Edward Corbett

As I mentioned previous I recently enjoyed reading about the Abstract Expressionist Edward Corbett. In the late forties and early fifties he felt that praising the importance of the psychology of the artist over the art itself was resulting in ugly paintings. And while there was a lot of context for this ugliness, the war, existentialism, damaged emotional psyches, etc, that it would be much nicer if artists still painted beautiful paintings. Guernica is about an awful event but it’s still a beautifully achieved painting. In his words, “there is enough ugliness and neurosis in the world without putting it down on canvas.”

So Corbett’s call to action was to make abstractions that were beautiful. Rather than saying that since Ab-Ex was blazing a new trail it could ignore and vilify the history of art, that it could still incorporate it. Just because it was a new type of expression didn’t mean it was exempt from the long held principles of aesthetic design. Whether you think figure painting is dead in the present doesn’t mean that Rembrandt isn’t still beautiful.

From the Corbett monograph by Susan Landauer:

Corbett strongly disapproved of the concept of Action Painting, agreeing with Reinhardt that “any painter peddling wiggly lines as emotions ought to be run off the streets”. For Corbett, such intentional lack of discipline was both fraudulent and self-defeating. “Painting is always improvisation because you don’t have the thing already created . . . Rosenberg’s idea is so easily distorted to mean a kind of unconscious, unfocused act or movement with tools on a surface which one hopes or presumes will have some kind of meaning. I don’t think it does. I think random markings by anyone or random actions are the opposite of what leads to art. Art is design. It is intentions, careful concentrations, acute awareness. Art is purposeful. It is not accident.

Which is to say that even if you approach the canvas with a zen beginner’s mind and start slapping paint, later you need to come back to it as an editor. You may have chosen a particular red-violet at random, but now you have to decide what to do about it, leave it, excise it, expand. You have to consider it in context, how do these forms fit together, do these lines move the eye around the canvas well. Since you may not have started with a specific intention you can ask yourself Have I achieved want I wanted to achieve, but you still need to ask What have I achieved and do I like it.

And while I don’t like all of Corbett’s work, I really identify with his imperative. Painting non-objectively and yet retaining some classical elements of design.