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BARBARA
ROSE
result from an effort to combine the surface emphasis of
inlormel
painting with monumental scale and grandiose aspirations for a dis–
embodied art of pure color and light are singularly unconvincing.
Although I was very enthusiastic about Olitski's initial stain
paintings of the early sixties, I came to have more and more reserva–
tions regarding his works as they began increasingly to rely on familiar
art historical formats to sustain their purported radicality. In the last
series of paintings in the stain technique, for example, large fields
of fluid paint are given awesome scale by the presence of tiny dots
of color that cause the fields to appear that much grander in com–
parison. This was a device to establish heroic scale well known to
classical landscape painters like Domenichino and Poussin who added
tiny
stallage
figures to their panoramic views. In nineteenth century
American landscape painting, the discrepancy between miniscule
figures and gigantesque landscape become ludicrously contrasted;
but Americans have a tendency to exaggerate.
Olitski's ambition forces him to return to academic formulae to
establish his paintings as pictures, differentiating them from experi–
ences of pure phenomena that painting cannot deliver.
As
an example
of such contrivance one may cite Olitski's use of drawing. For Olit–
ski, drawing functions in two ways: to establish scale in contrast with
immense fields of color, and to frame these fields , defining their boun–
daries so that they may be understood as pictorial statements as op–
posed to just yard goods. Toward this end he elaborates the edges of
the canvas with various kinds of apparently nonchalant marks. Olit–
ski's emphasis on the frame, created by drawing around the edges,
is crucial to defining the solid wall of opaque pigment he has built
up as a painting, as opposed to just another architectural surface.
Moreover, drawing is necessary to define the location of the picture
plane, since the tonal modulations present within the field would oth–
erwise create the illusion that the picture plane itself was buckling.
Olitski's most successful attempts to emphasize the frame were
those of his spray paintings in which an internal frame, reminiscent
of Seurat's halo of pointillist dots around his compositions, were
masked-off around the perimeter of the canvas. Dissatisfied with this
solution, Olitski opted for attempting to establish the rectangle of the
canvas a.s a shape strong enough to act as a container for modulated
color. Unfortunately the rectangle is the simplest and hence the weak-
