Essay
THE PAINTING UNDONE:
SUPPORTS/SURFACES
By
RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN
This chapter from
the author's
Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism:
1990 - 2002 Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2004, $24.95
is posted here to
coincide with Deborah
Garwood's review
Claude Viallat Sans
Titre #116
acrylic on fabric montage, 52 x 68 inches
Courtesy Daniel Templon Gallery, Paris
The Musée d'Art Moderne
de Saint-Etienne is located near Lyon about two hours south of Paris
on the TGV, the fast train that continues to draw France closer together
and leech away Paris's longstanding monopoly on culture. Thanks to the
TGV it is now feasible to make quick visits to shows in Nice or Grenoble
or Lyon; as a result museums in those cities are in a stronger position
to vie with the capital. The Musée d'Art Moderne's current director,
Bernard Ceysson, first came to Saint-Etienne in 1977, to head what was
then known as the Musée d'art et d'industrie de Saint-Etienne.
In 1986 Ceysson left Saint-Etienne to become director of the Musee Nationale
d'Art Moderne at the Pompidou Center in Paris, only to return, a year
later, to Saint-Etienne to head the current museum, which opened in
1987. There was much speculation as to why Ceysson gave up what was
clearly the most prestigous museum position in France. Some thought
that he was happier being a big fish in the little pond of Saint-Etienne
rather than carving out a place for himself in Paris. Others, perhaps
more accurately, suggested that Ceysson was less interested in the power
brokering entailed by the Pompidou job and prefered simply to curate
shows. Whatever the reasons for his move, Ceysson seems quite happy
in Saint-Etienne, making the most of the spacious museum. This seemed
particularly the case with his most recent exhibition, "Supports/Surfaces"
which presented a broad overview of the work of a group of French artists
Ceysson has long championed.
"Supports/Surfaces"
occupied almost the whole museum, temporarily displacing most of the
permanent collection in order to examine the work of the 12 artists
who comprised the Supports/Surfaces group: André-Pierre Arnal,
Vincent Bioulés, Louis Cane, Marc Devade, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël
Dolla, Toni Grand, Bernard Pagés, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Patrick
Saytour, André Valensi and Claude Viallat. Concerned with exploring
their interrelations rather than surveying the careers of the individual
artists, the show was restricted to the years 1966-1974, the period
during which they frequently showed together (often in the most unlikely
locations), founded a magazine, issued tracts and manifestos and, most
importantly, created distinctive yet remarkably attuned bodies of painting
and sculpture. Since 1974 the artists have all gone their different
ways, but at the time they clearly were engaged in a common esthetic
project.
That project included what, to American eyes, might seem rather strange
bedfellows-Clement Greenberg and Mao Tse Tung for instance-but even
in relation to the French art world, the Supports/Surfaces group always
tended to stand apart. As a movement, it developed far away from Paris
and largely without the involvement of the art establishment. While
some of the artists of Supports/Surfaces were starting to crop up in
group shows in 1966-67, their collective activities did not begin in
earnest until after 1968, and were clearly affected by the Paris student
revolt in May of that year. There is no doubt that Supports/Surfaces
was a creature of its time; as critic Otto Hahn commented in 1970, even
the slash between the two terms of its name reflects a keen awareness
of the literary fashions of Paris in the '60s and '70s-think of Roland
Barthes's book S/Z ). But while they partook of the revolutionary atmosphere
of France in the late '60s, the artists of Supports/Surfaces-in contrast
to other European avant-garde groups of the time such as Arte Povera-did
not seek to turn their back on painting. For all the impatience they
showed with art business as usual, they were recognizably inheritors
of Henri Matisse.
Supports/Surfaces had its
beginnings in the south of France, in cities like Montpellier, Nîmes
and Nice where most of the group's earliest members lived and worked.
