526
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion of painters as the manipulation of flat shapes of color has replaced
the delineation of illusionistic forms as the central impulse in painting.
This change has coincided with the postwar revival of the old, and
rather stale, anti-art tactics of Dadaism; and the result has been a con–
centration on deliberately ugly, coarse, "unartistic" materials which repu–
diate any connection with received ideas on beautiful surfaces and ele–
gant forms. Moreover, it is easier to effect these results in collage than
with paint,
if
only because the pigment itself offers some resistance to
this abuse. And it hardly needs saying that because pigment itself
is
now frequently abandoned altogether by certain "artists"-thus remov–
ing what remains the hardest task in the plastic arts: the application of
paint to canvas-the door has been opened to a gang of pseudo-talents
who in a less decadent period would be more profitably engaged in
decorating department store windows. Burri is only the most widely
hailed representative of this decadence, who at the same time demon–
strates the sad fate of an "innocent" European beguiled by American
cant (Karel Appel is another instance)-a curious cultural twist which
we can expect to see more of in the years ahead.
The painters who emerge from the European exhibition with the
best work are Afro, Edouard Pignon, and William Scott. It cannot be
said of these artists that their work "extends" the means of painting,
yet because they have concentrated on creating pictures which go as far
as their talents can take them (and no further), they bring a modesty to
easel art which is rare on both sides of the Atlantic today. Afro's
Boy
with Turkey,
with its hot, transparent color (which he sustained in
several brilliant pictures shown at the Viviano Gallery last spring), es–
tablishes this Italian as the most lyrical painter in the European show.
And Pignon's two beautiful canvases,
Olive Tree
at
Sunset
and
Black
Nude,
are the only evidence (albeit dilute) of what were once the
glories of French art. Scott's paintings have less authority; they are on
less intimate terms with the felicities of Parisian art than Pignon's, and
there was no work as fully realized as the painting he showed in the
Guggenheim Museum's "Younger European" exhibition; but he is none–
theless an authentic artist, working out his encounter with Continental
painting without subterfuge or bravado.
What separates even the most successful paintings in the American
exhibition (which I believe to have been painted by Willem de Kooning
and Robert Motherwell) from the works of Pignon, say, is a quality
which I should call
synthetic.
In the late 'forties and early 'fifties de
Kooning produced a series of black and white pictures which are among
