190
PARTISAN REVIEW
vention was taken for granted in even the most doctrinaire abstract
art, and the later Kandinsky, though he helped ruin his pictures by
his insensitivity to the effects of value contrast, never questioned
it
in principle. Malevich's prophetic venture in "white on white" was
looked on as an experimental quirk (it was very much an
experiment
and, like almost all experiments in art, it failed aesthetically). The
late Monet, whose suppression of values had been the most con–
sistently radical to be seen in painting until a short while ago, was
pointed to as a warning, and the
fin-de-siecle
muffling of contrasts
in much of Bonnard's and Vuillard's art caused it to be deprecated
by the avant-garde for many years. The same factor even had a part
in the under-rating of Pissarro.
Recently, however, some of the late Monets began to assume a
unity and power they had never had before.
This
expansion of sensi–
bility has coincided with the emergence of Clyfford Still as one of
the most important and original painters of our time-perhaps the
most original of all painters under fifty-five, if not the best.
As
the
Cubists resumed Cezanne, Still has resumed Monet-and Pissarro.
His paintings were the first abstract pictures I ever saw that contained
almost no allusion to Cubism. (Kandinsky's relations with it from
first to last became very apparent by contrast.) Still's first show, at
Peggy Guggenheim's in 1944, was made up predominantly of pictures
in the vein of an abstract symbolism with certain "primitive" and
Surrealist overtones that were in the air at that time, and of which
Gottlieb's "pictographs" represented one version. I was put off by
slack, willful silhouettes that seemed to disregard every consideration
of plane or frame. Still's second show, in 1948, was in a different
manner, that of his maturity, but I was still put off, and even out–
raged, by what I took to be a profound lack of sensitivity and disci–
pline. The few large vertically divided areas that made up this typical
picture seemed arbitrary in shape and edge, and the color too hot
and dry, stifled by the lack of value contrasts. It was only two years
ago, when I first saw a 1948 painting of Still's in isolation, that I
got a first intimation of pleasure from his art; subsequently, as I was
able to see still others in isolation, that intimation grew more definite.
(Until one became familiar with them his pictures fought each other
when side by side.) I was impressed as never before by how estrang–
ing and upsetting genuine originality in art can be, and how the
