artist himself seemed to lack
confidence in it. In many ways Gorky was a better handler of brush
and paint than anyone he was radica lly influenced by, including Picasso
and Miro. And what he did with the hints he got from Matta made
the latter look a more serious painter than he has any probable chance
of really being.
The fact of Gorky's originality was the point made for me by a show
at the Kootz Gallery in April of fourteen oils executed over the last
several years of his life. It was the most brilliant and consistent show
by an American artist that I have ever scen, and I say this advisedly.
