528
PARTISAN REVIEW
This solidity has also been the intermittent quest of Mothetwell's
art, but where he has been closest to attaining it in a picture like
The
Voyage
of 1949, he has done so at the sacrifice of complexity. His most
coherent works never stray very far from a flat-patterning in black-white–
ochre; beyond that limit, he is forced to deal
in
Picasso's currency, and
so far his losses have been heavy.
If
I have omitted thus far any discussion of sculpture from these
pages, it
is
not only because the best sculpture of The New Decade is
really isolated from the painting with which it is frequently exhibited,
actually forming another subject for criticism, but also because there
was very little sculpture in "The New Decade" exhibitions in which
one could take a serious critical interest. With the Whitney's incredible
omission of David Smith from the American show, the most impressive
sculptor of the decade was missing, and there was no other figure (or
group of figures) to replace him in authority and performance.
The problem of contemporary sculpture is a problem in freedom.
There have been major sculptors in our time; Brancusi, Picasso, Matisse,
Gonzalez, Giacometti, Lipschitz, Moore, and others have all created a
body of work which enlarges the possibility of sculptural art, and in
consequence they have been properly respected and imitated. But un–
like the painters of the School of Paris, say, or the German Expressionists,
or the group which formed the De Stijl movement, these sculptors do
not represent a coherent artistic idea; they impose, in fact, a terrible
anarchy on their younger contemporaries, and it is this anarchy which
reigns now in baffling profusion.
Moreover, this anarchy of possibilities is abetted by a diversity of
materials. As Otis Gage wrote last winter in
Arts
&
Architecture,
The variety of contemporary sculpture is in direct proportion to the
variety of means and materials available to the sculptor. And they are
available to a fantastic degree. A sculptor in New York can get almost
any material that has ever been used for sculpture, and a few that have
never been. ... It should not be surprising
if
the present breadth of
possibility has produced a certain shallowness of result. Sculptors have
plunged into extreme techniques in a headlong flight from each other
... or in search of their own characters....
It
is only natural that the
depth that would othetwise come
out
of group activity has been achieved
by those artists who have been pursuing their particular course for the
longest period of time.
David Smith's course has been welded metal, and he has made out of
it a virile art which has more variety and scope than any sculpture shown
in either of "The New Decade" exhibitions. I think he has accomplished