The town of Céret was the site of "Impact 1," a show
organized in May 1966 by Viallat and Jacques Lepage, who was a crucial
supporter of the group. The presence of Arman and Ben Vautier among
the artists in "Impact 1" indicates that in its early days
some members of Supports/Surfaces were close to the Nice branch of Nouveau
Réalisme, but this can mostly be laid to geography: Supports/Surfaces
shared little of Nouveau Réalisme's passion for the detritus
of everyday life and where the Nouveaux Réalistes went out of
their way to incorporate non-art materials, the artists of Supports/Surfaces
made a point of using only the constituent elements, albeit elaborated
to the extreme, of that most retrograde of mediums, painting. In fact,
they owed more to American Color Field painting than to their Nouveau
Réaliste neighbors. When one looks at the paintings of Marc Devade
or Vincent Bioulés, it is evident that painters like Kenneth
Noland and Jules Olitski were influential from the very inception of
Supports/Surfaces. The writing of Greenberg was a force as well. In
his essay for the Saint-Etienne show, Yves Aupetitallot establishes
the frequency with which these painters were being shown in Paris in
the early '60s and remarks as well on the availability of some of Greenberg's
texts in French translation. One finds specific confirmation of the
importance of Color Field paintings in Viallat's memory of having been
struck by an Olitski show in 1964. Inspite of their later denunciations
of the American art system, the painters of Supports/Surfaces were working,
at least initially, with a vocabulary strongly accented by contemporaneous
American art concerns.
It was only when the French
artists found themselves vying with (and often losing out to) American
artists for public recognition that signs of dissent began to appear.
(In general, European resentment of American art accelerated after 1964,
the year Rauschenberg, amid much controversy, won the Grand Prize at
the Venice Biennale.) Thus, speaking recently, Louis Cane recalled with
a certain bitterness the attention given shows like "Art of the
Real: USA 1948-1968," which, after a run at MoMA in New York, where
it was organized, appeared at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1968. In
contrast to the artists in the American show, the Supports/Surfaces
artists were getting by with low-budget shows mostly outside of Paris.
Yet it was no accident that
Supports/Surfaces found itself at odds with what was being officially
promoted outside the center, since perhaps more than anything else the
founders of Supports/Surfaces were inspired by their dissatisfaction
with what they saw around them. As Cane put it: "what brought us
together for the Supports/Surfaces exhibiton at l'ARC in 1971 or even
for earlier exhibitions was the deep-seated conviction that the art
which was then 'in place' was completely unsatisfactory."50 Whereas
Cane felt his "horizon blocked" by BMPT (a group of four painters:
Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni whose
conceptually derived abstraction was diametrically opposed to the touch-sensitive
work of Support/Surface). Viallat saw the problem as centered around
what seemed to him the dead end of abstract, formalist painting. "This
work which seemed to me determined by nothing, which seemed to me completely
gratuitous," he said some two decades later. "Little by little
I no longer knew how to justify it."51
Speaking in contrast to these esthetically couched protocols, Dezeuze
still seeks to emphasize the political nature of the group's beginnings:
"Our movement was also a movement of revolt, social as well as
esthetic," he has said. Supports/Surfaces was looking for a means
of "revolting against the art world and the world in general without
having to make anti-art."52 Allying themselves with Maoist-inspired
Parisian intelllectuals, conducting their internal relations like a
communist cell, seeking a place for their work outside the (capitalist)
market, Supports/Surfaces was light-years removed from the world of
Post-Painterly Abstraction.
And yet, for all their revolutionary
zeal, the artists of Support/Surface were sincerely concerned with the
specific problems of painting. For them, a simple renunciation of its
existence did not seem sufficient. They held that if the then-current
stasis of abstract painting was to be overcome, it would have to be
done within the domain of painting itself-but not in what they saw as
the rigid, nihilistic manner of the BMPT group. It is in this light
that their interest in political theory begins to make sense, particularly
the Marxist analysis of Louis Althusser, although the early work of
Derrida also played a part, to judge from the frequent appearance of
terms like "deconstruction" in Supports/Surfaces statements.53
The Supports/Surfaces artists
were driven by the feeling that painting had still not come to terms
with its most basic conventions, hence, of course, the group's name,
which proclaimed the materialist basis of the project. These artists
held that despite Greenberg's exhortations, most painters showed little
concern with the essential conditions of their medium. They thus saw
their task as using the work of art to "show what was hidden, to
deconstruct and individualize each of its elements."54 That is
to say, they sought to isolate the two principal constituent elements
of conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), to strip the medium
down to its phenomenological foundations and then begin to reconstruct
it without in any way forgetting or obscuring those foundations.
