192
PARTISAN REVIEW
is probably the most widely practiced and homogeneous kind of paint–
ing seen in the Western world today. I seem to detect its beginnings
in Old Crome's oils and the Barbizon School, but it has spread only
since the popularization of Impressionism. "Buckeye" painting
is
not
"primitive," nor is it the same thing as "Sunday painting." Its prac–
titioners can draw with a certain amount of academic correctness, but
their command of shading, and of dark and light values in general,
is not sufficient to control their color--either because they are simply
inept in this department, or because they are naively intent on a
more vivid naturalism of color than the studio-born principles of value
contrast will allow. "Buckeye" painters, as far as I am aware, do
landscapes exclusively and work more or less directly from nature.
By piling
dry
paint-though not exactly in impasto-they try to cap–
ture the brilliance of daylight, and the process of painting becomes
a race between hot shadows and hot lights whose invariable outcome
is a livid, dry, sour picture with a warm, brittle surface that intensifies
the acid fire of the generally predominating reds, browns, greens, and
yellows. "Buckeye" landscapes can be seen in Greenwich Village res–
taurants (Eddie's Aurora on West Fourth Street used to collect them),
Sixth Avenue picture stores (there is one near Eighth Street) and in
the Washington Square outdoor shows. I understand that they are
produced abundantly in Europe too. Though I can see why it is
easy to stumble into "buckeye" effects, I cannot understand fully
why they should be so universal and so uniform, or the kind of paint–
ing culture behind them.
Still, at any rate,
is
the first to have put "buckeye" effects into
serious art. These are visible in the frayed dead-leaf edges that wander
down the margins or across the middle of so many of his canvases,
in the uniformly dark heat of his color, and in a dry, crusty paint
surface (like any "buckeye" painter, Still seems to have no faith in
diluted or thin pigments). Such things can spoil his pictures, or make
them weird in an unrefreshing way, but when he is able to succeed
with, or in spite of them, it represents the conquest by high
art
of
one more area of experience, and its liberation from
Kitsch.
Still's
art
has a special importance at this time because it shows
abstract painting a way out of its own academicism.
An
indirect sign
of this importance
is
the fact that he is almost the only abstract ex–
pressionist to "make" a school; by
this
I mean that a few of the many
