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Johns operates to allow as many interpretations of his work as
possible; Stella, neatly and diabolically, aims to invalidate all interpre–
tations.
If
one responds
to
his paintings visually or formally, one is
being perverse.
If
one rejects them on the basis of their "principle,"
one is being obtuse. In the end, they will not countenance being used in
any way, so that our liking or disliking them is irrelevant. They are
perhaps the closest that paintings have yet come to being mere objects.
More importantly, because of this arrogant uselessness (purchased,
however, with the most humble artisanal devotion), Stella, in my
opinion, may be the first to attain an
Abstract-Dadaist
position.
Apart from Johns, there have been considerable precedents for
this whole situation, precedents that go back right into the forties, and
to a much older generation. In the work of three important artists
who stood apart from Action Painting, artists who are called color–
field painters (Rothko, Still, and Newman) lay a pictorial region–
anti-Cubist, as well as gestural, but overtly chromatic-which opened
up several questions to be explored. Their pictures generally consist
of huge monolithic walls of color, punctuated or contained by minimal,
highly generalized structures- vertical lines, horizontal layers or agitated
flaked-off edges. But although still highly respected, Clyfford Still,
because of his over-wrought emotionalism, and Mark Rothko, because
of a hyper-individual poeticism, have both taken on an historical, and
somewhat less than vital, status for young painters. The unpainterly
Barnett Newman continues to be the old master and most pertinent
influence upon the present abstractionists.
If
one asks the question, "Why Newman?", a number of answers
suggest themselves. First, he is the only one of the three whose
handling is fairly even, unstressed by manual irregularity. Even the
flat, smooth surfaces of Ad Reinhardt are more inflected with feeling,
if not human imperfection, than Newman's. To be sure, there was a
time when Newman was considered a purveyor of grand sensuous ef–
fects, an interpretation which the sheer impact of say sixty square feet
of cobalt blue might well reinforce. Yet the color is not used to overwhelm
the senses, so much as in its curious muteness and dumbness to shock
the mind. Newman habitually gives the impression of being out of
control without being in the least bit passionate. During the early
fifties, it was possible to think of Newman's work, less correctly than
of Rothko's and Still's, as morally activated, concerned with pruning
art down to its essential flatness, but still able to make
it
count more
than ever in the rarified air. What the color-field artists had in com–
mon with Abstract-Expressionism, after all, was this emphasis on a