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PARTISAN REVIEW
well as a group of contemporary artists involved with earthworks and
archeological art, have wished to escape history, to exist outside its
framework, in this case the insistence of modernism on an historical
consciousness became just one more reason that modernism so frequently
found and continues to find resistance in America.
Returning to Newman's remarks concerning the sublime, we find
other peculiarly American prejudices against an art for art's sake (instead of
an art for God's sake) articulated. In
Prophetic Pictures,
Nathanial Haw–
thorne indicated the basis, deeply embedded in Puritan thought-and as it
turned out for Jewish painters like Newman, Rothko and Gottlieb as
deeply embedded in Old Testament iconoclasm-of the American an–
tagonism to the aesthetic. "Some deemed it an offense against the Mosaic
law, and even a presumtuous mockery of the Creator," Hawthorne wrote,
"to bring into existence such lively images of his creatures."
In the recurrent rejection of the category of the aesthetic as trivial and
void of higher meaning, there is a consistency connecting the disparate
chapters in American art that may explain even the virulence of the
conceptualists' attack against an art for art's sake as meaningless decoration.
Except for Gorky, de Kooning and Hofmann, who are not included in "The
Natural Paradise," the abstract expressionists were not of course nature
painters; but there is a good argument to be made that they were essentially
religious painters who found many correspondences between the natural
religion of Transcendentalism , the concept of the sublime as a transcenden–
tal category, and transcendental ideas in Eastern religions. To see the New
York school as merely the lineal descendent and legitimate heir of a
mainstream tradition of French art is to miss a great deal of its complexity
and meaning . Abstract expressionism flowered in New York not merely
because Hitler made Europe unsafe, but because a tradition ofmetaphysical
painting which could provide a profound content for art was already
established in America. One hopes that the next time this tradition is
examined, a more convincing case for its existence than that made by "The
Natural Paradise" can be established.