The critic Marcelin Pleynet,
one of the first to write on the group, was also instrumental in its
eventual embrace of a Marxist position. He emphasized the attention
Supports/Surfaces paid to the "principle contradictions" of
its medium (e.g., the "irrationality" of color versus the
"geometric code," the physical or "real" versus
the conceptual or epistemological properties of painting,55 the tension
between collective action within an avant-garde "sect" and
the needs of the individual artist). And in consequence he aligned Supports/Surfaces
with a broader attack on the dominant ideology of capitalism.56 Whether
or not one accepts the idea that the contradictions of capitalism infuse
the works of art that capitalism produces, Pleynet was clearly correct
in 1971 when he described Supports/Surfaces members as concerned with
reconciling their work with a "violently politicized situation."
He went on to suggest that it was this very relation to "a precise
political event (May '68)" that forces us to see these artists
as "specifically French." To innocent (or American) eyes,
Devade, for example, might indeed appear as an overseas disciple of
Kenneth Noland, but in the hypercharged atmosphere of late '60s Paris-infatuated
as its intellectual elite was with the Chinese Cultural Revolution-it
hardly seemed far-fetched to explain his work with reference to Lenin
and Mao.
Of course, the Supports/Surfaces
artists were not the only group in the 1960s with ambitions to return
art to its essentials, yet their approach was notable for avoiding the
dehumanized constructivism of Minimalism, as well as Arte Povera's refuge
in the sublimity of their lowly materials. The Supports/Surfaces artists'
work is always distinguished by its emphasis on touch, its clear status
as the product of human hands.
Almost as if by assignment,
each member of Supports/Surfaces seems to have undertaken a specific
task in the "deconstruction and individualization" of the
elements of painting. One can almost picture them sitting around a conference
table, or perhaps after a long lunch in a Niçoise restaurant,
enumerating every possible way there might be to disrupt and redeploy
canvas and stretcher. The group can be sorted into two parts, corresponding
to the two terms of their name. The "Surface" (i.e. canvas)
team included Viallat, Cane, Pincemin, Saytour, Valensi, Dolla and Arnal,
all of whom in one way or another worked with unstretched canvas, while
the question of "Support" (the wooden stretcher bar) would
fall to Dezeuze, Grand and Pagés. Painter Marc Devade (who died
in 1983) remained the most conventional of the group, working with stretched
canvases painted in a manner obviously indebted to Barnett Newman, Kenneth
Noland and Morris Louis. In the context of the Saint-Etienne exhibition,
Devade's brash stripes of color and luminous stained canvases were most
useful in suggesting the relations between Supports/Surfaces and American
painting of the '50s and '60s.
In 1969 Bioulés was
still working with stretched canvases, but when he was invited to participate
in one of Supports/Surfaces's open -air exhibitions, he realized that
his work would have to change, that he could not very well stick a painting
in the middle of downtown Montpellier. He thus took six doors and laquered
them with primary colors, and joined them into three pairs, hinged at
right angles. These were placed in a row on a patch of grass in a square
in Montpellier. The following year he went still further, distributing
125 thin wooden poles, each stained either purple, blue, green, yellow
or red, along a narrow street in the southern French town of Coaraze.
These poles showed up again in Ceysson's exhibition, leaning against
the wall like a set of giant pickup sticks. Although the poles revealed
Bioulés's earlier interest in Newman's "zip," they
simultaneously suggested the wooden stretcher bar. Daniel Dezeuze's
reference to stretcher bars was more explicit. In 1967 he simply covered
empty stretchers of various sizes and configurations with transparent
vinyl. It is the self-evidence of such works which, for fellow Supports/Surfaces
member Louis Cane, distinguishes them from reductive work like Carl
Andre's. With Andre's work, Cane says, "one has need of a dealer
to develop its sociology to explain that what one sees is not just some
tiles on the floor . . . , but when Dezeuze takes a stretcher covered
with vinyl and leans it against the wall, there's no need for a dealer
to explain what it is. It's immediately visible.57
By 1970 Dezeuze had reduced the stretcher bar to thin strips of wood
veneer which he wove together in small compositions suggesting unfinished
Indian baskets or laid out in large, supple grids pinned to the wall.
His "échelles ajourées" were made of thin fiberglass,
in the form of small delicate ladders dangling from the wall. Surveying
his work from '67 to '71 one remains conscious of his point of departure-the
stretcher-and yet also how willing he was to play with it.
