BOOKS
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of capitalist terrorism, subtle and deceptive like a new virus not yet
understood enough to control.
In
making a verbal picture of a visual process the art writer functions
like the literary critic. William Phillips, looking back from the perspec–
tive of fifty years, told Karen Wilkin in
1990:
"Art criticism is way
tougher than literary criticism. When it comes to literature, you can
quote. You can point to what you're talking about, and you can mix the
subject up with the form. With visual art, you can't bring the subject up."
Abstraction insists that the connection between feeling and form is
not representational. The artist, representing his or her self, does not
represent his or her visage. As Robert Motherwell remarked, "How 1
look is not how
I
feel." Certain problems of expression cannot be solved
by representational means.
If
the American Abstract Artists, as a group,
made the case for pure abstraction, they cast it as a political opposition
between
art
and
l1ot-art.
Immediately authenticity appears in the work
of Hofmann, Pollock, and others, while the emphatically pristine efforts
of artists associated with the non-objective goal seem driven by ideas to
outdistance themselves. Matisse only appeared as a great artist to the
Hofmann people.
Greenberg's collection is skewed, instructively, toward the conse–
quence of a relentless formalism. He was interested in the tondo and
several appear in the collection. Besides numerous shaped canvases,
many circles appear within rectangles. Greenberg's formalism is finally
reduced to the geometry of the object. The circle offered the escape from
the rectangle. The outstanding painting in Greenberg's collection is Ken–
neth Noland's first circle painting. Here the logic of formalism comes
full circle, except a way out is left open. The circle is not closed.
Christopher Busa
