BOOKS
311
ownership so that the collection would remain whole; and Karen
Wilkin, a student of Greenberg's, whose lively essay, affectionate and
detailed, will remain a valuable resource.
The book's visual design shifts between presentations of the full work
and photographs of a detail. The detail, or close-up, is suddenly enor–
mous, emphasizing the very attention to surface and texture that was
essential to Greenberg's own scrutiny. There are twenty-three works by
Kenneth Noland and twelve by Jules Olitski, the color-field painters
who pursued a Greenbergian formalism in the early sixties as pop and
conceptua I a
rt
rose in ascenda nce. After the expected Americans–
Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and others in the New York School, with
others notable for their absence, especially Motherwell and de Koon–
ing-Canadians are best represented with nine artists, including Jack
Bush and Darryl Hughto. The Canadians-homeland of the author who
wrote
How Nell'
Y()r/~
Stole the Idea of Modem Art-suggest
a branch–
ing out from urban density toward large, airy landscapes. Greenberg's
collection shows also how he discounted the figurative base that under–
lies abstract expressionism, ignoring the lessons learned by the artists
who passed through the movement. The fact is that these artists
returned to the figure with renewed understanding of the resources of
paint to express, not simply the figure, but the feeling of the figure.
Living in Provincetown in the winter of
'950,
beginning to record
reflections that would become a book-length journal, Myron Stout
quoted Thucydides: "And be not contented with ideas derived only
from words." Stout was irritated by Greenberg's assessment of exactly
the kind of work Stout valued. He reasoned that Greenberg spun his
good thinking toward an impossible conclusion. He wrote,
Such painters as the Intrasubjectives, with Greenberg as their
spokesman, when the)' say the subject matter of painting is the
material itself, seem
to
be illogically and willfully erecting a false
theoretical structure
to
explain what they are doing. The
material,
the paint itself, or its arrangement on the canvas can never be any–
thing but a physical, tangible thing. It is only as a
means
that it has
any value
to
the painter. If the
paillt
is the subject matter then it can
only be as a scielltist that they are using it-as a subject for scien–
tific investigation. The psychological conformation of the colors
rakes on meaning that can be explored.
Modernism and abstraction arc not necessarily the same things. From
the point of view of abstract reduction, there may be more consequence
