THE NEW AMERICAN PAINTING
427
end rises above them without ever abandoning the obligations which
each has laid upon it. Mr. Gottlieb does abandon the obligation of
looking
at land, sea, and clouds; one feels he has never really
seen
them, that he is guessing. And therefore his landscapes and seascapes
are "imaginary" in the worst sense: they are something "made up."
Although the new American painting has been with us for only a
few years, it is not too soon to begin making distinctions. We should
not throw the best works of Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell,
for instance, into the same pot with the authors of all the "liberated"
and "imaginary" paintings which fiII the avant-garde galleries, simply
because their dealers do. A movement in painting is not just an Irish
stew into which you can chuck everything on sale at the market-though
art
dealers have a certain vested interest in denying this, and the mu–
seums are too timid to acknowledge it.
And yet throughout this movement one finds a certain unity of
plastic feeling, if not of achievement.
It
is a unity which derives from
the effort to assimilate the modern European masters, to accommodate
them to the local situation, and at the same time to make that assimila–
tion the occasion for a vigorous American art in which a generation,
not merely isolated figures, can participate. One can see this in de
Kooning's relation to Picasso, as well as in Hofmann's use of Kandin–
sky; it is here that the reappearance of surrealist motifs falls into place;
and it is here also that one can understand,
if
not admire, the desperate
imperative which moves many of the new painters to assert their own
identities-to be "unique" as soon as possible-before they have quite
discovered what it is they are doing. I have already remarked that in the
case of John Marin a similar imperative resulted in a style which was
needlessly intimidated. The new painters have even less freedom of
movement than Marin, for he at least had the luxury of being isolated–
a luxury of which Hartley wisely took full advantage-and therefore,
the obstacles they face are greater. Whether the new painters will
succeed in creating a new American art, or whether it will
be
only
an epilogue to European modernism, will depend on the wisdom they
bring to this crisis in the years ahead, and on the resources with which
that wisdom can be applied to the canvas.
