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PARTISAN REVIEW
the last three or four years has obscured his real worth.
Gottlieb is likewise a very uneven artist, but a much more solid
and accomplished one than is generally supposed. He seems to me to
be capable of a greater range of controlled effects than any other
abstract expressionist, and it
is
only owing to some lack of nerve or
necessary presumptuousness that he has not made this plainer to the
public, which accuses him of staying too close to the grid plans of
Klee or Torres-Garcia, the Uruguayan painter. Over the years Gott–
lieb has, in
his
sober, pedestrian way, become one of the surest crafts–
men in contemporary painting, one who can place a flat, uneven sil–
houette, that most difficult of all things to adjust to the rectangle,
with a rightness beyond the capacity of ostensibly stronger painters.
Some of his best work, like the "landscapes" and "seascapes" he
showed in 1953, tends to be too difficult for eyes trained on late
Cubism. On the other hand, his 1954 pictures, the first in which he
let himself be tempted to a display of virtuosity and which stayed
within late Cubism, were liked better by the public than anything he
had shown before. The zigzags of Gottlieb's course in recent years,
which saw him become a colorist and a painterly painter (if anything,
too much of one) between his departures from and returns to Cub–
ism, have made his development a very interesting one to watch.
Right now he seems one of the least tired of all the abstract expres–
sionists.
Jackson Pollock was at first almost as much a late Cubist and
a hard and fast easel-painter as any of the abstract expressionists I
have mentioned. He compounded hints from Picasso's calligraphy
in the early '30s with suggestions from Hofmann, Masson, and Mexi–
can painting, especially Siqueiros, and began with a kind of picture
in murky, sulphurous colors that startled people less by the novelty
of its means than by the force and originality of the feeling behind it.
Within a notion of shallow space generalized from the practice of
Miro and Masson as well as of Picasso, and with some guidance from
the early Kandinsky, he devised a language of baroque shapes and
calligraphy that twisted this space to its own measure and vehemence.
Pollock remained close to Cubism until at least 1946, and the early
greatness of his
art
can be taken as a fulfilment of things that Picasso
had not brought beyond a state of promise in his 1932-1940 period.
Though he cannot build with color, Pollock has an instinct for bold
