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PARTISAN REVIEW
artists. But their pictures could be read graphically and thus could
be assimilated to the hard-edged, bright, and simplified salon taste
of the period. Helen Frankenthaler, who showed the way to Pollock,
didn't become fashionable until the late 1970s, and other major
second-generation figures aren't visible yet. This pertains especially
to Friedel Dzubas and Jack Bush, two painters whose work didn't
quite fit the salon taste of the early 1960s. (Neither has a picture in
the Museum of Modern Art, and Dzubas hasn't been seen in the
Whitney Annual or Biennial in twenty-five years!) The best artists
who came along after pop took off in 1962 have never become
fashionable. Jules Olitski came the closest in the mid- to late 1960s,
but since then his work has been the most "out" of "out," at least
in New York and Europe. Larry Poons's good dot pictures of the
early sixties were quickly approved of by arbiters of pop and
minimalist taste, but his much better "cascade" paintings of the
1970s remain as "out" as Olitski's recent work. Important younger
artists like Michael Steiner, Darby Bannard, Darryl Hughto, Sandi
Slone, and John Griefen haven't been seen at all in the salons, even
though they have shown commercially in New York for years. And
many of the best abstract painters in this country, Canada, and
England aren't even seen commercially in New York-let alone in
Europe. Instead there are the " trends": postminimal , earth art,
concept art, performance art, process art, pattern painting, new
image painting, air brush realism, punk painting, the new Italians,
the new Germans, and many more . Behind these trends are
simpleminded ideas about artistic originality and innovation-a
lack of understanding of modern art and especially of the work of
Pollock's generation. Beer cans, stuffed goats and camels, human
excrement, self-mutilation, and almost everything else have been
offered in the salons as serious, professional work . Nothing could be
more shallow and meretricious than these ideas. But today's salon
offers many of them together, giving contemporary art a varied,
energetic, and entertaining look , even though , considered individu–
ally, most of what is shown is artistically simpleminded.
There are salon versions of representational art like the work of
Alex Katz , Phillip Pearlstein , Chuck Close, the pop artists, the
photo-realists, and most recently the neoexpressionists like Julian
Schnabel. All combine conventions of recent abstraction (especially
large size and bright color) with representation in such a way as to
trivialize rather than extend the tradition of working from nature .
Then there are salon versions of pure abstraction, like the work of
Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Al Held , and the minimalists-
