68
PARTISAN REVIEW
French art because American artists regarded impressionism as a scientific ,
secular attitude toward nature , incompatible with the Transcendentalist
idea of nature as a metaphysical force of mysterious origin . As Professor
Novak points out, luminism was intentionally anti-impressionist and
antimodernist . Yet more evidence of the American hostility toward
modernism is documented in
TheMachine in theGarden,
Leo Marx's study of
the struggle between the pastoral ideal of agricultural America and the
prog ressive demands of capitalist expansion through industrialization .
More that is pertinent to the iconog raphy ofAmerican art is contained in his
book,
The Machine in the Garden,
than in the catalogue of "The Natural
Paradise ," which indicates that cultural historians may have more to
contribute to a study of American art at this point than do art historians. Of
particular interest in a study of antiprogressive, antimodernist attitudes in
America is Leo Marx's suggestion that the resistance to industrialization
was tied to the fear that to embrace the machine was to give up the fantasy of
the earthly paradise , a fantasy central to American popular relig ions . The
profoundly reactionary flavor of American popular religions, further study
ought to show , affected American art to a far greater degree than has been
acknowledged .
One of the peculiarities of abstract expressionism as a modern style is
that as much as earlier American nature painters, the abstract expressionists
rejected industrialization, deliberately turning their backs on that very
geometric machine imagery which has been identified as
the
modern theme .
Moreoever , as French as some of its techniques are , abstract expressionism,
or at least a good part of it , is related to earlier American art both in its
peculiar conception of history as well as in its hostility to the European
modernist ideal of an art for art 's sake . In any discussion of the presence of a
transcendental or metaphysical element in abstract expressionism, Barnett
Newman is certainly a key personality, since he so often spoke for his
colleagues . In December, 1948, a few months before he painted
Horizon
Light-a
work not included in "The Natural Paradise" that does indeed
resemble an abstraction of a luminist landscape-Newman published an
article in
The Tiger's Eye,
a little magazine , titled "The Sublime is
Now. " This essay is the specific document linking abstract expressionist
aesthetics to earlier conceptions of the sublime as a transcendental category,
especially those that provided the aesthetic for the luminist school.
In the essay, Newman denounces the "failure of European art to
achieve the sublime" as the result ofa "blind desire to exist inside the reality
of sensation ," reiterating the luminists' original critique of impressionist
empiricism . Because impressionism did not express faith in nature
as the manifestation of a divine presence , but was merely a matter of
