ART
CHRONICLE
299
creasing explicitness, even the space suggested by that faceted mono–
chromatic light was absorbed into the abstraction of every inch of
canvas. The revival of interest in Monet's late paintings makes sense
only against this background, although much of the interest was fad–
dish or superficial, and ignored the real relevance of the pictures. More
than anything else attributed to him, Monet showed how the surface
could create space, and this suggests a rout of the claustra!'
Last year, in these pages, I commented on a new development in
Hofmann's work, the introduction of squares of color which seemed
unrelated to the pictures. This seemed very puzzling, I felt something
was going on, but I wasn't sure what it could be. The squares appeared
to be on top of the picture, creating a different surface, and were
painted differently from the rest of the picture. Some people did not
notice this, others noticed it but weren't bothered by it. Again in the
Hofmann retrospective, the same squares made their appearance, as did
some elements of calligraphy somehow connected with them, and once
more I was puzzled. Recently, however, after seeing Hofmann's show
of new work at the Kootz Gallery, it seems to me that last year's pic–
tures hinted of something which was more fully presented this year–
an attempt to save more space for abstract painting.
In Hofmann's new pictures, the squares can still be seen, but greatly
transformed, larger, painted differently, more a part of the picture, in–
corporating the earlier suggestion. Before this, they
were
on top of the
picture, and now I see this as precisely the point. They looked ahead
to a way of holding the surface and thus creating a new kind of space.
If
you think of the Monets again, what gives them their space without the
illusion of depth is not so much the breathing of the paint surface, but
that the abstractness of the forms as we now see them "set" the surface,
hold it, become the surface with such force and ambiguity at once that
the greatest space develops without any sacrifice of the two-dimensional
quality. In the
Water Lilies,
that large pinkish-white area straying down
from the top does this; the fact that it starts directly at the top, almost
from outside the picture, is of no little significance. Monet often did
something like this, whether with poppies beginning at the left edge
and moving down to the bottom, or water lilies beginning at both left
and right, or a narrow horizontal cloud held at one edge. These struc–
tural features are of the greatest importance, this relation to the edge,
and they prevent the pictures from being either purely decorative
surface
or
shadowy forms seen under glass. And if some of what is called
Abstract Impressionism seems weak compared with Monet, the lack of
energy might be closely connected with the indifference to just such
structural elements.
