ABSTRACT
MOST writers have not been sensitive to painting and sculpture, perhaps because they cannot relate to media that are not verbal. To be sure, there have been notable exceptions, from Baudelaire and Ruskin to more recently, Greenberg, Rosenberg, Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara. The French would seem to be an exception, but one wonders whether there was some kind of national aesthetic ego that led them to appropriate Cézanne and Picasso and Braque and Léger. Or it might be that the French critical idiom is at once so abstract and deceptively concrete that it seems to take in the plastic arts even when the experience is remote. American writers, however, being closer to their direct experience, have usually responded more to painting with a literary content, and while they have eventually accepted almost as a part of art history the achievement of the abstract expressionists and the New York School, they originally had no idea of the importance—or the advances—of figures like Gorky, Pollock, Motherwell, de Kooning, Rothko, Gottlieb, and the others. The fact is that most writers at first were either indifferent to or scoffed at the New York abstractionists. The story is told, for example, 86that Rahv once said to Rosenberg that Rothko was just a house painter, to which Rosenberg replied, “Isn’t it interesting that a house painter should paint such pictures?”