Claude Viallat arrived at
the grid from the other side of the equation-the canvas. Using a kind
of template or stencil technique (not unrelated to Matissean decoupage),
in which a single form is repeated in regular intervals on unstretched
canvas, Viallat employed not only tinting, staining and imprinting but
also the effects of nature's elements, partcularly the strong sun of
the Midi where Viallat has always lived. (In general the Supports/Surfaces
painters favored any method of getting color onto the canvas as long
as it didn't require the traditional brush. They stained, imprinted,
bleached, faded, folded and dyed, crumpled and dyed, and burned their
works' surfaces.) Viallat harnessed the sun for his art by laying out
prepared canvases so that the uncovered areas would fade into different
colors, thus creating grids of his distinctive kidney bean-shaped motifs.
While Viallat offered a strongly decorative art, like all the members
of Supports/Surfaces he also sought to question prevailing assumptions
about painting. Quite early, in 1966, he showed a canvas that he had
signed every 10 centimeters, thus allowing it to be cut and sold in
fragments, like fabric. He has also shown himself adept at working with
rope and string, reveling like an old sailor in the intricacies of complex
knots.
Jean-Pierre Pincemin's paintings
are also constructed as grids, produced in a number of ways. Whereas
Viallat chose to leave the canvas in one piece, many of Pincemin's works
are canvases which have been imprinted or stained with color, then cut
up and reassembled. By the mid-'70s Pincemin's grids had turned into
closely packed, weathered blocks of somber colors, oddly suggestive
of, yet distinct in spirit from, more recent paintings by Sean Scully.
It is worth noting that with the occasional exception of its sculptors,
Grand and Pagés, Supports/Surfaces consistently avoided any suggestion
of esthetic machismo. Drawn always to thinness, softness, flexibility,
often utilizing traditionally domestic techniques like weaving and tinting,
Supports/Surfaces effectively distanced itself from the myth of "heroic"
painting and Minimalism alike. Its works are fragile but not precious,
common but not industrial, and despite the movement's suceptibility
to accusations of being doctrinaire, it was in some ways nothing more
than a dozen men trying to make use of their hands in every way imaginable.
(If Supports/Surfaces was influenced by Color Field painting in the
early 60s, it is equally likely that in turn the French group had an
effect on the American Pattern and Decoration artists in the '70s. One
frequently finds striking parallels between the two movements.)
Arnal's paintings were the
most attractive and easily accessible produced by the group. Exemplifying
typically Supports/Surfaces methods of folding, crumpling and tying
the canvas in order to prepare it for the pigment, Arnal's paintings
show the grid that tends to recur throughout the group's work. However,
as capable a manipulator of material as he seems, Arnal did not really
bring anything specifically his own to his work of the time, and the
results seem tentative. This was not the case of Louis Cane who, in
a gridded work from 1967, used a rubber stamp reading "Louis Cane
Artiste Peintre" to cover a large canvas. (Nouveau Réaliste
Arman had used rubber stamps to create abstract compositions in the
'50s.) Cane's more characteristic works of the Supports/Surfaces period
are his "Sol-Mur" series of monochrome paintings in which
the canvas begins on the wall and continues onto the floor. As in the
back-flap of a pair of long johns (and also similar to Bioulés's
hinged lacquered doors), Cane has cut out the center of the canvas and
laid it on the ground, simultaneously creating the sense of a window
or doorway on the wall and a kind of welcome mat that paradoxically
forces the viewer to remain a certain distance from the painting unless
one is willing to step on the canvas.
Valensi's paintings also
employed this double canvas effect, if rather differently. After staining
two canvases in a similar way, he would cut a section out of one, reverse
it and sew it onto the first, thus simultaneously presenting the effect
the staining had on the front and back of the canvas. Valensi's sculptural
works are more striking. 93 formes peintres (1969) is made up of two
stacks of 93 cardboard cut-outs painted yellow and orange, while Bois
et corde (1970) consists of 86 thin wooden sticks attached at 40cm (ca.
15 1/2 inch) intervals to a length of packing rope. The latter ensemble
was dyed red and yellow and suspended from the ceiling. Even with the
noticeably high ceilings of the St.-Etienne museum there was still enough
of the sculture left over to form a clump in the middle of the floor.
(Hanging a work from as high as possible was a favorite device of Supports/Surfaces,
and this exhibition featured works by Dezeuze, Dolla, Saytour and Viallat
which started so high up that one had to crane one's neck to see the
beginning of the piece. Given this unwillingness to be restricted by
the arbitrary dimensions of exhibition spaces, it is only natural that
the artists of Supports/Surfaces repeatedly chose to hold their exhibitions
out-of-doors.)
