JED PERL
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York. Still, Porter reveals it to be a comfortable place; he sees New
York through the eyes of artists and poets, of O'Hara announcing
"How funny you are today New York/ like Ginger Rogers in
Swing–
time."
In Porter's work the city emerges out of great big planes and
strokes of color- whites infused with gold or blue : peculiar oranges
and greens. The city isn't constructed, block by block. It's formed
out of the collision of bulky elements and tiny grace notes which are
scattered almost at random , here and there. Paris , in Balthus's
Passage
and Helion's
Triptyque du Dragon,
is a bourgeois capital- per–
fectly ordered, ordinary; Porter's New York is more like a pioneer
outpost - improvised by speculators and con artists.
This is the New York that , in the hagiography of art history ,
has become the clearinghouse of tradition.
The Triumph
of
American
Painting,
Irving Sandler calls it in the title of his best-selling history.
Meanwhil e, Paris continues as a living museum, full of extraor–
dinary formulations. We now go to Paris as travelers from Stendhal
to H enry James went to Rome . We're enchanted yet critical; we
regard the natives as some fascinating endangered species. How
wise these foreigners appear- maybe too wise for their own good,
too clear on what is poss ible ever to attempt anything new. And if
Pari s is no longer a capital to which we go to see new art, this may be
because the re a re today many more studios in New York where
Par is is a live than in Paris itself.
To be always the big, brash, hot, young city- this is intoler–
ab le. New York-oh, yes, triumphant-must still go to Paris at the
end of the twenti eth century. Whatever New York may have, it lacks
the experience of working through history, of keeping tradition
ali ve . Subtle Paris shows us how to unknot the knots, to find our way
out of the one-way streets and cul-de-sacs.
Nowadays, an American artist's judgment of the School of
Paris is a judgment on the value of ce rtain kinds of feeling , certain
aspec ts o f the past. The looking toward Europe - this is a great risk,
one involving a considerable leap of the imagination. Paris, to an
American's eyes, will always be different from Paris to a Parisian's
eyes . Can we know them, ever? Their revolutions become our tradi–
tions. But then they can never know us, either. . .. Leger, in
America in the forties, goes into a department store where he sees
three clerks standing together, one white, one black , one Oriental.
They looked , he writes, like three women out of a painting by
Watteau.
