194
PARTISAN REVIEW
A concomitant of the fact that Still, Newman, and Rothko sup–
press value contrasts and favor warm hues is the more emphatic flat–
ness of their paintings. Because it is not broken by sharp differences
of value or by more than a few incidents of drawing or design, color
breathes from the canvas with an enveloping effect, which is intensi–
fied by the largeness itself of the picture. The spectator tends to react
to this more in terms of decor or environment than in those usually
associated with a picture hung upon a wall. The crucial issue raised
by the work of these three artists is where the pictorial stops and dec–
oration begins. In effect, their art asserts decorative elements and ideas
in a pictorial context. (Whether this has anything to do with the
artiness that afflicts all three of them at times, I don't know. But
artiness is the great liability of the Still school.)
Rothko and especially Newman are more exposed than Still to
the charge of being decorators by their preference for rectilinear draw–
ing. This sets them apart from Still in another way, too. By liberating
abstract painting from value contrasts, Still also liberated it, as Pol–
lock had not, from the quasi-geometrical, faired drawing which Cub–
ism had found to be the surest way to prevent the edges of forms from
breaking through a picture surface that had been tautened, and there–
fore made exceedingly sensitive, by the shrinking of the illusion of
depth underneath it.
As
Cezanne was the first to discover, the safest
way to proceed in the face of this liability was to echo the rectangular
shape of the surface itself with vertical and horizontal lines and with
curves whose chords were definitely vertical or horizontal. After the
Cubists, and Klee, Mondrian, Mir6, and others had exploited this
insight it became a cliche, however, and led to the kind of late Cub–
ist academicism that used to fill the exhibitions of the American
Abstract Artists group, and which can still be seen in much of re–
cent French abstract painting. Still's service was to show us how
the contours of a shape could be made less conspicuous, and there–
fore less dangerous to the "integrity" of the flat surface, by narrow–
ing the value contrast its color made with that of the shapes or areas
adjacent to it. Not only does this keep colors from "jumping," as the
old masters well knew, but it gives the artist greater liberty in draw–
ing-liberty almost to the point of insensitivity, as in Still's own case.
The early Kandinsky was the one abstract painter before Still to
have some glimpse of this, but it was only a glimpse. Pollock has had
more of a glimpse, independently of Still or Kandinsky, but has not
