Art: Low Pain

Hell-for-leather abstractionists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning have kept Manhattan art circles spinning all season. Their swirls, blobs and blizzards of paint, most of them too haphazard for analytical discussion, drew cheers and jeers, started scores of cocktail-party tiffs.

A California critic named Jules Langsner finally capped the argument with a shrewd belch, in the current Arts & Architecture magazine. Reviewing a traveling show including such abstractions, he observed that they “evoke all kinds of muffled after-sensations, but not individuated images in the mind’s eye. It is as if vision had been converted to gastrointestinal equivalents, so that when the doctor asks you just where you feel the pain, the best you can say is that ‘it’s down here somewheres.'”

To get to the bottom of the bellyache, Langsner quoted and neatly skewered Painter Motherwell’s introduction to the show’s catalogue. ”The process of painting [these pictures],” Motherwell had explained, “is conceived of as an adventure, without preconceived ideas, on the part of persons of intelligence . . . and passion.”

Retorted Langsner: adventure for its own sake is not enough—it should be a byproduct of exploration. “In the long run, the exploring artist returns with more loot because he sees more; he sees more because his sense of purpose alerts him to what he himself can find rather than what will turn up by accident.”