Something to Say

In 1908, Matisse published “Notes of a Painter” in La Grande Revue. It is the closest thing he wrote to a manifesto, and it stakes the entire claim in one sentence:

The armchair line got him decades of condescension. “Decorative” became the word they reached for, as though serenity were a lesser ambition than suffering. But the Fauves (les fauves, the wild beasts, named by a hostile critic at the 1905 Salon d’Automne) were not tame. They used color at a violence that had no precedent. The difference was that Matisse directed the violence toward joy instead of anguish.

The late cut-outs, made from his wheelchair with painted paper and scissors, are the final proof. He could no longer hold a brush. So he cut directly into color, and the work got bigger, not smaller. The Snail(1953), at nearly nine feet, is a spiral of pure color blocks with no line drawing at all. He called it “painting with scissors.” The medium changed; the position did not.

In 1913, Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool and watched it spin. By 1917, he bought a urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works in New York, signed it “R. Mutt,” and submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition. They rejected it. The rejection was the point. If the artist’s choice is what makes art, then the institution that refuses the choice has just proved the argument.

After The Large Glass, Duchamp told the world he had retired from art to play chess full-time. He played in the French national team. He designed chess sets. For twenty years, everyone believed him. Then, after his death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed Étant donnés(1946–66): a secret installation he had been building in his studio for two decades while claiming to make nothing at all. The retirement was itself a readymade.

By 1950, Rothko had arrived at the format he would keep for the rest of his life: two or three soft-edged rectangles of color, stacked vertically, hovering on a larger field. No line. No figure. No title (he stopped titling them, using only numbers or colors). He insisted the paintings be hung low, in dim light, in small rooms, so the viewer would be enveloped rather than surveying from a distance.

The late paintings darken. The reds become maroons, the oranges become browns, the blues become black. The Rothko Chapel canvases are the end of the sequence: color pulled so deep into itself that the surface becomes a threshold. You are not looking at a painting. You are standing at the edge of something.

Dali called his method the “paranoiac-critical method”: a systematic derangement of perception, controlled enough to paint, wild enough to see what rational sight cannot. He read Freud before he met him (they met in London in 1938; Freud, who had dismissed the Surrealists, conceded that Dali was worth studying). The technique is hyper-academic. The content is dreams, phobias, and obsessions rendered with the precision of a Vermeer interior.

Dali was expelled from the Surrealist group in 1934 by André Breton, who accused him of fascist sympathies and commercialism. Dali’s response: “I myself am Surrealism.” He went on building the Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueres, which he designed as his own tomb and final artwork. He is buried in the crypt beneath the stage. He was born in Figueres and he died in Figueres and the building that holds his body is the last thing he made.

The catalyst was a studio visit. In 1953, the critic Clement Greenberg brought Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, where they saw Mountains and Sea (1952): paint thinned to a stain, poured directly onto unprimed canvas so the color soaked into the fabric rather than sitting on top of it. Louis and Noland returned to Washington and spent the next decade working out what that technique meant.

What it meant was the end of the brush. If you pour the paint, the artist’s hand disappears. If the color soaks into the canvas, the surface is the painting, not a surface with a painting on it. The distinction matters: Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, de Kooning, Kline) kept the gesture visible. The Washington painters wanted the gesture gone. What remains is color in its purest state, doing everything the painting needs to do without any help from drawing.

The artists

The Washington Color School painted at the Phillips Collection, exhibited at the Corcoran (now folded into the National Gallery and George Washington University), and lived in a city that was not the center of the art world and did not try to be. Alma Thomas painted from her house on 15th Street NW. Morris Louis painted in a small house in Northwest DC and would not let visitors into his studio. The work did not need New York. It needed color, canvas, and a position about what a painting is for.