Painters Talking

In the early fifties, the avant-garde knew Jackson Pollock as a man who might come into his favorite East Hampton bar late one night, have a few drinks, and knock his fellow painter Franz Kline across the room. Folks at home knew him, thanks to Henry Luce's magazines, as "Jack the Dripper," the angry-looking young man who put canvas on the floor, slopped a little Duco paint around, added some sand and miscellaneous junk, and called the mess a painting. He seemed as full of chaos as his paintings. He smoked Camels, drank hard, then finally lost control of the whole thing and died.

Of no painter today could we have an impression of equal intensity.

None of the sixties painters shown in Emile de Antonio's curious new film, Painters Painting, has the uniqueness, the personal elan, or the tragic fascination to foster any myth like those Pollock became. Painting has grown more varied since those days, and its leadership has spread out among a number of men and movements. But most importantly, the kind of abstraction which Pollock was instrumental in starting produces paintings before which even the painter himself seems a stranger.

Painters Painting might have added a whole new level of interest to these paintings--which are surely among the most impersonal works of art ever produced--by restoring the personalities which the works so carefully exclude. To see this diverse group of painters at work might have provided a kind of explanation through the making for paintings that in the gallery seem intolerant of any questions. The film might have done this, but it doesn't.

What Painters Painting actually shows is mostly painters talking, and talking even less profoundly than might have been expected. De Antonio, who created Milhouse, a pastiche of old newsreels about Yorba Linda's favorite son, seems qualified to make the current film chiefly by his acquaintances with many of the painters featured, who from time to time address him affectionately as "De." Whatever unkind things might have been said in this space about the documentaries of Marcel Ophuls, De Antonio's interviewing technique clearly demonstrates how much Ophuls has in fact achieved. There are long pauses, inane phrases left hanging, and, all around, the obtrusiveness of the equipment--a long mike stuck in a painter's face, or a cameraman's shadow moving across the painting under discussion.

The possibilities for a film like this are almost limitless: now would be an excellent time for a look at the artists behind the work of sixties, now when the more formalist work of that period is coming under increasing attack and other tendencies are being reemphasized. A series of recent critical forays have taken the formalists to task. Harold Rosenberg's The De-Definition of Art attacks the whole notion of a unified New York School in general and the minimal aesthetic of Frank Stella and others specifically. Its author was one of the original champions of "action painting"--of Pollock and the early abstract expressionists. And Leo Steinberg, perhaps the most academically respected critic now writing about contemporary art, has advanced in a major series of essays called Other Criteria a set of alternative values to the formalist criticism of the sixties.

In addition, a number of major New York shows last year helped bring about the restoration of painters who had survived from the hey-day of abstract expressionism but been neglected during the sixties, including such figures as Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis. James Brooks, a close friend of Pollock's and the first to seize upon his innovations, has been subjecting his work to constant refinement in the years since his and Pollock's first drip-paintings in the late forties. His recent show earned him long-deserved critical acclaim for a style that continues the expressionist tradition at a high level of formal competence.

All of this would suggest that the return of abstract expressionism, or the arrival of its offspring, is in the offing, and that the artist as personality may be about to emerge again from behind the anonymity of his work. Still--and De Antonio can't fail to show this much--there is a certain incongruity between say, the spare stripes or chevrons of Kenneth Noland and the explanations the artist delivers in a North Carolina drawl. Or, equally incongruous, the contrast between Frank Stella--sitting on the floor of his studio, dressed in an old sweat shirt and looking for all the world like Woody Allen slightly lisping his reply to the charge that his paintings are cold and detached--and his paintings themselves. If the incongruity itself is not the best proof of the charge it at least explains how it originated.

It may be no accident that two painters known for maintaining a critical dialogue with abstract expressionism come off very well in the film. The art of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns is of a type that admits more easily than that of the formalists to personal justification. Thus we have Rauschenberg sitting atop a ladder in his studio and explaining how his search was always for what could be different about his work from other artists and not necessarily what was better. And Johns speaks of trying to find the "things which can't be located" in the materials with which he works--things which he alone can find there. In forms pressed to the limit of expressionism by earlier painters, these men continue to seek for new, distinguishing, and parodistic works.

The one sequence which really does show any part of the process of a painter painting is easily the most interesting of the film, but it hints at a kind of fatal demystification to which modern methods of working are particularly subject. The process of painting no longer seems like that of an artist creating from sheer, inner self. With Pollock there came the negation of the easel and, for the most part, the brush. De Kooning spent almost as much time scraping rejected versions of his Women off the canvas as painting them onto it. Here, Larry Poons--who looks like a football lineman but, the film tells us, actually began as a part-time short order cook--is shown completing a canvas onto which he had sloshed buckets of paint while it was taped to the floor. We see Poons and an assistant peeling the finished canvas from the floor, rolling it up and taking it to a frame to be cropped. For all its supposed inaccessibility, this sort of painting is closer to everyday physical labor than any in the past. Canvases are manhandled like pieces of building material, and the studio has become as cluttered as a factory workshop. The kind of decisions the artist makes no longer face him with each brush stroke: this is the painting of accident and subsequent discovery, where the giving of shape and scale to the canvas are the essential choices.

The viewer is likely to feel cheated, however, when he sees Poons making this type of choice by intuition, standing in front of the painting, or when he hears how Robert Motherwell stumbled on the whole idea for his "Open Series," by observing the proportion of two canvases leaning together on his studio wall and tracing the shape of the smaller on top of the larger. Without explanation this kind of decision is likely to seem an abandonment of the painter's role.

What De Antonio's film fails to do above all is to provide through the interviews discussion of the reasons that artists have chosen to make their paintings this way. And to have done that would also have meant to depict the painters themselves in greater depth.

For all the rich new material and inherent possibilities which it contains, Painters Painting manages only to hint at the complex experience which is painting today, and neither delineates the shape of painting's current preoccupations nor reveals the artists themselves.