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PARTISAN REVIEW
structed depth, even of the narrow shallow kind. Of course the nature
of visual perception might insure that some depth effect is always
present, because of the way the eye sees figure and ground-no matter
how much depth is controverted. But it can be so obstructed that only
hints of it remain. For example, the very size of abstract expressionist
painting-consistently so much larger than most of the large works of
cubism and surrealism-could interfere with the depth effect as well
as enhance it. And the all-over picture of ceaseless quivering movement
was a kind of culmination of counterpointed depth, and a significant one:
beyond it is that perfection which is to be found in the picture painted
all in one color with only the faintest variation in brush strokes. That
is
a kind of perfection, a perfect resolution of forces, a kind of
liebestod.
At this point it seems important to distinguish between depth and
space, because they are not the same, and yet they are intimately re–
lated. Put simply, perhaps depth could be said to recede and space to
range or expand. Depth may also be more specific, more regulated, and
more crowded, showing us how a number of objects or shapes relate
to the area in which they move, while space indicates the force exerted
between them, less measurable, more protean. Depth, roughly, would
be a particular organization of space.
In
a picture we can be given
an
illusion of depth, but nothing can provide an illusion of space, because
space is from the beginning a pictorial quality and can be created by
pictorial means whether or not depth is also indicated. This is what
non-Western and pre-Renaissance painting show us.
What I have called the counterpointed depth of abstract painting
began to have a curious effect: although the flat surface was preserved,
the picture began to move forward, almost as if it would explode out
in the face of the spectator. (This aesthetic fact can be seen to explain
something about the aggressive quality perceived in advanced painting.
The supposed "attack" on the spectator is in a sense the function of a
limited depth, which insists that the picture move
out,
both in size and
in direction.) Even as abstract expressionist painting became larger, the
flatness combined with this outward explosion to produce a closely
worked, crowded picture with an inevitable claustral effect. De Kooning's
Asheville
is an example of this, and the same thing can be seen in so much
of the painting which is influenced by him. Size could counteract the
claustral, but only in a very limited way. The all-over picture could
do so only by reduction, or by unifying the abstractness of the surface
to the point of monotony, as in some of Tomlin's pictures. The claustra!
had been less of a problem in early cubist pictures, but in the forty-odd
years after, when the implications of cubism were explored with in-
