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PARTISAN REVIEW
of his previous exhibitions had-for one thing, because it made clear
what an accomplished craftsman he had become, and how pleasingly
he could use color now that he was not sure of what he wanted to
say with it. (Even so, there were still two or three remarkable paint–
ings present.) His 1951 exhibition, on the other hand, which in–
cluded four or five huge canvases of monumental perfection and re–
mains the peak of his achievement so far, was the one received most
coldly of all.
Many of the abstract expressionists have at times drained the
color from their pictures and worked in black, white, and gray alone.
Gorky was the first of them to do so, in paintings like "The Diary of
a Seducer" of 1945-which happens to be, in my opinion, his master–
piece. But it was left to Franz Kline, whose first show was in 1951,
to work with black and white exclusively in a succession of can–
vases with blank white grounds bearing a single large calligraphic
image in black. That these pictures were big was no cause for sur–
prise: the abstract expressionists were being compelled to do huge
canvases by the fact that they had increasingly renounced an illusion
of depth within which they could develop pictorial incident without
crowding; the flattening surfaces of their canvases compelled them
to move along the picture plane laterally and seek in its sheer physical
size the space necessary for the telling of their kind of pictorial story.
However, Kline's unmistakable allusions to Chinese and Japan–
ese calligraphy encouraged the cant, already started by Tobey's ex–
ample, about a general Oriental influence on American abstract paint–
ing. Yet none of the leading abstract expressionists except Kline has
shown more than a cursory interest in Oriental art, and it is easy
to demonstrate that the roots of their art lie almost entirely within
Western tradition. The fact that Far Eastern calligraphy is stripped
and abstract-because it involves writing-does not suffice to make
the resemblances to it
in
abstract expressionism more than a case of
convergence. It is as though this country's possession of a Pacific
coast offered a handy received idea with which to account for the
otherwise inexplicable fact that it is now producing a body of art
that some people regard as original.
The abstract-expressionist emphasis on black and white has to
do in any event with something more crucial to Western than Ori-