Noël Dolla's banners
of thin cotton gauze made up for their transparency by their inordinate
length. The three strips of Tartalanes I (1969), for instance, measure
2,012 x 20 cm (ca. 8 inches by 65 1/2 feet). In fact, however, Dolla's
"tartalanes" are limitless. The regularly distributed dots
of color he applied to them were brought to a halt only by the limits
of the exhibition space. Hanging freely in midair, they are suggestive
of religious icons suspended in the midst of cathedrals but also of
industrial production-rolls of cloth or paper spewing out onto a factory
floor. Equally effective, on a smaller scale, were his wall sculptures
made from dyed handkerchiefs and dishtowels to which Dolla added a few
green and red dots. In these works the artist makes the viewer aware
of the utter humility of the materials without that becoming the point.
One is convinced that Dolla used handkerchiefs and dish towels because
they suited his artistic needs, not because he wished to make some sociological
point. And yet, they nonetheless hinted at a transgressive domesticity.
In contrast to Dolla's fragile
domestic textiles, the wood sculptures of Toni Grand are rough-hewn
and unwieldy, more suggestive of a rural carpenter's workshop than of
the kitchen or laundry. By splitting and joining logs and planks of
wood into warped and twisted forms, often studded with oversize wooden
pegs, Grand seems to travel much further than the others from the originary
canvas-and-stretcher. Although Grand's use of wood, of generally long
and thin dimensions, might ultimately derive from the notion of the
"support," he has developed a vocabulary of forms and methods
of attachment that suggest concerns and imaginative leaps far removed
from the "anatomy of a studio" approach of many other members
of Supports/Surfaces. If Viallat among the painters is the one who seems
to have gained the most and developed to the fullest, the same is true
of Grand as sculptor.
Possibly the most distinctive
artist of the Supports/Surfaces group-distinctive insofar as his work
begins to leave the carefully defined orbit of the group-is Bernard
Pagés. Pieces like Les tas de buches et briques (1969), which
consists of a rough, low pyramid of sawed-up logs and bricks, or Le
tas de gravier (1969), where a mound of gravel spreads out of a small
fenced enclosure, introduce manufactured materials from the everyday
world that are atypical of Supports/Surfaces. Much of the work Pagés
did in the late '60s suggests building sites, with a sense of industrial
accumulation. On the other hand, Series de 24 assemblages angulaires
(1972), a floor piece of showing 24 ways to join together two pieces
of wood (e.g., with leather straps, clamps, ribbons, bungee cord, nails,
chains, cement) possesses both the sense of tinkering and the elaboration
of the grid that point toward the central concerns of Supports/Surfaces.
When one turns back to the others' works, Pagés's eccentricity
helps one concentrate on the methods and techniques of Supports/Surfaces
rather than simply on materials and motifs. Like Pagés, Patrick
Saytour's work also makes use of manufactured items, in particular the
"Brulage" series from 1967 in which he burned a grid of small
holes through a drape of plastic imprinted with a banal flower pattern.
As Saytour admits, his work seems closer in spirit than any of the other
Supports/Surfaces artists to the Pop inflections of Nouveau Réalisme;
yet it adheres very closely to Supports/Surfaces' taste for unstretched
fabric and grid patterns.
In 1969 and 1970 a momentum
developed for Supports/Surfaces, especially with the outdoor summer
exhibitions in Coaraze (July 1969) and in the following year a series
called "Eté 70" along the French coast from the Italian
to Spanish borders. In Saytour's notes, the list of location where the
placed members' works were placed was long and unorthodox, including
"a forest, a public beach, a stretch of water, a wall, a dry riverbed,
a stone quarry, a village square, a street, an art gallery, a creek,
and a barn." These entries give one a sense of its compelling mixture
of serious research and relaxed comedy. The idea of introducing art
works unannounced into public space smacks of guerrilla theater, but
the photographs of paintings spread out on the beach or sculptures leaning
against the walls of a Côte d'Azur village are redolent of the
Mediterranean environment which spawned so many of the Supports/Surfaces
artists. It is tempting to draw a comparison to an earlier generation
of French artists-the Impressionists-who decided to forsake the comforts
of the city for plein-air painting. Some excerpts from Saytour's notes:
The experience consisted
of: 1. Systematically placing our work in a number of places theoretically
unlimited, later to analyze the effects of the environment on the works
presented. 2. Placing the work in the milieu of a public whose presence
will not depend on our arrival, who will not be informed of our intentions
and who will remain free to attend to or to ignore our conduct.
