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PARTISAN REVIEW
Anton Chekhov, in a letter, said, "Having read over the years a thou–
sand reviews of my plays, I never read one single sentence that was any
use to me."
If
indeed fa te, or something, prods the direction my work is to take,
it's the exception, not the general practice. Most of the time I go to my
studio and just begin. Something, a sentence I've read can get me going.
"Do the thing and you will have the power." It's in Emerson's essay
"Compensation." It's addressed to farmers: sow, plow, reap. It's a gem
of a sentence for artists. An artist's studio is a marvelous situation. It's
where an artist can be by himself, truly himself, to sing, dance, paint,
pray, and play. I have to pray standing up...getting old in the knees.
"Do the thing and you will have the power." I say it to myself. It's
freeing. It works. Later, an artist looks at his work and asks himself, and
anyone who happens to be there, "Does it work?" What does it mean,
"Does it work?" We know what it means. Someone says, "I think it
would work if you took an inch off the top." Another remonstrates,
"Don't touch it. I don't believe in cropping." Someone shouts,
"If
it
makes the painting more realized, he'd damn well better take off an
inch!" When a painting "works," it looks as if it had to be; otherwise
it's merely art.
Looking at great art helps. It gives me pleasure. I go to museums for
pleasure. In New York, the Met and the Frick are pleasure givers. How
can I look at a Tintoretto, a Titian, a Rembrandt, a pastel by Manet,
quite small of a young woman in profile, a pink rose in her hat, and not
want to rush home to paint? The Manet was at the Guggenheim in one
of those side galleries where one can see Impressionists, if motorcycles
and fashion are not one's cup of tea . For the most part I stay away from
what is to be seen at most of the galleries. There are exceptions: that
extraordinary show of Cezanne's watercolors at Aquavella, a first-rate
Marin show at the Richard York gallery, and that beautiful, beautiful
"Rembrandt and the Venetians" at Salander-O'Reilly. But for the most
part art is not to be seen in most New York galleries, unless a political
sign lifts you up and takes you to paradise. Feces are in. Lots of shock,
lots of schlock not only in the galleries, it's all over the place. Jacques
Barzun calls it an "age of decadence." It's worse. The level is that of a
Roman circus. Darwin was mistaken . The Neanderthals never went
away. They began to paint. This started about twenty or thirty years
ago, led on by Duchamp and a handful of French and American
philosophers writing in a language neither French nor English, and
encouraged by the radical spawn of the sixties, now tenured professors
of art in our most elite universities, by journalists pretending to be art
