264
PARTISAN REVIEW
of subsequent developments, we cannot help noticing that the work
of so many of these artists shows a sharp decline after the mid-fifties.
Only Gottlieb, Motherwell, Hofmann, and Smith worked well after
that. Also, some of the greatest innovators of this generation-I'm
thinking of Newman, Still, and Rothko-did surprisingly few
first-rate works. Since it was a pioneering generation it was also an
isolated and neglected one, at least at first; this led to self–
dramatization, high flying, and defensive rhetoric, usually about the
"subject matter" or the supposed mythical content of their abstract
pictures. And self-conscious "meaning making" (as opposed to
direct, sensuous involvement with the materials) is, I think, what
accounts for much that is dead or depressing in the work of this
generation: Rothko's murals in the Houston chapel and most of his
late, dark pictures; almost all of Still's very large pictures; most of
Newman's work after 1953, including most of his stagy
Stations of the
Cross
series. So, too, empty rhetoric is the main expressive feature of
de Kooning's work of the past thirty years, or of most of Kline's
paintings of the late 1950s. Abstract expressionist drama often
turned into melodrama, and it makes some sense to talk of these
painters as "primitives" of new abstraction, and as a "sacrificial
generation." But their real achievement was to set out the main
ideas of the new art and create its first masterpieces. They showed
the way.
A second generation began to appear in the 1950s. This group
didn't come along together, and it took a long time for it to develop
and to come into focus . But it too has turned out to be a fairly large
group, whose leading figures are Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis
(who died in 1962), Kenneth Noland, Friedel Dzubas, Jack Bush
(who died in 1977), Jules Olitski, Stanley Boxer, Robert
Goodnough, Ludwig Sander, and Anthony Caro. There are also late
bloomers such as Cora Ward. The most noticeable feature of the
painting of this second generation is the great emphasis given to
color. Also, these painters have shown a new confidence in dealing
with large scale. Most use a staining process or at least paint thinly,
and all have adopted a very experimental approach to materials and
working procedures, which they inherited from Pollock's
generation . The second generation was the first group of painters to
turn to the new acrylic paints, which almost all of our leading
abstract painters use today. This appears to be the most important
change in the medium of painting since oil paint became popular in
the sixteenth century; it was certainly one of the fastest. By the early