Among the results:
-Some children were dissappointed when we arrived with our pieces because
the games they were hoping for didn't take place.
-A cinema technician remained convininced that we were preparing to
shoot a scene.
-A wife declared herself satisfied after having gotten from her husband
the assurance that all that was just signals to be seen by airplanes.
-A group of archeologists dismantled and used in their excavation several
of our canvases which they believed were markers for a cross country
motorcycle race.
-A volleyball game was played over a thread stretched between two trees.
-A family sat there all day waiting for it "to begin."58
The chief participants of
these open-air events were Dezeuze, Pagés, Saytour, Valensi and
Viallat. In 1971, however, the tenor of the group began to change, particularly
as the result of the political and theoretical contributions of Devade
and Cane, who did much to shift the emphasis of the group when they
joined. It was they (both living in Paris and close to Tel Quel theorists
like Pleynet) who founded Peinture - Cahiers Théoriques, in which,
along with Dezeuze and Bioulés, they proceded to establish a
high profile with denunciations and manifestos against art of which
they disapproved. These denunciations were not limited to the pages
of their review: during the opening of his February 1971 show at Daniel
Templon Gallery in Paris, Cane distributed a tract titled "Conceptual
art will die alone, we don't need its corpse." Other tracts carried
titles like "Necessary Materialism or Dialectical Materialism"
and Peintures - Cahiers Théoriques bristled with references to
Marx and Mao. It did not take long for schisms to appear as attitudes
began to develop that were reminsicent of André Breton at his
most pontifical. In fact, in the very first issue of Peinture - Cahiers
Théoriques, Claude Viallat, in many ways the founding spirit
of the Supports/Surfaces group, was expelled. Although all the members
were included in a June 1971 show at the Théâtre Municipal
in Nice, they had to be divided into two groups: Arnal, Bioulés,
Cane, Devade and Dezeuze in the foyer, Dolla, Grand, Saytour, Valensi
and Viallat in the theater and on the stage. By the following year,
1972, the group was whittled down to the just the Peinture - Cahiers
Théoriques section, which was further reduced by the expulsion
of Bioulés and Dezeuze. Soon only Cane and Devade were left,
with no more delinquent comrades to eject.
But while the group was dissolved
by the political passions of the time, most of the former members were
able to go on to establish their individual identities. Certain artists,
such as Viallat, pursued and elaborated their original concerns, while
others, such as Cane, who now makes figurative sculpture, chose divergent
paths. In 1974 the Musée d'Art et d' Industrie in Saint-Etienne
mounted a show called "Nouvelle Peinture en France pratiques/théories."
Most of the former members of Supports/Surfaces were included, with
the notable exception of Cane and Devade, who refused to participate.
By looking at the group as a discrete historical moment, the 1974 retrospective
made it clear that the members had by then come to the termination of
Supports/Surfaces's collective journey. In March 1991, 17 years later,
another show in the same city, organized by the same museum director,
once again reunited the group. The opening was an occasion for reminiscenses
and reunions, and if any of the old disaccords remained, there was no
visible sign of them. Perhaps it was the amazing coherence of the works
themselves which ensured the cooperative atmosphere. Everywhere one
looked there were parallels, borrowings, dialogues, creative dependencies.
Some of the impact may have depended on Ceysson's carefully thought-out
installation, but it was equally clear that Supports/Surfaces was the
real thing, a movement of artists who not only needed each other but
profited esthetically from their association, giving one another the
daring and imagination that they might not have had alone. And indeed,
the work looked intoxicatingly fresh and alive, perhaps especially to
American eyes. One might have thought that it was a show of newly made
work rather than a reappraisal of art from two decades ago.
In his famous essay of the
mid-'50s, "American-Type Painting," Greenberg stated that
modernist painting's task was to discard all nonessential conventions,
to reduce itself to its "viable essence." He went on to proclaim
that Paris was "losing its monopoly on the fate of painting"
because the Americans were more successful jettisoning the expendable
conventions of painting. Looking at what started to happen in southern
France about 10 years after Greenberg's pronouncement, one can't help
wondering if that awarding of the prize to America was not dangerously
premature.
Poet and art
critic Raphael Rubinstein is senior editor at Art in America magazine.
