Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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MacLeish, who is on leave in the Virgin Islands, went on to maintain that through poetry we reach a concrete understanding of experiences, as distinguished from the abstract knowledge which the sciences present. Thus we can understand the ends of our actions, as well as their means, he said...
...Gotham News uses just about every trick in painting, except illusion, to create excitement. It is juicy à la Rubens, gaudy à la Delacroix, emphatic à la Vlaminck -and utterly ambiguous. Being too agitated for the purposes of either decoration or contemplation, De Kooning's canvas reaffirms the abstract-expressionist credo that the very effort of painting is what paintings should be about. The observer's glance is led to skid here and there in the calculated mess like brush strokes; looking at the picture is supposed to re-create the painting process...
With Guston's Summer, 1954, abstract expressionism becomes its own opposite: abstract impressionism. Guston, who once had a high reputation for academic art, does not think of his later paintings as pictures at all. Says he, "They are myself." In order to put himself into his canvases, Guston makes them close to his own size. For such self-consciously personal work, the results look strangely like blowups of Claude Monet's water-lily impressions...
...forthcoming, some of them sulk and some shrug. But none of them seems to laugh. "To refashion the fashioned, lest it stiffen into iron, means an endless vital activity," they argue with Goethe. They solemnly reiterate that since impressionism, cubism and abstractionism have proved meaningful over the years, abstract expressionism will, too. And curiously enough, this wishful argument-by-analogy does cow some critics and win over others...
...natural resistance to new art forms tends to get in the way of appreciation. Sweeney's own enthusiasm for advance-guard painting leads him to argue that it is, in the best sense, conservative. Recognizable objects, he says, are only the surface of painting, mere vocabulary. Abstract composition is the basis of all painting-the syntax. Therefore, the young American pioneers are blazing a trail back to fundamentals. Since grammar is not poetry, that would seem to leave Taylor's basic question of communication up in the air. But Sweeney maintains that the prime function...