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PARTISAN REVIEW
directly to the Museum of Modern Art, which has educated a whole
generation to look upon art
in
the historical mode. But there has been
a more far-reaching cause, too. The historicism of Marxist ideology in
the 'thirties had a more profound influence on our cultural affairs than
is usually admitted, and it could not be
l
xpected to evaporate with a
mere change in political commitments. My own feeling is that this his–
toricism has played an important underground role in artistic culture
here, and particularly in the way the middle-aged generation has come
to regard itself. The Museum of Modern Art has merely given the
younger generation a more respectable version of the idea.
This historical anxiety, which is also a form of vanity, has managed
to congeal the provincialism of The New Decade. The pendulum has
now swung its full arc since the days of "The Eight." Where the latter
found itself superseded by European art, The New Decade finds itself
heir to a synthetic fortune; yet the fact remains that our lack of native
values in art provides us with no medium for resisting the temptations
of history.
I think a group of paintings, drawings, and sculptures more impres–
sive than "The New Decade" exhibitions could have been assembled,
however, just out of the shows held last season by some of the younger
artists
in
New York, artists who are not immune to the historical vanity
I have mentioned but who are nonetheless producing work which affords
a pleasure and interest which Abstract Expressionist art seldom achieves.
I would name particularly the painters Reginald Pollack, Nell Blaine,
Philip Pearlstein, Wolf Kahn, and Leland Bell; sculptors Richard
Stankiewicz and Fred Farr; and for their drawings, Knox Martin, Vin–
cent Longo, and Joseph Glasco. s Nearly all of these artists admit once
again the figurative motif, and thereby have given themselves access to
a world of forms which do not lend themselves so easily to synthetic dis–
solution. For the painters the work has been made more difficult by
The New Decade, for the task of working from nature-however remote
the distance-is a dialectical process, and the
painting
term in the
dialectic has been left in very bad repair.
What one would particularly hope to see from these new artists is
a tolerance for levels of excellence which are without: historical impera–
tives. It is what our artistic culture requires today above all-even more,
I daresay, than a single "major" painter to hold up to those stubborn
European critics.
Hilton Kramer
3 Glasco would have made a better showing at the Whitney if he had been
represented by drawings and sculpture instead of paintings.
