The 50s
Page 66
Mr. Susskind’s second question raises the point that metaphor is indispensable in radio-televese. “Wherein water always finds its own level, they should start hitting soon,” a baseball announcer said about the Yankees the other day. In an earlier year, Red Barber, analyzing a situation in which a dangerous batter had been purposely walked, with the effect of bringing an even more dangerous batter to the plate, remarked that it was a case of “carrying coals to Newcastle, to make use of an old expression.” I suspect that Mr. Barber meant that it was a case of the frying pan and the fire, and I also suspect that if he had thought of the right metaphor afterward, he would have corrected himself publicly. He is a conscientious man, and therefore by no means a typical user of radio-televese. The true exponent never retraces his steps but moves from bold figure to bold figure without apology. There have been few bolder sequences (or “seg-ways,” as they are sometimes called on the air) than the one that Mr. Gray achieved in 1957, during a discussion of the perils faced by Jack Paar in launching a new program. I think I have quoted this passage here once before; it still fills me with admiration. “It’s like starting off with a noose around your neck,” Mr. Gray said. “You’ve got twenty-six weeks to make good, or they’ll shoot you. That sword of Damocles can be a rough proposition.” As most of you know by now, Mr. Paar eventually made good before the sword could explode and throttle him.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of radio-televese is its power to move freely in time, space, and syntax, transposing past and future, beginnings and endings, subjects and objects. This phase of the language has sometimes been called backward English, and sometimes, with a bow to the game of billiards, reverse English. Dorothy Kilgallen, a television panelist, was wallowing in the freedom of the language on the night she said, “It strikes me as funny, don’t you?” So was Dizzy Dean when he said, “Don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s doubleheader.” Tommy Loughran, a boxing announcer, was exploring the area of the displaced ego when he told his audience, “It won’t take him [the referee] long before I think he should stop it.” Ted Husing was on the threshold of outright mysticism when he reported, about a boxer who was cuffing his adversary smartly around, “There’s a lot more authority in Joe’s punches than perhaps he would like his opponent to suspect!” It is in the time dimension, however, that radio-televese scores its most remarkable effects. Dizzy Dean’s “The Yankees, as I told you later…” gives the idea. The insecurity of man is demonstrated regularly on the air by phrases like “Texas, the former birthplace of President Eisenhower” and “Mickey Mantle, a former native of Spavinaw, Oklahoma.” I’m indebted to Dan Parker, sportswriter and philologist, for a particularly strong example of time adjustment from the sayings of Vic Marsillo, a boxing manager who occasionally speaks on radio and television: “Now, Jack, whaddya say we reminisce a little about tomorrow’s fight?” These quotations show what can be done in the way of outguessing man’s greatest enemy, but I think that all of them are excelled by a line of Mr. Gray’s, spoken four or five years ago: “What will our future forefathers say?”
It is occasionally argued in defense of broadcasters (though they need and ask for no defense) that they speak unorthodoxly because they must speak under pressure, hastily, spontaneously—that their eccentricities are unintentional. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Their language is proud and deliberate. The spirit that has created it is the spirit of ambition. Posterity would have liked it. In times to come, our forebears will be grateful.
ROBERT M. COATES
DECEMBER 9, 1950 (ON JACKSON POLLOCK ET AL.)
HE CRITIC CONFRONTED with such a phenomenon as Jackson Pollock, whose new paintings are now on view at the Betty Parsons Gallery, is obliged to cling more tightly than usual to his basic beliefs if he is to review the man’s work with reasonable intelligence. He must remind himself that artists are rarely humorous, at least where their painting is concerned, and, despite what the cynical may say, they are still less likely to devote themselves to a lifetime of foisting off practical jokes on the public, especially when they make very little money in the process. He should recall that even the most extravagant technical innovations generally have some artistic justifications, and remember, too, that no matter how fantastic and unconventional they may seem, there are always, underneath the surface, some linkages with the past. So although Mr. Pollock—along with others of the new “wild” school of moderns, like Hans Hofmann, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Louis Schanker—has been accused of pretty much everything, from a disgracefully sloppy painting technique to out-and-out chicanery, we can afford to disregard or discount most of the charges. His unorthodox manner of applying pigment (he is reported to work with the canvas flat on the floor, and just dribble the paint on straight from the can or tube) and his fondness for such unusual materials as aluminum paint, asphalt roofing cement, and Duco enamel, though both were probably at the start gestures of rebellion against conventional procedures, have a certain wry relation to the brisker industrial practices, in which the brush is also abandoned in favor of directer methods and new materials are constantly being experimented with. Odd and mazy as it is, his painting style is far from sloppy, for the overlying webs on webs of varicolored lines that make up most of his pictures are put on with obvious sureness, while the complaint that it’s all a vast hoax falls to the ground, it seems to me, because of the size and, to date, the unprofitableness of his enterprise.
