THEN AND NOW
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and the local New York ambiance.Thus it had depth and meaning in terms of
the history of the times.
Of the major art sources, surrealism and cubism have been well docu–
mented. Another source, however, still unacknowledged today because of the
publicity mongering of the surrealists plus a residue of postwar anti-German
feeling, was Hilla Rebay's Museum ofNon-Objective Art in New York, where
during the 1940s all the painters and art lovers dropped in, studied the great
Kandinskys, listened to Bach and also listened to the somewhat mad but
visionary Baroness . In 1946 she published a translation of Kandinsky's 1911
work
On the Spiritual in Art:
"Color embodies an enormous though unex–
plored power which can affect the entire human body as a physical organism
. .. exercising direct influence upon the soul. " One year later, and then one
by one, the pioneer artists Pollock, Rothko, Kline, and so on, began making
the leap away from consciously constructed (albeit abstract) form, to the new
art : embodiments of power that communicated through the eyes to the
psyche. Thus this art was indeed, despite Tom Wolfe's vulgarization of the
insight, concept art, though it was also visually masterful in a historic
tradition.
This art was also laden with literary overtones, communicated by the
artists in oracular utterances in the spirit of European pessimism and existen–
tialism: " Only that subject is valid which is tragic and timeless." Further, in
its bleakness and starkness, it gave an accurate picture of the artists' poverty
and alienation from the commercial mainstream.
Yet within the budding tip of the movement, a rare and liberated sense
of purpose existed. Poets, avant-garde theater people, musicians, impresar–
ios , and publishers mingled . Also, at
Art News,
a new criticism was con–
sciously fostered to bring the new psycho-aesthetic to a wider public.
It
cultivated a language th.at was subjective, sometimes witty, responsive on an
empathetic level, and rejecting of objective description (young poetS in the
quasi-surreal mode were among the first of these). There were some defi–
ciencies in the criticism: it exhibited a jejune spirit of cultural jingoism (and
poor art history) through talk of a wholly' 'new" art and of America taking
over the world from Paris. There was also virtuoso exercise of the pathetic
fallacy: paint was "savage," "ripped," "wild," "tortured"; compositions
projected feelings of "threat," "explosion," "collapse." Also, since the aim
was to write the parallel essay , critical judgments were often eschewed, so
reviews read like puffery to outsiders, an attitude that angered many scholars
and museum curators, who accused the movement of obfuscation and a
falling-back to sentimentality and unclear thinking. However, a true richness
inhabited the movement: not only its humanistic content-the fact that the
works of art, like all authentic art, existed as shadow projections of the artist,
