So What's New?

Abstract art, in its heyday after World War II, had a vitality and expressiveness that will forever enrich painting and sculpture. But in much of the abstractionist work of recent years, the vitality has seemed played out, and a sizable school of critics has decided that abstract is old hat. Last week, musing over the recent annual at Manhattan's Whitney Museum. Frank Getlein, the conservative art critic for the liberal New Republic, gave a lively verdict on the state of abstraction today.

Getlein recalled that a few years ago Critic Harold Rosenberg, the man credited with inventing the term "action painting," denounced a canvas by Realist Jack Levine for an odd reason. The painting was of a gangster's funeral, and Rosenberg said that since everyone knew all about gangsters already, Levine was a mere formalist. The abstract expressionists, with their great swirls and blots, showed something no man had ever seen before. They were, therefore, the truer artists. Getlein noted that Rosenberg's "tradition of the new," if carried to its logical conclusion, would pretty much dispose of Michelangelo and Monet, since everyone knew about the human figure and water lilies. He went on to ask:

Are the abstractionists really producing anything new today?

"The first time any of us saw Franz Kline's tall white paintings streaked with huge black strokes that might be girders or shadows, we were impressed.

But essentially the same Kline painting is in the Whitney called Probst I, and all you can say is 'So what's new?' Adolph Gottlieb's Soft Blue, Soft Black is another arrangement of one big circular smudge hovering over another, the lower more like a gear, the upper more like a sun. He's been doing it for years."

What has happened, says Getlein, is that the variations possible to abstraction are running out. The oldtimers of abstraction are only repeating themselves, and their disciples will do the same. The genuinely novel paintings at the Whitney were paintings that show at least a hint of image--some sand dunes by Karl Knaths ("Naturally, we all knew about dunes anyway, but we didn't know about these dunes"), a Piet`a by Abraham Rattner "that compares with the last sculptures on that theme by Michelangelo." a standing nude by Raphael Soyer ("We see freshly the tired flesh, the dull face, the patient, loving application of paint"). Concludes Getlein: "You find that the only reasonable answer to 'What's new?' is given by the older painters, those who are still painting for vision, for representation, for organization, for almost anything except the wish to be new."

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