KENWORTH MOFFETI
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sixties most of the best second-generation painters had switched to
acrylic paints. Quick drying and flexible, the acrylics seemed made
to order for the direct, spontaneous ways of working evolved by
the first generation. Beginning with Helen Frankenthaler, Morris
Louis, and Kenneth Noland, abstract painters have had a con–
tinuing creative dialogue with the manufacturers of acrylic paint.
Picture making and the technology of paint manufacture now evolve
together.
Direct improvisational methods are also favored by the
sculptors of the new-abstraction art . Instead of the laborious
traditional methods of carving or modeling that, like the hand-held
brush and oil paints, were devised to make representational images,
today's abstract sculptors proceed by bringing together unit parts,
usually of steel, that are easily joined by techniques such as welding
or bolting. This was Smith's approach, adopted by Caro, who, even
more than Smith, revolutionized the medium of sculpture. Caro did
for sculpture what Pollock had done for painting-he finally liber–
ated it completely from the last assumption of representational art.
The leading figures of the second generation haven't faltered as
the abstract expressionists did. Their attitude toward their art is
more matter-of-fact and professional, with little of the self–
dramatization so typical of the earlier generation. With the second
generation, abstraction has become a fully extroverted and empiri–
cal art; they have built brilliantly on the foundation laid by the first
generation and have expanded abstract art beyond anything that the
first generation imagined it to be.
Recently, there has appeared a third generation or wave of
abstract artists now in their thirties or forties (a few are in their
twenties). In the last six or seven years it has begun to look as if this
will be a very large group. Indeed, since the middle seventies, there
has been something like a quantum leap in the number of good
abstract artists. So much is happening so quickly that it's hard to
keep abreast of it all. I hear about or see the work of a new, aspiring
talent every few months. Certainly, there is much more to look at
than there was even five years ago . There is even much more good
student work., Abstract art has become altogether more solid and
assured . At the same time, it continues to gain momentum and to
produce great things . Postmodernist rhetoric notwithstanding, we
are experiencing a florescence of modern art.
(Mr. Moffett will discuss today's representational art as well as
the new generation of abstract artists in a forthcoming article.)
