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had to free themselves from this too. Such problems were not attacked
by program (there has been very little that is programmatic about
abstract expressionism) but rather run up against simultaneously by
a number of young painters most of whom had their first shows at
Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in 1943 or 1944. The Picasso of the '30s
-whom they followed in reproductions in the
Cahiers d'Art
even
more than in flesh-and-blood paintings- challenged and incited as
well as taught them. Not fully abstract itself, his art in that period
suggested to them new possibilities of expression for abstract and
quasi-abstract painting as nothing else did, not even Klee's enormous–
ly inventive and fertile but equally unrealized 1930-1940 phase. I say
equally unrealized, because Picasso caught so few of the hares he
started in the '30s-which may have served, however, to make his
effect on certain younger artists even more stimulating.
To break away from an overpowering precedent, the young ar–
tist usually looks for an alternative one. The late Arshile Gorky sub–
mitted himself to Mir6 in order to break free of Picasso, and in the
process did a number of pictures we now see have independent virtues,
although at the time-the late '30s-they seemed too derivative. But
the 1910-1918 Kandinsky was even more of a liberator and during
the first war years stimulated Gorky to a greater originality. A
short while later Andre Breton's personal encouragement began to
inspire him with a confidence he had hitherto lacked, but again he
submitted his art to an influence, this time that of Matta y Echaurren,
a Chilean painter much younger than himself. Matta was, and per–
haps still is, an inventive draughtsman, and in some ways a daring
painter, but an inveterately flashy and superficial one. It took Gorky's
more solid craft, profounder culture as a painter, and more selfless
devotion to art to make many of Matta's ideas look substantial. In
the last four or five years of his life he so transmuted these ideas, and
discovered so much more in himself in the way of feeling to add to
them, that their derivation became conspicuously beside the point.
Gorky found his own way to ease the pressure of Picassoid space, and
learned to float flat shapes on a melting, indeterminate ground with
a difficult stability quite unlike anything in Mir6. Yet he remained
a late Cubist to the end, a votary of French taste, an orthodox easel
painter, a virtuoso of line, and a tinter, not a colorist. He
is,
I think,