The question still remains: What is Pollock getting at? Here, I think, as is true of others of the general school he belongs to, the concept of design makes understanding the work a bit difficult. To most of us, form means outline, and, conversely, when we see an outline on canvas, we try to make it contain a form. This is, it happens, a situation that the Cubists and such early Non-Objectivists as van Doesburg and Mondrian were up against, but because their designs were either angular or precisely curved, they instantly suggested the outlines and forms of simple geometry, and acquired for the spectator—by association, as it were—a feeling of inevitability and austere logic. In Pollock’s work, though, the drawing is irregular and sinuously curved, while the composition, instead of being orderly and exact, is exuberant and explosive. Both suggest the organic, and since the lines of natural forms are varied and unpredictable, we search longer for the recognizable outline (which, of course, isn’t there) and are all the more baffled when we cannot find it.
It is partly because of this difference, I believe, that Pollock’s paintings, while they are actually no more arbitrary in their design than, say, Mondrian’s, seem so much more difficult to “get into” immediately, but it is true, too, that the younger man has hardly yet acquired the wisdom and maturity of the other. It’s still possible, though, to get past the apparent obscurities of Pollock’s work, and the new show, which contains some thirty canvases, all but one of them dated this year, gives an excellent chance to observe both the strengths and the weaknesses of his work. Among the faults, I think—and this one is a failing of the whole school—is a tendency to let the incidental rule at the expense of the over-all concept, with the result that the basic values of a composition are lost in a clutter of more or less meaningless embellishment. (All the pictures in the show are simply numbered, by the way, which makes reference to them here a bit dull.) This fault is particularly evident in the two large canvases numbered 30 and 31, while in some of the smaller ones, notably No. 15, a really exquisite rhythmic quality in the design is almost totally obscured by the same sort of overelaboration.
There is, as well, a slight repetitiousness in Pollock’s color patterns. His favorite compositional device is the overlying webs and striations that I have mentioned, and though this gives an air of depth and spaciousness to his canvases that is quite distinctive, it seems to me that too often the progression is up from a background of blue-greens and reds, through a network of whites, to a bolder pattern in black, and I am grateful when occasionally, as in the lacy and delicate No. 1 and the snowy-looking No. 27, he varies the sequence. B
y no means all of the work is repetitious, however, as one can see if one turns from the boldly black No. 32 to No. 27, or to the friezelike, somewhat smaller No. 7, and in general the work shows a healthy imaginativeness of attack. Pollock’s main strength, though, lies in an exuberance and vitality that, though hard to define, lend a sparkle and an excitement to his painting. I felt this particularly in such pieces as the green-and-black No. 19 and the lively, small No. 18. But it’s a quality that is apparent all through the show, and I hope that he doesn’t end up by letting it run away with him.
