"AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING
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ental pictorial art.
It
represents one of those exaggerations or apoth–
eoses which betray a fear for their objects. Value contrast, the oppo–
sition and modulation of dark and light, has been the basis of West–
ern pictorial art, its chief means, much more important than perspec–
tive, to a convincing illusion of depth and volume; and it has also
been its chief agent of structure and unity. This is why the old
masters almost always laid in their darks and lights-their shading–
first. The eye automatically orients itself by the value contrasts in
dealing with an object that is presented to it as a picture, and in the
absence of such contrasts it tends to feel almost, if not quite as much,
at loss as in the absence of a recognizable image. Impressionism's
muffling of dark and light contrasts in response to the effect of the
glare of the sky caused it to be criticized for that lack of "form" and
"structure" which Cezanne tried to supply with his substitute con–
trasts of warm and cool color (these remained nonetheless contrasts
of dark and light, as we can see from monochrome photographs of
his paintings). Black and white is the extreme statement of value
contrast, .and to harp on it as many of the abstract expressionists do
-and not only abstract expressionists-seems to me to be an effort
to preserve by extreme measures a technical resource whose capacity
to yield convincing form and unity is nearing exhaustion.
The American abstract expressionists have been given good cause
for this feeling by a development in their own midst. It is, I think,
the most radical of all developments in the painting of the last two
decades, and has no counterpart in Paris (unless in the late work of
Masson and Tal Coat), as so many other things in American abstract
expressionism have had since 1944. This development involves a more
consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts than seen so far
in abstract art. We can realize now, from this point of view, how con–
servative Cubism was in its resumption of Cezanne's effort to save
the convention of dark and light. By their parody of the way the
old masters shaded, the Cubists may have discredited value contrast
as a means to an illusion of depth and volume, but they rescued it
from the Impressionists, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Fauves as a
means to structure and form. Mondrian, a Cubist at heart, remained
as dependent on contrasts of dark and light as any academic painter
until his very last paintings, "Broadway Boogie" and "Victory
Boogie"-which happen to be failures. Until quite recently the con-
