ART
417
structures, endowing them with their emotional impact, must also be
inherent to de Kooning's whole approach to his art. The "decisions" a
few critics have called upon
him
to make, decisions which would pre–
sumably lay the ghost of anguish and permit a free flowing "major"
production are, therefore, perhaps simply impossible to this art.
This exploratory character, and the tentative, unfinished, probing
quality, unhortatory and unclassical, that it lends to the work, has been
considered one of the definitive marks of the New York School. The
question may be asked (negligible or crucial, depending upon one's
concept of what it is the master masters), whether it is a quality imposed
by or imposed upon the artist. The answer seems unimportant to any
understanding of de Kooning's work, precisely because while the re–
calcitrant elements remain in being, sufficient control over them has
been established and made evident so that both the raw material and
its ordering may be grasped and their relation seized. I cannot, on the
other hand, make out of this personal, formal struggle any social prin–
ciple whose content is a critique of our society. (Were things better,
would there be no plastic conflict?) This is not the content of this
art and what conscience need pretend it is?
If,
indeed, this is the mirror
of anguish, then it is of another, more human sort, and more than
sufficient for its validity.
What is certain is that de Kooning is not a voluble, lyrical artist.
(I say this in description, not criticism.) He does not paint as the bird
sings, whether with conscious or unconscious ease, nor does he pretend
to do so.
In
the seeking, he transmits the search, and the will that
channels it, from confusion to clarity.
In
all this his painting is opposed
to that of Pollock, who in his most fully realized art created pictures of
free-flowing ease, arabesques of apparent grace, only occasionally marked
by breaks, rarely arrested by fractures, rhythms that swing in upon them–
selves and are placed upon a few planes picked out in front of an
unlimited space. (It is one of the remarkable aspects of Pollock's art,
that his problems of creation, so amplified in legend, are so rarely
apparent in his best work.) Pollock has an energy to match de Kooning's,
but it is of a different sort. Within the framework of abstract expression–
ism, their styles are in fundamental ways opposite, and it is an irony of
the school's history that so many members of the second generation, who
had learned dedication to "existentialist" truth as a way of creation
nevertheless formed themselves upon an impossible eclectic image of the
two masters, and strove simultaneously to exteriorize lyricism and anguish,
spontaneity and tormented reflection. The effort prompted many of the
younger artists to neglect the particular clarity that each of the two
