"AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING
193
artists he has stimulated or influenced have not been condemned by
that to imitate
him,
but have been able to establish strong and inde–
pendent styles of their own.
Barnett Newman, who
is
one of these artists, has replaced Pol–
lock as the
enfant terrible
of abstract expressionism. He rules vertical
bands of dimly contrasting color or value on warm flat backgrounds–
and that's all. But he
is
not in the least related to Mondrian or any–
one else in the geometrical abstract school. Though Still led the way
in opening the picture down the middle and in bringing large, unin–
terrupted areas of uniform color into subtle and yet spectacular op–
position, Newman studied late Impressionism for himself, and has
drawn its consequences more radically. The powers of color he em–
ploys to make a picture are conceived with an ultimate strictness:
color
is
to function as hue and nothing else, and contrasts are to be
sought with the least possible help of differences in value, saturation,
or warmth.
The easel picture will hardly survive such an approach, and
Newman's huge, calmly and evenly burning canvases amount to the
most direct attack upon it so far. And it is all the more effective an
attack because the .art behind it
is
deep and honest, and carries a
feeling for color without its like in recent painting. Mark Rothko's
art
is
a little less aggressive in this respect. He, too, was stimulated by
Still's example. The three or four massive, horizontal strata of flat
color that compose his typical picture .allow the spectator to think
of landscape-which may be why his decorative simplicity seems to
meet less resistance. Within a range predominantly warm like New–
man's and Still's, he too is a brilliant, original colorist; like Newman,
he soaks his pigment into the canvas, getting a dyer's effect, and does
not apply it as a discrete covering layer in Still's manner. Of the three
painters-all of whom started, incidentally, as "symbolists"-Roth–
ko is the only one who seems to relate to any part of French art since
Impressionism, and his ability to insinuate contrasts of value and
warmth into oppositions of pure color makes me think of Matisse,
who held on to value contrasts in something of the same way. This,
too, may account for the public's readier acceptance of his art, but
takes nothing away from it. Rothko's big vertical pictures, with their
incandescent color and their bold and simple sensuousness-or rather
their
firm
sensuousness-are among the largest gems of abstract ex–
pressionism.
