PARTISAN REVIEW
85
illusionism. Shaped paintings resolved the problem of foreground vs.
background relationships by di carding the background altogether,
cutting out the image so that the entire canvas was identical with the
whole of the image. Both Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly used
this means of causing depicted shape to coincide with literal shape.
After 1'966, however, Stella combined shapes depicted within the can··
yas together with the literal shape of the eccentric canvas cut-out, in–
troducing an unexpected clement of illusionism.
Another alternative to creating Cubist planes and shapes was
popularized by Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Morris
Louis in the technique of stain ing paint into raw, unprimed canvas.
inking the image directly into the support, staining identified the
figure with its ground so that the spatial illusion created was not
related to Cubist space but to the more ambiguous atmospheric
space of the color-field painting of Rothko and Newman.
The question of what liberated Newman and Rothko from
Cubism becomes more pressing as their liberation assumes increasing
significance for current painting.
ow that we have had another
chance to see both Matisse and Mira once again in recent retrospec–
li\'es, the answer becomes clearer. Matisse's high key color, and Mira's
conception of pace as an indeterminate continuum are the obvious
sources for the post-Cubist style of color abstraction that remains
dominant in present day American art. However, we must remem–
ber that Matisse remained a representational artist, no matter how
radically he reformulated the canons of representation. Mira on the
other hand - especially in the paintings of the late twenties shown
recently at the Guggenheim Museum - could be amazingly free of
figural referents. The experience Mira had that Matisse did not was
of course Surrealism.
Fashionable as it still is in New York to deny that Surrealism
had other than literary importance, it seems time to admit that Sur–
realism rather than Cubism was the key to the emergence of an art
whose conception of space and figuration were not still bound to tra–
ditional models.
For Surrealist space, at least as it was developed by Mira, is
open , expansive, indeterminate, as opposed to the closed, finite, re–
strirtiye space of Cubism with its layered planes and silhouetted
shapes. Surrealist space is a continuum as fluid as the thought process