JANUARY 17, 1959 (ON AN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM SHOW)
IVISIONISM IS A crime in the Communist countries, but I’ve always felt that in a school of art it’s a healthy manifestation—as the survey now on at the Sidney Janis, of a group of our top Abstract Expressionist painters, indicates. The development of any school of art, I’ve noticed, follows a fairly fixed pattern. First comes the breakaway, the time when about the only thing the artists feel is an acute dissatisfaction with the established painting purposes and procedures. But this is only the negative phase, and as the positive search for new methods begins it is followed by the theoretical, or let’s-all-get-together-and-work-out-a-better-system, period. Then artistic personalities are lost in a welter of generalization—really lost, for to abandon a traditional style is like abandoning a well-travelled highway in a desert, fog-bound. It takes courage. But since no one knows for sure which way to head now, there is at first a tendency to huddle, and it’s not till the fog lifts, or—to wrestle this metaphor back to its bearing on art again—till the mistier part of the theorizing clears and the new direction becomes plainer, that the artists’ separate personalities can begin to emerge.
This, I think, is the danger point in any school’s development, for this is the time for wider exploration, and the school’s tenets and aims must be broad and well-founded enough to allow for it. The artists can no longer even go single file; they must be able to branch out on side excursions of their own, and if they can’t do that and still retain a certain coherence within their group, then the school itself will surely die—as Orphism died, and Dynamism, Suprematism, and a number of the other once promising abstract movements that sprang up in the early part of this century. This is the “divisionist” phase. It’s a testing phase, which may be one reason the Communists don’t like it, since its effect in the end is to prove how strong or weak the school’s philosophic basis is, by trying out its adaptability to broad individual interpretation. It seems to me that Abstract Expressionism is in that phase now, and the fact that it stands up as well as it does under the test is an indication of its vitality as a method.
The exhibit at the Sidney Janis is a case in point. Eight artists are represented, each with a single canvas, and two of them, Josef Albers and Arshile Gorky, are not strictly Abstract Expressionist. Gorky, though, was a forerunner, and as his painting (untitled) demonstrates, with its floating, indeterminate figures and flowing pattern, he was unquestionably an influence on the school in its formative days. And while Albers’ firm addiction to the geometric approach might appear to rule him out as an influence, one has only to compare his Homage to the Square with the blurred geometry of Mark Rothko’s Red, White and Brown—both built on rectangular patterns and both striving for vibrant tonal effects—to see a definite affinity between the older man and the younger one. The five other paintings show further variations in the Abstract Expressionist approach. There has always been a good deal of diversification in the group, the distinction at its broadest being between the more or less calligraphic style of Franz Kline, say, and the flamboyantly colorful manner affected by Willem de Kooning. Both these men are in the show, Kline with a slashingly powerful black-and-white oil, Delaware Gap, and de Kooning with a gentler study based on landscape motifs, Suburb in Havana, which to me has a suggestion of van Gogh. Philip Guston’s The Return, a kind of waterfall of greenish lacery, doesn’t show him at his best, and the same must be said of Robert Motherwell’s lumpish The Wedding. But to make up for that there’s a handsome, intricate large Frieze, by Jackson Pollock.
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Hans Hofmann, at seventy-eight, is the undisputed dean (and in a sense even the founder) of Abstract Expressionism, and his paintings, now at the Kootz, have an authority that is fully commensurate with his position. The exhibition is a two-part affair. The first section, closing this Saturday, is given over to his paintings of the past year, about twenty in number, while the second, running through the rest of January, will be devoted to a display of his earlier works, dated from 1940 to 1947. As for his current production, I must say that it seems to be his finest performance so far. Hofmann has always been primarily a colorist; indeed, the interplay of tonalities, one upon the other, has always been the factor that “made” his paintings, far more than any formal structure. His color now is fully as varied as ever. But he has succeeded in sharpening his compositional values, so the paintings seem stronger and denser in design. Exuberance is still one of the key words for Hofmann’s manner, however, and there are times when, inevitably, it spills over into sheer flamboyance, as in the rather hectic Towering Clouds, or into mere clutteredness, as in the awkwardly planned Blue Spell. I feel, too, that the artist depends to excess upon tiered slabs of crusty color, laid on with the palette knife, for textural effect; used to excess, they seem to weight the over-all compositional fabric down, and I thought the otherwise admirable Golden Blaze suffered because of this. One can have little but praise, though, for such paintings as Equinox (with its climbing, varicolored patterns), the beautifully blue Oceanic, and the handsomely organized The Phantom.
