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seen to converge even as they overlap. A strictly optical shock in which
the eye responds exclusively to, or at least is held to, the way a combina–
tion of two colors will
~'jump"
in a kind of electric vibration or give
off resonating after-images of a third hue-this attack typifies the
work of various quite young artists such as Larry Poons, Tom Downing
(a Washington, D.C. painter), Richard Anuskiewicz, and at times,
Ellsworth Kelly. Compositional schemata, from meshes to polka dots
are regularized in order to focus on the strictly physiological repeating
activity of the color choices (say, purple against orange),
so that one
is
not allowed to oontemplate an area or passage in itself.
Even so,
the possibility of running visual charges along edges, or of stringing
them by lines, let alone playing them off larger fonns of every con–
ceivable shape, demonstrates the curious future and variable range of
this mode of painting. It is at once more pugnacious than any previous
idiom-in its , jangling discords, and in the way it compels strict re–
sponses from the eye-and more passive-in its radical suppression
of human will. One's very difficulty in bridging the gap between these
two extremes-now far removed from the innocent Bauhaus pedagogy
from which they derive-indicates the content to which optical painting
aspires.
It is in fact impossible to overlook a deliberately aberrated quality,
a stunning emptiness, injected into American abstract painting of the
last few years. The spectator's perpetually violated sense of proportion
makes him aware of these elements. I refer here not so much to the
mammoth physical scale of the present work (to which most spectators
have been accustomed through Abstract-Expressionism), but
to
the fact
that generally one element within the picture's confines has been per–
mitted to get more or less cancerously out of hand.
Once again, much of this has its own history. Aside from the
pioneer color-field artists who pretty much equated the whole pictorial
zone with the artistic statement, the direction of much American paint–
ing has been toward the enlargement of a characteristic image which
then fills out or leaves more slivers of the original ground showing.
Between 1956 and 1959, this applied to de Kooning, Kline, Motherwell,
and Gottlieb, among the older action painters, as well as to somewhat
younger painters such as Frankenthaler, Jenkins, Dzubas, and Parker.
A good deal of this development can be interpreted as a reaction
against a vestigial appearance of drawing in painting that had other–
wise rejected the tenets of drawing in favor of a totally paint-conceived
fonn of expression. An objection of equal force, incidentally, held for
brushiness which focused rather than diffused energy, and tied down