Mountains and Sea

The subtractive test, put to a painting made in one session by pouring and soaking. Much of its particular arrangement is the record of a process that could have fallen otherwise: the edge of a pink pool, the run of a blue into the weave, a charcoal contour here or there could differ and the picture would know the same thing. What resists removal is the principle and its few carriers: the bare canvas, which is the light of the picture and not its background; the thinness of the colour, without which nothing is soaked; and the gathering of colour off centre, which leaves the field open. The charcoal is the most removable element. The cap clears; the work is necessary as a decision more than in its parts.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What can be stated, through image, and holds: that paint and ground can be one thing, colour no longer a skin on a support but a stain in it, so that the picture is literally inside the canvas; and that the memory of a place can be held as a state of colour and openness rather than as a view. The first is a true proposition about painting, plain to anyone before the canvas. The second is a mood, rendered with freshness: the light, wind and water of a summer coast. Neither is an articulated human or social condition. What the painting uncovers about a life outside the studio is little more than that memory returns as light and colour, and mood ranks below meaning.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The elevation is of one kind and real: lightness, openness, the lift of a pale field breathing through a stain, the air of a coast in high summer. It comes at first sight, in the bare canvas that reads as light rather than as absence, in the blues and pinks that seem to float in the weave rather than sit on it, and in a scale wide enough to stand inside. It does not reach grandeur or terror, and it does not rise to summits across the field. The brightness is even and gentle, and parts of the canvas, the charcoal and some muddier mixtures in the cluster, are flat rather than lifted. Beside the Water Lilies it is a breeze beside a surround.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The title names the two oldest elements of landscape, the mountain and the sea, and the painting evokes them as memory: a coast, rocks, water, seen again from inside the studio. That is myth evoked, and lightly. Nothing archetypal is built. There is no figure, no journey, no threshold, no structure in which the mountain and the sea stand for anything beyond themselves, and the picture does not even keep them apart as forms. A deeper pattern might be found in the method, the painter over a canvas on the floor and the paint going into it as rain into ground; but that is a figure brought to the work, not built in it. The particulars stay particular, and the names in the title remain names.

Score: 6.6 / 10

The inheritance is the New York painting of 1947 to 1952: Pollock’s poured skeins on canvas laid on the floor, de Kooning’s loaded and worked surface, Gorky’s floating colour, and the Cubist armature still under most of it. The departure: paint thinned until it stops being a surface and becomes a stain; canvas left unprimed so that ground and image fuse; colour, not line or gesture, made the carrier; the whole made light, transparent and open where the school was heavy, dense and dark. The stake was real for a little-known painter whose canvas looked, to the eyes of 1952, unfinished, thin and pretty. Discounted because Pollock had soaked black enamel into raw canvas in 1951; what was new was colour, thinness and openness as the whole picture.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. Paint the same shapes in opaque oil on a primed ground and the picture loses its one proposition: that colour can be in the canvas, not on it, with no separation of image and support. The bare canvas is not a frame for the colour but its light, and only an unprimed ground can give that. The size lets the field be entered by the eye and read as open space rather than as an object on a wall. The floor method, the colour poured and spread from above, is legible in the shapes of the pools. Held below the top because the charcoal belongs to an older form, a drawn landscape laid under the new one, which the form did not need.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: seventy-four years in which the painting has been a fixed point in every history of postwar American painting and the subject of a substantial literature on its maker. The questions still open: whether it is a landscape or an abstraction, and how far the title and the charcoal hold it to a view; whether the stain completes Pollock or departs from him; how far the reading of the painting has been shaped by Clement Greenberg’s account of it and by what came after; what it knows about the body, the floor and the gesture of a young woman in a school of men. Much of the return, though, concerns its place in a history rather than the canvas, whose surface yields less on a second hour than its consequence does.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The field is American abstract painting of the early 1950s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the stain made a new kind of painting, colour as the structure, image and ground as one, the open field without gesture as the dominant sign. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, brought to the studio by Greenberg in April 1953, took the method from this canvas, and Louis’s Veils and Unfurleds and Noland’s circles and chevrons are its direct descendants; with them came the Washington Color School and the painting Greenberg gathered as Post-Painterly Abstraction in 1964; and the painter’s own sixty years of staining. Discounted because that programme later lost authority, and because Rothko and Newman reached the colour field by other routes.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at seventy-four years, an age whose usual row gives 9.0 to 9.1. Form: whole; one canvas, not cut, not altered after the painter, and no loss of a defining part is known. Presence: continuous, on extended loan from the painter’s foundation to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, shown in the surveys of postwar American art and reproduced in every history of it; but lent rather than owned, and not shown as widely as the most travelled canvases of its period. Fabric is charged a step: thinned oil on unprimed cotton is a known vulnerability, the binder spreading beyond the pigment, bare canvas discolouring and weakening with age, and the delicacy limits handling and travel. The risk bears on the ground that carries the light.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged as command of oil on raw canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at its core: the paint thinned to the point where it soaks and still holds colour, the pools controlled so that their edges are soft without being muddy in most places, the colour spaced across a bare field so that it neither crowds nor scatters. That is a technique invented in the act and controlled at first trial. The costs are real. The method gives up much of the control a brush gives, and parts of the canvas show it: mixtures that run toward grey, passages that read as tentative, a cluster in places busy where the painter’s later stains are spare. The charcoal lines are serviceable rather than fine.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: a charcoal line drawn as a contour near the top of the cluster, and a wide pool of thinned blue soaked into the bare canvas. Do they obey one law? In part. The colour and the bare ground obey one law throughout: the stain, transparent, with no edge harder than the weave allows, the light given by the canvas itself. The charcoal answers another, older law: the drawn line of a landscape sketch, an outline that names a form. The two are kept in tension deliberately, and the canvas holds together, but its law is not single; the drawing is the residue of the method it overturns. The range is narrow besides, one kind of mark, one register of colour, one density, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 7.9 / 10

An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds four: the natural order, a coast with its rocks, hills and water held as memory; consciousness, in the passage from a summer’s seeing to an autumn’s remaking; the body, in the method, the canvas on the floor and the painter over it; and the history of painting, in its answer to Pollock and his school. The first three are integrated in one act; the fourth lies outside the canvas, in its consequence rather than in its image. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour beyond the painter’s own, no state, no history in the image and no sacred order. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.2 / 10