LEWIS MUMFORD
MARCH 25, 1950 (ON TALL BUILDINGS GONE WRONG)
URING THE PAST year there has been an eruption of tall office buildings in midtown Manhattan. Once more, office buildings, at least those under thirty stories high, are profitable investments, or, at all events, a lot of people seem to think so. To an old New Yorker such an outbreak is quite commonplace, and it is a shock to realize that except for Rockefeller Center and the postwar Universal Pictures Building, at Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh, these are almost the first tall office buildings to go up in New York in twenty years. Twenty years is a long time, and architecture everywhere has advanced rapidly in that span. Naturally, this spate of construction makes one wonder how much New York has learned in that time—whether the people of the city now understand the forces that are making Manhattan unlivable, whether investors and builders have contemplated the limited achievements of Rockefeller Center and considered how far they are prepared to go beyond it. The answer is that nobody seems to have learned anything. The new skyscrapers are being built by people who reason like the mud wasp; their chain reflexes will not let them do anything their ancestors have not done a thousand times before. Fortunately for the mud wasp, his humble dwelling is still habitable; unfortunately for New Yorkers, the skyscrapers they persist in building will ultimately ruin the city almost as effectively as any H-bomb.
Let us examine in detail three of the new crop of buildings—the one at the northeast corner of Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, which I shall call Buff, after the color of its brick facing; the white whale of a building, No. 488, that raises its hump over the west side of Madison Avenue between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Street; and the Crowell-Collier Building, at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Like the Universal Pictures and the McGraw-Hill Buildings, Buff and 488 differ from the skyscrapers of the boom period in that they stress horizontal and not vertical lines; none of these buildings was conceived, to recall Louis Sullivan’s famous description of the skyscraper, as a “proud and soaring thing.” The continuous window without any visible columns or walls to interrupt its flow was first used, if memory does not betray me, by Eric Mendelsohn in his design for the Schocken department store in Chemnitz, Germany, a generation ago. That façade carried a step further Hans Poelzig’s robust treatment of a Breslau office building in 1912. When the interior of an office o
r a factory is so shallow that sunlight can penetrate its full depth, there is good reason for using this system of fenestration. In the case of Buff and 488, strip windows are used apparently just because they are fashionable; after all, these buildings are so deep that sunlight cannot completely penetrate, and they have to rely upon artificial lighting at all hours of the day. The one good reason for using this type of window in such structures has been ignored. Kahn & Jacobs, in their design for the Universal Pictures Building, excellently expounded that reason. Using the narrow columns in the frames of their strip window for vertical support, these architects did away with bulky columns in or near the outer wall. This permits a most flexible use of floor space, since partitions may be placed almost at will. Neither Buff nor 488 takes advantage of this innovation in construction. The supporting columns from which the floors are cantilevered out are only a couple of feet from the windows, and the floor space is even less adaptable than it would be if the designers had kept to the old-fashioned practice of placing big supporting columns in the outer walls. Unless the strip window is a building’s major source of light and air, there is nothing in particular to be said in favor of using it instead of more conventional fenestration; in this city of torrid summer temperatures, the balance is a little on the side of the latter. The one thing that can be said for the strip windows of Buff and 488 is that they seem to have tempted the architects to turn their corners with a curve rather than a right angle. But why this aesthetic effect should appeal to hardheaded businessmen I do not know, since it causes them to lose a small yet appreciable amount of floor space at the most valuable part of a building, where the light and ventilation come from two sides. The strip window also can have a tricky optical effect, one that was first noticeable some years ago in the McGraw-Hill Building and that is quite plain in 488: While 488’s topmost setback, which houses the elevator and air-conditioning machinery, is rather well done, the strip window beneath creates the illusion that the setback is leaning over. Happily, the building offers some photogenic passages in compensation. On the Fifty-first Street side, the smooth black-and-white walls break into a series of setbacks; visually, these curving waves of black and white dash against the smooth, unbroken rear walls of Best’s. In bright sunlight, the effect is exhilarating, but like so many good subjects for photography, it is almost innocent of architectural intention. If there were no zoning restrictions to establish setbacks, the façade would have been unbroken.