ART CHRONICLE
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the difference between the two is striking. The groundscape combined
the impulse of the all-over and of the explosive, two kinds of space
which would pull against each other. The spots or suns in the flat area
above, however, did not generate as much force because in a sense they
shared it with the complicated movement of the ground beneath them.
In the newer pictures, the spots have gathered to themselves more of
the febrile linear activity characteristic of the ground, and as a conse–
quence they are much more powerful, while the ground has been re–
duced to the straggling black mass beneath. More intensely the "burst"
creates space around itself, especially behind it, and it moves out and
back as much
if
not more than it comes forward. A precursor of these
pictures was
Black, Blue and R ed,
1956, in the Jewish Museum show
as
well as in last year's show at Martha Jackson. But that did not make
the point which the new ones do, for several reasons: the black mass
beneath was still more of a ground than a mass, there was an indecision
between the all-over and the explosive, so that the "burst" had less
unitary force; and last, but most important, this was done on a chalky,
somewhat muddied blue against which neither the red nor the black
could act properly. I remember thinking it "powder-puffy"-something
I would not say about the new ones. Actually, a hint of this same
spatial development, an early response to the problem could have been
seen
in
Paul Feeley's "spot" pictures shown in 1955 at the de Nagy
Gallery. Feeley's new pictures indicated a more explicit and more am–
bitious attack on the shape in space. Two of these were especially suc–
cessful, one, a very large light cerise with a yellow jug-like shape and a
large yellow spot, and another, smaller, with three rust-red spots. Others
explore large crevice-like divisions of the picture, creating space by a
massive jumping of figure and ground.
What is Mark Rothko's relation to the kind of space I have been
discussing? It seems to me an ambiguous one. Certainly his enormous
pictures made of fuzzy-edged bands of color (at the Janis Gallery) are
very different from the busily working claustral pciture. And there is no
doubt that their size, their luminous compelling simplicity gives them
(like the Feeleys) a quality of being
there.
For some people this is a
kind of unlimited, illimitable landscape of being itself. They have their
backs to the spectator also, and the large rectangular areas of glowing
color loom above, almost cover, the thin edged areas around them.
What happens behind the color is mysterious and unknown, and nothing
is
disclosed. The bands of color do not create space, they suggest it, but
the effect is all suggestion, all promise of something, and the spatial
cues are limited. Although the surface is employed (and this sugge5ts
