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PARTISAN REVIEW
Oil on canvas suggests "open" rather than "closed" forms, loose rather
than tight contours, broken rather than smooth, uniform colors, trans–
parent and vibrating rather than opaque surfaces. Oil fulfils itself on
canvas when the painter invents form with a full brush, with color and
in masses, instead of tinting or filling in a prepared outline. Then the
painter invents form with his brush, not his pencil, and sees everything
in terms of transition rather than sharp separation.
Greenberg outlines the course of painterliness from the seventeenth
century's bravura paint handling to modernism's initial assertion that "it is
possible to
draw
color and draw
with
color, and that all painting can be
brush drawing." But that soon changed; "Matisse turned the procedure
inside out by designing in flat areas with hardly any drawing, using his
brush like a broom. Mondrian made the final conclusion ... and in a
sense arrived back where the Renaissance began." Did Greenberg see
Pollock's shimmering, all-over webs of paint as a twentieth- century re–
vival of a kind of painterly painting? Difficult to say. He concludes the es–
say by observing that " ... the process that ends with Mondrian begins
with Velazquez. The dialectical principle by which all things are in–
evitably converted into their opposites may not operate in nature, but it
certainly seems to do so in art."
The same 1950 essay contains one of Greenberg's most revealing pas–
sages, uncharacteristically personal. It makes explicit both the passion that
informs his whole career as a critic and his willingness to follow, above
all, what his eye told him. He describes a picture that seems to him a
touchstone of excellence, a "tawny little jewel," seen at a recent show of
old masters at Knoedler Galleries. "I am told," he writes, "this particular
Titian has an incomplete pedigree but, if Titian did not paint it, whoever
did was a contemporary of his and, for at least that moment, as great as
he. It is a picture I could dance in front of"
