300
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hofmann's pictures, very different in manner, and with cubism
and surrealism and everything else behind them, already work with the
abstract consciousness of the picture plane and edge, but the earlier
squares of last year's picture might be seen as a kind of projection,
vis
a
vis his new pictures-like Monet's poppies of the late 1880's in rela–
tion to the clouds and water lilies of his late paintings. Holding the
surface by attention to the outer edge of the picture had already been
explored by Cezanne, and Picasso, and Matisse, and has been employed
by every abstract painter since then. In a sense, Hofmann did not need
to do that. But his discovery of still another surface in his work has the
effect of making the picture explode out, up, and back into space. Pic–
tures like
Floral Composition,
1954, or
X-1955
have much more the
effect of exploding forward, when considered with
The Ocean, Autumn
Gold, Autumnal Glory--Swamp Series, Early Dawn,
and others in the
recent show of 1957 work.
The point is made in a more specific and also more limited fashion
in the work of Sam Francis, at the Martha Jackson Gallery. This pain–
ter's previous work had been "all-over," with glowing, dripping spots
in the same basic color. The new pictures are very different. The blue
and red forms stray and straggle across the top, beginning at each side;
the greater part of the picture is bare. In fact, these pictures showed
more unpainted space than any I can recall in a long while, but the im–
portant thing is that the space never appeared empty. What was new
was the way the forms acted in and against the space, around it, de–
fining it, making it move almost as a kind of abstract baroque space.
The forms act as if their direction were away from the spectator, instead
of toward, using the surface to define a space which was extending
quite beyond them. Put imprecisely, it was as
if
the forms had their
backs to the spectator.
If
your eyes are attuned to the closely worked thick painting of
which de Kooning is a master, and which has spread from him to so
many others, then the kind of spatial organization I have in mind will
perhaps seem fragmentary, incomplete, errant. The space in Sam Fran–
cis's new pictures
could
look empty, if you expected something else
from it. Perhaps another approach to the problem can be seen in the
new pictures of Adolph Gottlieb, shown at the Andre Emmerich
Gal–
lery, compared with the retrospective of his work at the Jewish Museum
earlier in the season. His really new pictures are the "bursts" and "blasts"
-great red or green blobs, bursts of color on an unpainted ground, and
beneath them, scraggly black. Although these pictures are related
to
his earlier "groundscapes," some of which were exhibited with them,
