66
PARTISAN REVIEW
general reaction against the formalist approach of Clement Greenberg, who
successfully reduced the whole of the content of art to that which can be
objectively described. Greenberg's refusal to deal with any emotional
content not verifiable in positivist terms determined the reductionist
direction of recent criticism . And Greenberg's writing was probably as
responsible as anything else for the development ofa reductive minimal art ,
emerging in calculated respnse to that criticism. It is these reductionist
positivist attitudes "The Natural Paradise" implicitly condemns .
Of course one cannot hold Greenberg entirely responsible for the rigid
formalist bias of American art criticism, which degenerated in the sixties
into a belated version in the plastic arts of what the "new criticism" was to
literature .
It
has taken the art world longer than the literary world to shake
off the formalist approach because formalism was more firmly ingrained in
art criticism. Indeed there were a few alternatives to formal analysis since
the original texts on modern aesthetics to be widely diffused in America
were those of the English formalists Roger Fry and Clive Bell. These texts
were in turn the basis of the formalist teachings of Dr. Albert Barnes and
the staff of the Barnes Foundation. They also profoundly affected the views
of Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art during its formative
years, whose book on
Cubism and Abstract Art
published in 1936 was
criticized at the time in a review by Meyer Schapiro for its narrowly
mechanistic approach to works of art.
"The Natural Paradise" undoubtedly intended to reverse the emphasis
on the purely formal element in art, but the irony is that the impact of the
formalist school on both art history as well as art criticism has been so
decisive that MOMA's case for a continuity of metaphysical content in
American painting was sometimes sabotaged by the attempt to base con–
nections on nonexistent or obscure formal analogies . For example, in his
catalogue essay "The Primal American Scene," the distinguished art histo–
rian Robert Rosenblum dwells on the influence of Augustus Vincent Tack,
a painter active in the twenties and thirties collected mainly by Duncan
Phillips, on the art of the abstract expressionist, Clyfford Still. Comparing
the works in reproductions or in slides, one might conceivably imagine a
resemblance between Tack's pale peaked mountains and waves, stylized and
flattened in the manner of theJapanism popular in the art schools of his day,
with Still's intensely colored, jagged, restless abstract forms . Still and
Tack, of course, are not hung side by side in the exhibition; such a
juxtaposition would devastate any argument based on analogies of struc–
ture, facture, surface or color. It is evident that no documents can be found
linking the two artists because indeed any similarity is strictly coincidental.
Tack was essentially a decorator working in an Orientalizing style derived
.,
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