694
ROBERT GOLDWATER
it.
If
many of the younger artists, and some of the original genera–
tion, have lost it. it is because they too have concentrated entirely
on how these pictures are made and have visibly produced a new,
unexpressionist, unexpressive, and occasionally handsome, academi–
cism.
The quality of this expressiveness, or that of Bonnard, or
Matisse, or Braque, for that matter,
is
difficult to formulate. It
cannot for all that be ignored, nor can it be resolved by purely
formal analysis. (De Kooning may be a cubist, but his is a struggling
cubism, and the struggle, which is in the pictures
if
not in the
intention, makes his work different from earlier "similarly con–
structed works," and must be mentioned.)
If
one begins, as Green–
berg apparently does, by ignoring the affective values of rep–
resentational painting, which have to do, equally and inextricably,
with the fusion of the associations of objects and, or in, their hand–
ling by the painter, one ends up with a purely formal, purely
analytical attitude toward abstract art, which in turn robs it of its
affective values. I should be the first to insist that there has been
too much pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology and pseudo-poetry
written around modern painting, and especially the New York
School. Greenberg's book
is
a wonderful counterweight to such
accumulated divagations. It is a model of penetration in sticking
to the visual evidence. But circumspect as one must be, one must
also recognize that art has meaning beyond the purely formal
relation of its internal parts.
KELLY
Oct_ 16th - Nov. 4th
H.
STERNE
Nov. 6th - Nov. 25th
YOUNGERMAN
Nov. 27th - Dec. 16th
FORREST BESS
Dec. 18th - Jan. 6th
Betty Parsons Gallery
15 East 57 Street, N. Y.
Robert Goldwater
Paintings by
Jane Freilicher
through November
Larry Rivers
through December
Tibor de Nagy Ciallery
149 East 72nd St.
