ART CHRONICLE
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establish its place in the sun. Are these qualities to disappear now that
both objectives have been won? (I am not talking of "success.") It
would seem that, precisely to the extent their claim to not being a
school proves justified, this need not happen.
If
the bases are preserved–
those contradicting combinations of surrealist space and cubist surface,
of intellectual abstraction and personal emotion, of extreme individualism
and extreme generalization (rather than the manner of the masters),
then we have a revolutionary fundamental style which, like cubism itself,
Will continue and evolve in ways that while unpredictable, will be ela–
borations that are recognizable.
This suggests in tum that a reaction, either revivalist or innovating,
is not inevitable. But it suggests too that the historical and social inter–
pretations of the content of the New York school, those patriotic con–
frontations of the essence of the school and the essence of the country,
are not inevitable either. There is no doubt that this is the significant
American style of the last fifteen years, but this style will evolve. In the
form we have known, it is no more the permanent American style than
was the realism that used to be declared fundamental to the American
character. Each belonged to a time and a place-and to individuals.
This gives these works their particular character; to make them carry
any more ideological freight robs them of a portion of that character,
and precisely that portion their creators most insisted upon.
The
Assemblage
exhibition brought forth some of the most violent
journalistic attacks of recent times, both from avowed traditionalists and
professed progressives. It was somewhat difficult to see why. The theme
of the show was after all as old as Arthur Cravan climbing through the
window of the Luxembourg museum to hang an empty picture frame:
art is not defined by consecrated materials and techniques but by the
poetic intention of the artist. Once this was granted- and one would
have imagined it granted a long while ago-it was remarkable into
what traditionally consecrated modem visual arrangements most of the
work fell. The dadaists, of course, adopted cubist principals-at the time
it was part of their shock value-but this holds true as well for the great
majority of the recent neo-dadaists (Rauschenberg, for example), who,
compositionally, are much more traditional than many of the painters
whose works hung at the Guggenheim.
Even so, since the show was based on a method of creating images,
rather than on the character of the images themselves, it brought to–
gether a great variety of styles and intentions, from the most classic
to the most romantic. Historically,
papier
colli
may have been the first
introduction of unorthodox materials, but it is by this time so accepted
