196
PARTISAN REVIEW
to mention a lack of a sense of proportion. But can I suggest it? I
do not make allowances for American art that I do not make for
any other kind. At the Biennale in Venice this year, I saw how de
Kooning's exhibition put to shame, not only that of his neighbor in
the American pavilion, Ben Shabn, but that of every other painter
present in
his
generation or under. The general impression still is
that an art of high distinction has as much chance of coming out of
America as a great wine. Literature-yes: we now know that we
have produced some great writing because the English and French
have told us so. They have even exaggerated, at least about Whitman
and Poe. What I hope for is a just appreciation abroad, not an ex–
aggeration, of the merits of "American-type" painting. Only then,
I suspect, will American collectors begin to take it seriously. In the
meantime they will go on buying the pallid French equivalent of it
they find in the art of Riopelle, De Stael, Soulages, and their like.
The imported article is handsomer, no doubt, but the handsomeness
is too obvious to have staying power....
"Advanced" art-which is the same thing as ambitious art to–
day-persists insofar as
it
tests society'S capacity for high art. This
it does by testing the limits of the inherited forms and genres, and
of the medium itself, and it is what the Impressionists, the post-Im–
pressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, and Mondrian did in their time.
If
the testing seems more radical in the case of the new American
abstract painting, it is because it comes at a later stage. The limits
of the easel picture are in greater danger of being destroyed because
several generations of great artists have already worked to expand
them. But
if
they are destroyed this will not necessarily mean the
extinction of pictorial art as such. Painting may be on its way toward
a new kind of genre, but perhaps not an unprecedented one-since
we are now able to look at, and enjoy, Persian carpets as pictures–
and what we now consider to be merely decorative may become cap–
able of holding our eyes and moving us much as the easel picture does.
Meanwhile there is no such thing as an aberration in art: there
is just the good and the bad, the realized and the unrealized. Often
there is but the distance of a hair's breadth between the two- at
first glance. And sometimes there seems-at first glance- to be no
more distance than that between a great work of art and one which
is not art at all. This is one of the points made by modern art.
