"AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING
191
greater its pressure on taste, the more stubbornly taste will resist ad–
justing to it.
Turner was actually the first painter to break with the European
tradition of value painting. In the atmospheric pictures of
his
last
phase he bunched value intervals together at the lighter end of the
color scale for effects more picturesque than anything else. For the
sake of these, the public soon forgave him his dissolution of form–
besides, clouds and steam, mist, water, and light were not expected
to have definite shape or form as long as they retained depth, which
they did in Turner's pictures; what we today take for a daring ab–
stractness on Turner's part was accepted then as another feat of
naturalism. That Monet's close-valued painting won a similar ac–
ceptance strikes me as not being accidental. Of course, iridescent
colors appeal to popular taste, which is often willing to take them in
exchange for verisimilitude, but those of Monet's pictures in which
he muddied-and flattened-form with dark color, as in some of
his
"Lily Pads," were almost as popular. Can it be suggested that
the public's appetite for close-valued painting as manifested in both
Turner's and Monet's cases, and
in
that of late Impressionism in gen–
eral, meant the emergence of a new kind of taste which, though run–
ning counter to the high traditions of our art and possessed by people
with little grasp of these, yet expressed a genuine underground change
in European sensibility?
If
so, it would clear up the paradox that lies
in the fact that an art like the late Monet's, which in its time pleased
banal taste and still makes most of the avant-garde shudder, should
suddenly stand forth as more advanced in some respects than Cubism.
I don't know how much conscious attention Still has paid to
Monet or Impressionism, but his independent and uncompromising
art likewise has an affiliation with popular taste, though not by any
means enough to make it acceptable to it. Still's is the first really
Whitmanesque kind of painting we have had, not only because it
makes large, loose gestures, or because it breaks the hold of value con–
trast as Whitman's verse line broke the equally traditional hold of
meter; but just as much because, as Whitman's poetry assimilated,
with varying success, large quantities of stale journalistic and orator–
ical prose, so Still's painting is infused with that stale, prosaic kind
of painting to which Barnett Newman has given the name of "buck–
eye." Though little attention has been paid to it in print, "buckeye"
