Art: The Blend’s Best

The prizes at big international art shows are rightly suspect when given to some eye-catching novelty by a local unknown—and rightly coveted when given for work that has evolved over years of dedication. It was years of. dedication that last week marked the two top prizewinners among the painters at the Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil.

The Grande Premio went to 60-year-old Adolph Gottlieb, a founder of the New York School that helped make abstraction the international style. And the prize for the best foreign painter was won by Alan Davie, who at 43 is considered by many to be Britain’s fastest-rising abstractionist.

It was in 1943 that Gottlieb, along with Mark Rothko, published the credo that has guided his work ever since. True reality for the artist, he said, lies not in perishable externals, but in the timeless images within himself. A well-painted picture is not necessarily a work of art because “there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.” Moreover, the proper subject matter for art comes from the world of imagination, which is “fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.” As Gottlieb added later: “If the models we use are the apparitions seen in a dream, or the recollection of our prehistoric past, is this less part of nature or realism than a cow in the field?”

Pictographs & Bursts. In his “pictographs” of 20 years ago, Gottlieb cut up his canvas into rectangles filled with symbols and shapes that were for a time inspired by ancient myths and later by pure free association. Gradually the symbols were replaced by abstract shapes and squiggles that Gottlieb labeled “imaginary landscapes.” Today, a Gottlieb canvas is apt to consist of two basic images—a circular shape floating over an exploding mass of calligraphy. These are called “bursts,” and Gottlieb’s most articulate champion, Director Martin Friedman of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, has called them “grandly conceived statements of dualism.”

In the “imaginary landscapes,” there was always some hint of earth and sky and the eternal tug of war between them. The “bursts,” too, give a sense of suns over earth, but Gottlieb does not regard them as anything so specific.

They are, he says, contrasting versions of the same image—one controlled and disciplined, the other bursting. They neither draw the eye into spaces beyond or leap out to envelop it, for Gottlieb means them to be so flat that they will not violate the surface of the canvas and so sim ple that they can be absorbed at a glance. To Friedman, they suggest “the resolution of serene and aggressive elements” and hence “the paradox of civilized man.” To others they are simply there, in all their stubborn purity—statements without any definite meaning and with little magic, but with a painterly integrity that has a force of its own.

Five Notes to Melody. Over the years, Gottlieb has pared his images down with an almost obsessive frugality; Britain’s Alan Davie seems to invent more and more, cramming them onto his bright canvases as a child might stuff new toys into a trunk. But like Gottlieb, Davie is after some timeless and universal language. He regards art as “a religious action, a communion with the unknown and unknowable, a link between the living and the dead.” Davie can identify himself with a pre-Columbian textile (“My God, this is me”), but his mind is also somewhere in the future. “In a way,” says he, “archaeology and space explorations join to prove that there is no beginning and no end but one continuous thing, and it is in this continuum that art takes place.”

Davie paints by improvising like a pianist hitting “five notes and then five notes, which may give you a pattern to be worked around until you may find you have a melody.” The painting may end up as a kind of tree, or an avalanche of oval shapes that Davie will call Assorted Dragon’s Eggs, or a bright clutter that looks like the bursting insides of a complicated machine but that Davie has called The Horse That Has Visions of

Immortality. Such things may not seem like “religious actions,” but they are certainly young and gay. For all the labor that goes into them, Davie’s bright images look, not as if they had been laid upon the canvas, but as if they had been spilled in one simple moment of intoxicated joy—”fancy-free,” as Adolph Gottlieb would say, “and violently opposed to common sense.”