THE NEW AMERICAN PAINTING
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is scarcely distinguishable from what a less friendly critic would write
as an indictment.
Mr. Rosenberg is not indifferent to the modern European masters
(though he does seem to find modern
American
painting irrelevant to
his considerations) but he is unwilling to allow these masters much
of a place in a discussion of the new American art. It seems that these
European painters, great as many of them are, influential as they
might be, were authors of mere works of art, mere objects (that is,
paintings). That might be very well, perhaps even a legitimate pursuit
for a painter; but in discussing the subject at hand Mr. Rosenberg
does not want to sound like one of those critics "who goes on judging
in terms of schools, styles, form, as if the painter were still concerned
with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of
living on the canvas...." Such a critic "is bound to seem a stranger."
One must take one's chances about being a stranger, of course; and
my feeling is that it might just possibly be less than honest for any of
us to claim to be more than that in the presence of a movement which,
at Mr. Rosenberg's calculation, is seven years old. Yet, from Mr. Rosen–
berg's account of his subject, some new transformations must take
place in the art critic: he must be a dramatic critic or maybe a
biographer or maybe a psychologist or maybe a metaphysician.
If
he risks
being an art critic, he risks being a stranger.
But let us get down to Mr. Rosenberg's central point:
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American
painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a
space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or "express" an object,
actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture
but an event.
Hence, the critic, like any spectator, will have to judge this art as a
performance. But painting being painting, and not the theater, what
does he mean by the canvas "as an arena in which to act"? The diffi–
culties have only begun, for this painting which is "not a picture but
an event" is not to be a public performance: "A painting that is an
act is inseparable from the biography of the artist."
If
Mr. Rosenberg
means it is "inseparable" for the spectator, then the critic will first
of all be a biographer-but can he mean that? Then he says that "what
gives the canvas its meaning is . . . the way the artist organizes his
emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation."
As
if?
Does this mean the critic will have to be a biographer of the
painter's fantasy life? A psychologist? Perhaps; but he must also be a
