PARTISAN REVIEW
93
est
gestalt,
with the result that these pamtmgs had the tendency to
decompose visually, having no strong boundaries to frame the billow–
ing clouds of sprayed, shapeless color.
Olitski soon realized there was only one way out of such a dilem–
rna: the use of framing
repoussoir
elements to lend coherence to
atmospheric effects. The use of such
repoussoir
framing devices are
common to the paintings of . luminists like Turner. Undoubtedly
Turner, and the whole concept of the sublime that Turner's sea–
scapes epitomize, was a crucial inspiration for Olitski. Turner, like
Olitski, was one of the original practitioners of aesthetic brinkman–
ship. Some of his paintings seem to be asking the same question
Olitski now poses - how far can you go in the direction of an art
of pure color and light and still make paintings?
The fantasy of immaterial painting is a contradiction in terms.
Although it may depict color and light, no painting can actually
be
disembodied color and light. This confusion, however, seems a
pecu~
liarly American heresy initiated by the Sychromists, the original Amer–
ican pseudo-visionaries. Like Thomas Wilfred, whose Lumia Suite,
the light box that still pathetically anticipates color television in the
Museum of Modern Art lounge, Olitski is guilty of asking of painting
what painting cannot deliver.
In the prophetic essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Me–
chanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935: "The
history of every form of art comprises critical periods in which art
aspires to produce effects that can be achieved only after a drastic
modification of the technical
status quo,
that is to say by a new form
of art." Surely there is an art of pure light and color, and it is realized
in slides, films, and the rapidly developing new art of video, but not
in painting.
Despite the emergence of these new forms, there is still a lot of
good painting going on today, and it is addressed, like Olitski's art,
primarily to a redefinition of the roles of drawing and surface within
a fresh approach to the painterly.
It
does not, however, defy the lim–
its of the pictorial in the pursuit of a spurious radicality that can be
redeemed only through academic contrivance.
I have spoken at such length of Olitski's work because it ac–
tually represents the focus for dialogue that seems to be lacking. Olit–
ski is surely addressing the crucial questions. But his answers, I fear,
