CORRESPONDENCE
"AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING
SIRS:
I would like to comment on Clement
Greenberg's article on "American–
type"
painting in the Spring (1955)
number of PRo I agree that there is
such a thing and that there are more
good abstract painters in America than
in Europe. But Greenberg does not de–
scribe "American-type" painting. He
evaluates it too easily in a favorable
light. He is very ready to tell painters
what they mayor may not do, with–
out enough understanding of what they
have done or are doing. Sometimes he
says "we" when "I" would be more
accurate. He speaks of "the easel con–
vention" without being clear what he
means. He
say~,
"By tradition, conven–
tion and habit we expect pictorial
structure to be presented in contrasts
of dark and light or
valuI."
This idea
of value is widespread among, for in–
stance, public-school art teachers.
Contrast of light and dark would be
better called "chiaroscuro." It is no
accident that there is the word,
"value," which is synonymous with
"worth." It is difficult to talk about
it without the painting (and not a
reproduction) before you. Adrian
Stokes in
Colour
and
Form
tries to
but fails, because he does not suffi–
ciently realize that it is a matter of
the art of painting, not of nature. But
in reported conversations of painters,
and in conversations I have had, I
know that there exists here a true and
I think very important concept that
has not been written down, except in–
adequately by people, not painters, who
talked with painters and may not have
understood. What Greenberg calls in
the case of Monet the suppression of
value, is really an emphasis on value,
through dissociating it from chiaros–
curo. For instance, one color can vary
in "value" but not in hue or chiaros–
curo or intemity. Needless to say, it
requires art to do this, and the effect
may be of the greatest importance in
the result. An area has as it were, dif-
ferent amounts of substance, or weight,
or opacity, or some such thing, and
this variation may be the important
thing in the balance of the composi–
tion, and in this variation the fonn
of the picture occurs. Fra Angelico was
a painter who was particularly sensi–
tive about this aspect of "value." Ve–
lasquez and Vermeer used it; but it
is most frequently seen in French paint–
ing, from the fourteenth century
Pieta
of the school of Avignon, through
Chardin, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Ma–
tisse, Vuillard, to Bonnard, who uses
it unrealistically, that is abstractly, as
can be seen in his painting that often
hangs in the Guggenheim Museum, and
that (though it has a recognizable sub–
ject matter,) is because of this, per–
haps the most abstract
painting
(as
distinct from art object) in this mu–
seum devoted to "abstract" paintings.
The earliest examples of complete ab–
straction of this kind of value from
chiaroscuro, after the Impressionists,
that I have seen, occur in paintings by
de Kooning and some by Reinhardt,
where a red and green, or a red and
red, or a yellow-green and purple,
having the same (Greenbergian) value,
as well as the same value in the sense
of worth (unless it is the same color),
make your eyes rock. Otherwise mod–
ern painting from Cubism to William
Scott and Clyfford Still depends on
chiaroscuro. Nothing much more has
been done except to leave out a recog–
nizable subject, a negative acknowledg–
ment of the first importance of the
subject.
Greenberg writes of the great in–
fluence of Kandinsky and German Ex–
pressionism on American painting. But
Americans copied the faults of these
models as well as whatever positive
qualities they may have. For instance,
Kandinsky, not understanding value,
made paintings full of dead areas–
usually the darks, which in both his
early realistic paintings and in his ab–
stract landscapes do not connect with
the rest of the surface. These faults
can be seen in both avant-garde paint–
ing and in the sort of realist painting
that derives from Expressionism and is
shown in the Associated American Ar-
