590
HAROLD ROSENBERG
if it were the code in
The Gold Bug.
Gorky had come to New York,
but for an artist in those days New York was the wrong spot; the real
spot was Paris.* The struggle for location, which was the connection
between Gorky and history, thus provided the meaning for him of the
fall of Paris and the arrival in New York of the exiled surrealists:
by
being and working there, they authenticated New York for Gorky-in
commenting on this dramatic relationship, it is presumptuous of Good–
man to introduce his opinions of Breton and Matta as "international
hipsters"; no one claimed that they influenced
Goodman .
Goodman lacks the dramatic imagination required to visualize the
outlines of another's life, as formed by his limitations and the dilemmas
that arise out of those limitations, and to apprehend the particular
genius by which he surmounts them (when he does surmount them )
and the anguish in which he sinks under their weight. Goodman is a
sage with answers; he is weak on problems. Thus he reduces the
concrete drama of Gorky's struggle with place, time and human en–
vironment, the conditions of his creative leap, to the mush of "the
artist's mature liberation in terms of his temporarily good marriage,
getting a decent income [Gorky never got a decent income] and a
little public acceptance [Gorky had just as much public acceptance in
the thirties but by different people, and it was the difference that
counted for him] also his rage of jealousy and fear of oncoming death
[by the time of Gorky's cancer operation his new style has been in
full development for five or six years] for these are the things that free
us from obsessional self-consciousness and give the real self a chance
to breathe."
In sum, Goodman demands that we discard as "fancy psycho–
logizing" the exploration of Gorky's thought and experience, his de–
velopment through conflict with the strangeness of his time and place
and with the hard issues of influence and originality, and accept in–
stead some abstractions of therapeutic psychology. History and the
artist are to be kept firmly apart. As flippantly as he dismisses from
serious "discourse" the facts that may do us in, he announces that he is
"profoundly unimpressed" by the human and cultural crisis (the War
and the conquest of France by Hitler) through which the personal–
historical complex of Gorky and other artists underwent transformation
and ushered in a new period in American painting.
For Goodman the only choice in regard to current history is either
*
Since this was true for American artists generally, the wrong spot was the
right spot in terms of the change that was to take place in American painting.
