558
PARTISAN REVIEW
were dopplegangers of man at a time in history- but further in its being,
while ideological , also open to marvelous variation. Subthemes raised to high
art by the second generation (many of them women , of whom Frankenthaler
ranks first) continue to prove that.
There were , however, two factors that worked a change : one internal,
one external. The method of working perhaps dragged too deep , stirred
psychic contradictions ("I paint the unconscious ... ", "my lifelong concern
with death ... "), so that some of the first rank and many of the second
suffered the anguishes of painter's block. Some wasted months , years, whole
careers stuck on an image, a phase of style . This condition did seem to be
spelling the end of the expansive phase of the movement by the mid-1950s.
But the external dialectic , between the artists and the marketplace, was even
more devastating .
All through the early 1950s Big Money had been sniffing around the art
world twirling its mustache ("I'll pay the rent .... ") . Some episodes,
nearly forgotten now, cut deep at the time. The Quiz Show scandals that
exploited youthful artists and intellectuals , and then visited pariahhood on
one scapegoat , foretold what appetites and guilts would be activated in this
marriage . More than one artist went the' '$64,000 Question" route research–
ing " clues" in the
ArtNews
library, and evaded the ax only by luck. Then the
Knoedler-Wildenstein wiretapping scandal revealed that behind the red
velvet, experts in illegality, deceit, and avarice were exercising their trade .
Whether out ofguilt, disgust, rage, or horror, or a combination of these (also
human physical frailty) the literal deaths began, by the big cars that
turned killer, the drugs atop heart attacks and high blood pressure that killed .
One painted "speed ," and speed killed. In the end the movement was '
ravaged. A survivor for a while-Rothko, the mythic one-went on darkening
his works into the blacks of bitterness, and his suicide was only the apotheosis
of a desecration he already felt had been visited upon his art.
The antithesis had been foreshadowed as early as 1953, when Rauschen–
berg erased a de Kooning drawing : the new phase would indeed be an
erasure, a refusal to shoulder psychic anguish or historic significance. The style
was formally announced in the winter of 1957-58, when JasperJohns debuted
at Castelli Gallery and
Art News
ran his
Target
on its cover. The new look
would be cool , its hep meaning veiled ; it embodied a scumbled , surfacy
quality that would , indeed, be elevated to dogma in the 1960s. By 1961 the
"death of abstract expressionism" was a topic for symposiums. Thereafter,
transfers of power, between dealers, journals , critics, advisors , to collectors
proceeded with savagery (I am being deliberately vague) .
Other signs of the times: that year, 1961, Parke Bernet sold
Anstotle
Contemplating the Bust a/Homer
for $2 .3 million , a result of the most pub-
