Art: Into the Void

Spanish Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset had started something, it seemed, when he descibed the evolution of painting as a steady march from external reality through the subjective to the “intrasubjective” (TIME, Aug. 22). Last week, twelve U.S. modernists had picked up Ortega’s word, opened an “intrasubjective” show in Manhattan.

Modernist Jackson Pollock, whose crisscrossed canvases sometimes resemble a battlefield seen from 40,000 feet or a culture of bacteria seen through a microscope, had heretofore escaped precise definition. Now he appeared in the vanguard of the new movement, flanked by such other ultra-ultras as William Baziotes and Adolph Gottlieb.

According to the intrasubjectivists’ manifesto, an intrasubjective painter is not inspired by anything visible, but “only by something he hasn’t seen yet . . . He begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents.”

Gallerygoers who peered into the canvases for traces of faces or places did so in vain. “Naturally,” concluded the manifesto, “there is no use looking . . . They have all melted into the void.”