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AVANT-GARDE
543
A
third
area of abstract
art
at the present moment is the only
one which can claim some interest in delectation and sensuous pleasure.
The genealogy of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland goes back to
Rothko--from whom comes their essentially chromatic way of seeing
things, as well as from Helen Frankenthaler-to whom they owe their
initiating techniques of splatter and transparent paint weaving. During
the mid-fifties, Louis, in Washington, D.C., produced .a number of
enormous color abstractions by laying transparent rivers of acrylic paint
over unprimed canvas into which the paint soaked to give a dyed
effect. This latter is the characteristic embodiment of a painting which
came to look substanceless and which had a -distinctly orphic or lyric
potentiality (in Louis particularly splendid), before emblematic con–
ventions, in the shape of chevrons and stripes, took it over. In its
iconic clarity, such work as Louis's and Noland's, by 1960 was fully
abreast of the geometrically derived abstraction which was its con–
temporary-though much more locked in, compositionally, through the
necessity to emphasize the dynamics of color. A certain algid brilliance,
at once refined and rigid, was the result. It remained for Jules Olitzki,
finally, to consummate the incestuous marriage between color-field
painting and the aberrant branch of abstraction by employing one or
two color dots or lopsided globules against a chromatic field.
If
his work
is any indication, however, the union only incidentally escapes being
detrimental to both forms. The attempt to reformulate pictorial quality
strictly in terms of color has a tinge of high ambition to it, deliberately
compromised here by gratuitous eccentricity. Prismatic authority and
great chromatic vibration are somehow embedded in a construct that
is mechanistic, without being rationalistic. Without denying the special
flavor of such a blend, I find it at the moment unconvincing as a
visual experience and too obtrusively esoteric as a concept.
All in all, present abstraction has worked a very definite change
on spectator responses in the last six years. With all the cards on the
table, the varieties of this new work nevertheless resist any kind of
emotional assimilation, even as they offer a practically instantaneous
visual experience. Total optical apprehension and knowledge of the
instrumenting process occur at about the same quick rate. As Hilton
Kramer put it, "The rhetoric of this painting"
is
to
be
found
in
those optical inflections which do not invite the spec–
tator's attention so much as stun it. The duration of one's
esthetic experience with painting of this school is not of an
exploratory nature; one does not probe these paintings, one
recovers from their optical audacity and literal brilliance.