100
PARTISAN REVIEW
Tautness of feeling, not "depth," characterizes what is strongest in
post-Cubist art. The taking up of slack, the flattening out of convexities
and concavities-the ambitious contemporary artist presents, sup–
posedly, only that which he can vouch for with complete certainty; he
does not necessarily exclude, but he distrusts more and more of his emo–
tions. This makes art much more of a strain, and I believe it accounts in
part for the fatigue from which Picasso -and Braque and even Matisse
have suffered since middle age (though, of course, it is not just a ques–
tion of fatigue).
A tautness that cannot be sustained affects the painting of Hans
Hofmann, though it is far from being tired. I can discern little con–
secutive development in his art during the eight years since he began
showing in New York; themes appear, disappear, and re-:\ppear, with–
out seeming to evolve. . . . Hofmann is a unique force. Coming here
from Germany-and Paris-in middle age, he has as a direct and in–
direct teacher done more than anyone else to make Matisse's indispens–
able contribution viable in American painting. He is over seventy, but
very much part of a movement most of whose members are under forty–
five. As a paint-handler pure and simple, he takes second place to no
one alive, not even Matisse, for he can do some things with pigment
that the French master cannot. Yet it would be hard to find an artist
who has had, and still has, more trouble realizing himself. His latest
show, at Kootz's, precisely because it is the most successful since his first
two, in 1943 and 1944, makes this all the clearer, for what is achieved
only reveals how great the unachieved potentialities are. The man who
could paint the plaster-white "Ecstasy" of last year and the off-red
"Scotch and Burgundy" of this, has it in him to add infinite riches to
modern art. But he appears to be unable to break through to those
riches-that is, the truth inside himself--except "in convulsive moments.
He makes a method of convulsiveness, and, of course, it does not work as
a method. I think Hofmann over-rates art as against pedestrian reality,
has an unduly exalted notion of art, and is therefore too reverential in
his relation to it. Humility is owed to the truth inside and outside one–
self, but not exactly reverence; one has to have the nerve to impose one's
truth on art.
If
the right to that nerve has to be earned, Hans Hofmann
has certainly done so by now.
The first two one-man shows of Barnett Newman, last year and
the year before, at Betty Parsons', exhibited both nerve and truth. I
mention him at this relatively late date because he has met rejection
from a quarter where one had the most right to expect a puzzled judg–
ment to be a suspended one. Newman is a very important and original
